Thai people

Thai
ไทย (Thai)
Regions with significant populations
Thailand: the central plains and the lower north
Languages
Thai
Religion
Buddhism
Related ethnic groups
Lao, Phu Thai, Shan

The Thai (ไทย) are the Tai-speaking people of central Thailand, also called the Central Thai or the Siamese.^: 63 The standard, official and national language of Thailand is a variety of Thai based on the dialect they speak in the central plains.^: 19 In a wider sense the name covers all the citizens of Thailand. The Siamese court and the Thai state set out to make the Lao, Northern Thai, Khmer, Kui and immigrant Chinese of the kingdom into "Thai".^{: 26, 31} The kingdom of Siam took the name Thailand in 1939.^: 241 Most Thais are Buddhists. Cannabis, kancha (กัญชา) in Thai, appears in formulae of the royal pharmacopoeia of King Narai and of the medical inscriptions at Wat Pho.^: 334

Name and identity

In local sources before the 19th century, Thai and Lao were common nouns for a person or a person's standing, not the names of nations or ethnic groups in the European sense. Siam was the name that people outside the Tai language family gave to Tai speakers at large, Thai and Lao alike.^: 65 The names shifted with the speaker. Commoners in the Siamese kingdom might call themselves Thai while others called them Siam. The people of Lanna to the north called themselves Yuan but were Lao to the court of Ayutthaya. In Tanapong Luekajornchai's reading, Western travel writing turned these words into the names of separate nations and became a basis for the later Thai and Lao nations.^{: 65, 84–85}

Many scholars take Siam to name a territory and Thai an ethnic group or race.^: 67 Luekajornchai divides writing on the Thai nation into two camps. One holds that the Thai nation has existed since antiquity. The other holds that it was made in the 19th century or after the revolution of 1932. In this view the making of the nation erased other peoples, the Lao above all. Writers of the second camp tend to call the country Siam and to separate ไท (tai), the ethnic group, from ไทย (thai), the nation in the modern sense.^: 66 In 1967 the anthropologist Charles Keyes used Thai only for the people of the Central Region, "alternatively referred to as the Central Thai or the Siamese".^: 63

The Siamese elite began to use Thai in place of Siam in diplomatic letters and treaty negotiations in the early 20th century, well before the official change of name. Textbooks in the new state schools taught Lao identity as one form of Thai.^: 9 The first of the government's Cultural Mandates, issued on 24 June 1939, laid down that "The name of the country is to be 'Thailand'".^: 241 The mandates, 12 in all between 1939 and 1942, are called Ratthaniyom in Thai, "state or national values".^: 238 Their drafting committee was chaired by Luang Wichit Wathakan, the ideologue of the regime's nationalist campaign, who was among the first to insist that the word Thai means "free" or "independent".^{: 113, 116} Other names of the Thai language include Central Thai, Siamese, Standard Thai and Thaiklang.

Population and distribution

Central Thai is the dialect of the central plains.^: 19 A 2005 study by Somsak Srisontisuk and his co-authors, drawing on a language survey by Suwilai Premsrirat, put the population of the central region at over 16 million. Of these, 98 per cent spoke languages of the Tai family: Central Thai, Thai Boeng, Soang, Phuan, Yor, Lao Wiang, Lao Khrua, Lao Ngaew, Lao Ti, Lao Isan and Yuan. In the lower north most people speak Central Thai, while the upper north speaks the northern dialect, kham mueang or Thai Yuan.^: 153–155 Of the roughly 9 million people of the south, most of them Muslims, 93 per cent speak the southern dialect, Pak Tai.^: 155

Thailand as a whole is home to more than 70 languages of five families.^: 19 In the time of King Vajiravudh the kingdom's people included Malays, Lao, Mon, Shan, Yuan, Indians, Europeans and many others besides the Thai.^: 163

Language

Thai, also known as Siamese, and Lao are the national languages of Thailand and Laos. Both belong to the Southwestern branch of the Tai languages, in the Kra–Dai family.^: 7 Thai (ISO 639-3 tha) is the de facto national language of Thailand. It is also spoken in Cambodia and Myanmar. Linguists have disagreed about how close Thai is to Lao. Brown held the two to be closely related, while Chamberlain set Lao nearer to Southern Thai.^: 8 In Brown's model Thai forms a subgroup with Phuan, Shan and Tai Yuan. In a scenario that Pittayawat Pittayaporn calls speculative, Chamberlain proposed that Thai, descended from the language of Ayutthaya, came into central Thailand from north-eastern Laos.^: 11 Pittayaporn himself joins Thai, Lao and Southern Thai, with most of the varieties he labels PH, in a "Peninsular" subgroup that spread southward from northern Laos.^: 7

From the early 20th century the Thai government pursued a policy of one national language, as part of building the nation and a sense of "Thai-ness".^: 19 Compulsory primary schooling gave most people some command of standard Thai by the 1930s.^: 32 Among speakers in Ubon Ratchathani, Saowanee Alexander and Duncan McCargo found Central Thai to be the high variety and the local phasa isan the low one. For speakers of Isan and of Patani Malay, standard Thai is a condition of higher education and of economic advancement. Younger speakers of both are shifting towards it.^: 21

History

King, sangha and school

Relations between the Siamese court and the outer parts of its realm changed after the Chakri dynasty was established at Bangkok in 1782. Rama I (r. 1782–1809) took control of the Lanna principalities of the north, until then under Burmese rule. He extended Siamese authority over the Lao and other Tai-speaking states of the north-east and east, beyond the left bank of the Mekong.^: 25 Keyes traces the integration that followed in three steps. The first asked everyone in the kingdom to recognise one monarch. By the early 20th century the court had extended the king's authority over most of the kingdom, paying large pensions to local princes and using military force against serious resistance. The second brought all monks under one national sangha, whose authority every monk in the country had accepted by the 1930s. The third was compulsory primary schooling.^: 31–32 The Malay-speaking people of the former sultanate of Patani, reorganised as the provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat and Yala, kept a strong memory of their own polity and did not become "Thai".^: 26

The same policies stimulated ethnic regionalism in the south, the north-east and the north.^: 32 Official policy sought to make the Lao of the north-east into khon isan. In the north similar policies replaced the name Lao with thai neua or khon muang.^: 9 Luekajornchai argues that the erasure of the Lao in the 19th century took place among the elite and in dealings with foreign powers. In his view it succeeded only after the revolution of 1932.^: 84

Histories of the nation

King Vajiravudh, who named nation, religion and king as the pillars of Thai nationalism.

From the reign of Rama V onwards the Thai elite and the Thai state sought to shape a memory of the "Thai nation" for people of every class, locality and ethnic group.^: 2 The historian Saichol Sattayanurak describes the histories that the elite wrote between the reigns of Rama V and Rama VII. They placed the king and Buddhism at the heart of "Thai-ness" and held the Lao, Khmer, Malays and Shan to be uncivilised, backward, lazy or untrustworthy beside people of Thai ethnicity. To show that former vassal states had belonged to the Thai since antiquity, some of them gave the old state of the upper north the name "Lanna Thai", a name found in no source, although the elite of the time thought of its people as Lao.^: 4 Late in the absolute monarchy, histories of a "Thai race" told of an ancient and powerful people, defeated by the Chinese, who had migrated to the land of present-day Thailand. More such histories were written after the revolution of 1932. During the Second World War the government spread them through plays, songs, radio, ceremonies and school textbooks.^: 5

King Vajiravudh named nation, religion and king as the pillars of Thai nationalism. In this official nationalism "a good Thai is one who loves the nation, is a good Buddhist and loves the king". It defined the Thai against one internal Other, the Chinese.^: 163 A decree of 1913 urged the Thai to take family names. Some local Chinese also adopted Thai surnames. In the same year a change in the nationality law allowed Chinese born in the country to hold Thai nationality.^: 163–164

The mandates of 1939–1942

A government poster on dress from the time of the Cultural Mandates, about 1940.

The Cultural Mandates of the Phibunsongkhram regime changed the name of the country, required the public to salute the flag at eight each morning and set rules for dress, eating and exercise.^: 116 Some of them sanctified the nation, and to a far lesser degree the monarchy, as the forces that united the Thai people.^: 238 Sino-Thai in the bureaucracy and the military were urged to replace their Chinese surnames with newly invented Thai ones. Every school had to teach the Thai language and Thai history, geography and culture, which cut Chinese teaching to one hour a day. In 1939 Phibunsongkhram closed the Chinese schools and made naturalisation easier for the Chinese.^: 164

The 1997 constitution

In the late 1990s the drafters of a new constitution debated a "Thai-ness" whose roots in the policies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were increasingly being questioned. The 1997 Constitution provided for the decentralisation of power to the localities. It kept the rule that the king must be a Buddhist but also made him an "upholder of religions". The constitution recognised the right of citizens to profess any religion.^: 32 Sattayanurak wrote in 2010 that the Thai state allowed marginalised peoples to keep their ethnic identity only in the form of material culture and of cultural capital that could be sold.^: 2

Religion

Buddhism is officially recognised as the religion of Thailand, although it is not formally the state religion. The king must be a Buddhist and is the ultimate patron of Buddhism. For these reasons most people in Thailand, non-Buddhists among them, regard the country as Buddhist.^: 22–23 The Central Thai and the people of Isan share Theravada Buddhism. The literature and arts of both show Indian influence that reached them through ancient Cambodia.^: 22 In figures of the National Statistical Office published in 2020, 93.5 per cent of Thais identified themselves as Buddhists.^: 106–107 Keyes holds that the census figure of 2000, 94.6 per cent, understates the share of non-Buddhists, above all Muslims. On data from the Islamic Committee Office of Thailand, Michel Gilquin put Muslims at 7.5 to 8 per cent of the population.^: 22

The small Muslim communities attached to the court at Ayutthaya and then Bangkok, and those that traded in what became northern Thailand, took Thai as their language. Their descendants for the most part became "Thai" in all but religion.^: 25 In an analysis of 42 primary-school textbooks, the anthropologist Kakanang Yavaprabhas found Thais presented as Buddhists, with people of other faiths cast subtly as others.^: 114–115 The national curriculum of 2008 treats Buddhism alone as the national religion.^: 112–113

Plants and medicine

Thai traditional medicine grew from Indian Ayurvedic medicine combined with local belief. It holds that the body is made of four elements (earth, water, wind and fire) and that illness follows when they fall out of balance. Most of its remedies are made from plants.^: 2673 By August 2021 the Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine of the Ministry of Public Health had compiled 579 national texts of Thai traditional medicine and 536 stone inscriptions, holding 45,134 formulae.^: 2673 The oldest of the national texts is the Khamphi That Phra Narai, the pharmacopoeia of King Narai.^: 2674

Cannabis

See also: Thailand and Thai stick

Part of the formula Suk Sai-Yad from the pharmacopoeia of King Narai, in a printing of 1917. The text names cannabis among its ingredients.

In Thai the plant is kancha (กัญชา), a name that comes from the Sanskrit gañjā. The ethnobotanist Marie Alexandrine Martin heard of three further names in the early 1970s, kanhcha thai, kanhcha thet ("foreign") and kanhcha cin ("Chinese"), but without plant samples could not say what each was botanically.^: 64–65

Three formulae of the Narai pharmacopoeia contain cannabis, as do two in the medical text of the Second Reign, 14 in the inscriptions at Wat Pho and three in the drug-properties text of Krom Luang Wongsathirat Sanit. Counting those of later texts, there are 90 cannabis formulae among about 23,000 announced national Thai formulae.^: 334 The Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine's larger compilation of 2021 counts 162 formulae containing cannabis, 34 of them for insomnia. The texts use the leaves against asthma, to stir the appetite and to give strength; the flowers for disorders of the nerves, to bring sleep and as an expectorant. Flowers make up most of the cannabis in the insomnia formulae.^: 2673 From the age of the Narai text, Chawalit Yongram and his co-authors conclude that the Thai have used cannabis as medicine for more than 360 years.^: 2674 One Narai formula, Suk Sai-Yad, is 15.38 per cent cannabis leaf. The Department of Thai Traditional and Alternative Medicine and the Thai Traditional Medicinal Council recommend it for insomnia and loss of appetite.^: 295 The classification of cannabis as a narcotic under the Narcotics Act of 1979 ended its medical use. The plant was taken off the narcotics list in 2022.^: 2674

Martin found that many medicinal properties were credited to cannabis in Thailand. It went into medicines against dizzy spells. Taken alone, it was a remedy for cholera.^: 71 Ground flowers were added to the curry kaeng phet.^: 73 In her account, cannabis had not been seen openly in Thailand since the change of government in December 1971. Medicines could use it only together with other plants. Cultivation was hardly more widespread than in Cambodia, "except perhaps in the north and in a few central regions".^: 67 In 1965 the physician Joel Fort found cannabis "widely used in the country, particularly in the north-east by smoking in pipes or cigarettes or adding it to food".

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

See also

• Lao people
• Northeastern Thailand
• Phu Thai people
• Thai stick
• Thailand