The Temples of Mae Hong Son
When I first visited Mae Hong Son, the capital of the least populated province in Thailand, more than thirty years ago, I was immediately sold. Back then it was one of the country's most pristine and remote towns, tucked away between towering mountains and difficult to reach from Chiang Mai via a road that seemed to wind forever in sharp hairpin bends between the steep, densely forested slopes.
A book that I purchased almost immediately after its publication was “Encounters in the East – A World History” by Patrick Pasture, professor of European and world history at KU Leuven.
I've never made a secret of my affinity for Chiang Mai. One of the many – for me already attractive – advantages of the 'Rose of the North' is the large concentration of interesting temple complexes within the old city walls. Wat Phra Sing or the Temple of the Lion Buddha is one of my absolute favourites.
The Dutch war cemeteries in Kanchanaburi
A visit to Kanchanaburi War Cemetery is a captivating experience. In the bright, shimmering light of the Brazen Ploert blazing mercilessly overhead, it seems that row upon row of the clean-lined uniform gravestones in the trimmed lawns reach to the horizon. Despite the traffic in the adjacent streets, it can sometimes be very quiet. And that's great because this is a place where memory slowly but surely turns into history...
Don't just say stupa to a chedi
You simply cannot miss it in Thailand; the chedis, the local variant of what is known in the rest of the world - with the exception of Tibet (chorten), Sri Lanka (dagaba) or Indonesia (candi), as the stupas, the round structures containing Buddhist relics or, as in some cases also the cremated remains of the Great Ones of the Land and their relatives.
Phra Mae Thoranee: the revered Earth Goddess
Phra Mae Thoranee or Nang Thoranee, the earth goddess of Theravada Buddhist mythology. She is worshiped and revered in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Sipsong Panna in Yunnan. In Thailand, she is a source of worship, especially in Isan, in the Northeast of Thailand.
The Thai National & Other Libraries
It all started in the seventh century BC with the thousands of clay tablets of King Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. A collection of texts that was systematically arranged and catalogued and it has continued in this way for twenty-eight centuries, albeit with trial and error. So the oldest library was that of good old Assurbanipal, the youngest newcomer is the internet.
And that's where the gold diggers show up again!
I have previously written on Thailandblog about the Thai version of the Loch Ness Monster; a persistent myth that pops up with the regularity of a clock. Although in this specific case it is not about a prehistoric aquatic creature, but about an even more imaginative enormous treasure that the retreating Japanese troops are said to have buried near the infamous Burma-Thai Railway at the end of the Second World War.
The unknown Railway of Death
Lung Jan has been working for a few years on a book in which he tries to reconstruct the almost forgotten story of the romusha. Romusha was the collective name for the voluntary and forced Asian laborers who were employed by the Japanese occupier in the construction and maintenance of the Thai-Burma railway, which soon and quite rightly became known, or rather, infamous, as the infamous Railway of Death, the Railway of Death….
Wat Saphan Hin is worth a steep climb…
God.. how I sweated that day… On a beautiful spring day in 2014, I set out on one of the bicycles, painted in a striking Barbie pink, that the Tharaburi Resort made available to guests, to what is known as the Western Zone from the Sukhothai Historical Park.
About a watchful dog and a sleeping princess
In many mythical places in Thailand one can find strange, often fabulous rock formations that stimulate the imagination. A large number of these bizarre, strange phenomena can be discovered in Sam Phan Bok, which is also - and in my opinion not entirely wrong - called the Grand Canyon of Thailand.
Weird squiggles and pigtails: the origins of Thai script
I must confess something: I speak a fair bit of Thai and, as a resident of Isaan, I now also - necessarily - have notions of Lao and Khmer. However, I never had the energy to learn to read and write Thai. Maybe I'm too lazy and who knows - if I have a lot of free time - maybe it will one day, but so far this job has always been put off for me... It also seems so damn difficult with all those weird twists and pigtails…
Boonsong Lekagul was born on December 15, 1907 into an ethnic Sino-Thai family in Songkhla, southern Thailand. He turned out to be a very intelligent and inquisitive boy in the local Public School and consequently went to study medicine at the prestigious Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. After graduating cum laude as a doctor there in 1933, he started a group practice together with a number of other young specialists, from which the first outpatient clinic in Bangkok would emerge two years later.
Wat Chang Lom, an outsider in Sukhothai
Wat Chang Lom is part of the immensely large Sukhothai Historical Park, but is outside the most visited and very touristy part. I had already explored the Historical Park at least three times before discovering this temple ruin by chance on a bike ride from the resort where I was staying.
Lampang is more than just Wat Phra That Lampang Luang
Lampang was an important city in the northern principality of Lanna for centuries. Nestled on the banks of the Wang River, between the Khun Tan Hills to the west and the Phi Pan Nam Hills to the east, Lampang was at the strategically important intersection of the roads connecting Kamphaeng Phet and Phitsanulok to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai.
The Ayutthaya of the 'ordinary' man (and of course also woman)
A huge problem for anyone trying to understand the history of Thailand is that historiography or historiography has been monopolized for more than two centuries and to this day by the Thai elite in general and the monarchy in particular. They and they alone have made the country what it is. Anyone who dares to question this theory is a heretic.
Book review: The Kings of Ayutthaya
Anyone who wants to do serious historical research with regard to Siam is confronted with the same problem. When the Burmese destroyed the Siamese capital Ayutthaya in 1767, the country's archives and most important libraries also went up in flames. This makes it damn hard to correctly reconstruct, let alone interpret, the history of Siam before 1767.