Thai people

History

The Siamese before the Tai

The present-day Thai people were previously called "Siamese" before the country was renamed Thailand in the mid-20th century. Wyatt used the same term for the people of the Central Plain before the ethnic categories hardened, expressly not as a synonym for Thai, to convey what he called an ethnicity in the process of becoming.

The peoples of Southeast Asia have been divided into five groups, the Mon-Khmer, the Viet-Muong, the Tay-Thai, the Hmong-Dzao and a southern island group comprising the Cham, Gia Rai and Ede. On that division the Tay and the Thai share a common origin.

The toponym or ethnonym siam or syam appears in several pre-Angkorian inscriptions, and earlier scholars have interpreted it as denoting either a geographical locality or an ethnolinguistic group within the Chao Phraya Basin; those inscriptions include K557 (611 CE), K127 (683 CE), K154 (685 CE), K79 (639 CE), and K904 (713 CE). Theodore Pigeaud identified the syangka of the Old Javanese Deśawarṇana with the same term, taking it for the Syam of a mid-11th-century Cham inscription and of 13th-century Khmer inscriptions.

The Chinese sources record a 6th-century polity known as Qiān Zhī Fú (千支弗), which some scholars have speculated was centered at Si Thep. The prefix qiān (千) phonetically resembles Xiān (暹), the name Chinese records of the late 13th and 14th centuries use for the port polities of the Gulf of Thailand, among them Ayodhya and Suphan Buri. Đại Việt sources use the same graph for the peoples and polities of the Chao Phraya River basin. On this basis, Tatsuo Hoshino proposed that Qiān Zhī Fú represented one of the early Siamese city-states—later subject to Tainization—that flourished through their participation in the trans-Mekong trade networks linking Champa in the east with the Menam Basin in the west.

The present-day descendants of the Qiān population, also known as the Nyah Kur people, who are not Tainized and maintain the Nyah Kur language—an archaic survival of Old Mon—reside primarily in the highland region surrounding the ancient center of Si Thep, with notable concentrations along the borderlands of Chaiyaphum, Phetchabun, Lopburi, and Nakhon Ratchasima provinces.

Arrival of the Tai

There have been many theories proposing the origin of the Tai peoples — of which the Thai are a subgroup — including an association of the Tai people with the Ai Lao and Kingdom of Nanzhao. The mid-20th-century view that made Nanzhao a centre of Tai expansion has since been rejected. A linguistic study has suggested that the origin of the Tai people may lie around Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of southern China, where the Zhuang people currently account for approximately one third of the total population. The Qin dynasty founded Guangdong in 214 BC, initiating varying successive waves of Han Chinese from the north for centuries to come.

With dynastic Chinese political upheavals, cultural changes, and intensive Han migratory pressures from north that led the Tai peoples on the verge of being displaced, some of them migrated southwards. According to linguistic and other historical evidence, the southwestward migration of Southwestern Tai-speaking tribes, in particular, from Guangxi took place sometime between the 8th-10th centuries. Baker and Pasuk give the ground for that dating, southwestern Tai having absorbed many Late Middle Chinese words datable to the seventh century, and stress that the movement was not one mass migration but many small groups over decades. A dated tree of the Kra-Dai languages published in 2023 gives the Guangxi–Guangdong coast as the most likely starting point and places their spread into mainland Southeast Asia within the last 2,000 years. That tree also places the family's first split at about 4,000 years ago, with a range of roughly 2,700 to 5,500. Kampuansai and colleagues find the Tai-Kadai populations of Thailand closer to Iron Age samples from Taiwan and southern China than to ancient samples from Southeast Asia, most strongly in the north. Yin and colleagues read the haplotype sharing between Austroasiatic speakers and their Tai-Kadai, Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan neighbours as relatedness from about 1,160 years ago.

Another proposed migration route, based on linguistic analysis, involves Daic-speaking populations moving from the east and settling in Luo Yue as early as around 700 BCE. Within this framework, the Âu group is hypothesized to have followed a trans-Mekong trade corridor linking Champa and Đại Việt in the east with the Menam Basin in the west. The route is reconstructed as extending from northern Vietnam through Thanh Hóa and Nghệ An, continuing into present-day Laos in regions such as Khamkeut and Hinboun, and ultimately reaching northeastern Thailand, including areas around Nakhon Phanom and Sakon Nakhon. Meanwhile, the Lạc group is scholarly interpreted as having persisted as a lineage designation among the Tai Dam people in Sip Song Chau Tai, and is also associated in later genealogical narratives with Khun Lo of the Lao people.

Hoshino reads Tai- or Daic-speaking populations into several of the polities the Tang annals record in the Mun–Chi and middle Mekong valleys during the 7th and 8th centuries, among them Wen Dan, Gǔ Láng Dòng (古郎洞), which he calls almost certainly the name of a Tai state, Jūn Nà Lú (君那盧), whose name he reads as na lao, "Lao paddy fields", Cān Bàn, and the three polities the annals group in a single category as alike in customs, Qiān Zhī Fú under the name Śrī Canāśapura, Xiū Luó Fēn and Gān Bì, whose military organisation he takes for the mark of a Tai-dominated state. Hiram Woodward regards the linguistic argument as tendentious and holds that it should be used neither to support nor to invalidate Hoshino's geographical conclusions. Together with the Tai Chiang Saen branch migrating from the north, they arrived in the central plain during the 8th–9th centuries, a period coinciding with the decline of the Dvaravati polities.

Vocabulary has also been used to argue for an origin in northern Vietnam. Wilaiwan Khanittanan argued that the Tai of early Sukhothai had come from the Red River basin, where they lived among Vietnamese and Muong speakers. Her main evidence is the twelve animal names of the year cycle. They are not Thai words, Thai uses them only for the year of a person's birth, and several survive as everyday animal words in Vietnamese and in Muong dialects. She builds on Cœdès, who held the names to be neither Khmer nor Thai and derived the Khmer set from the ancient Muong without saying where Thai had taken them. She adds vocabulary shared between Thai and Vietnamese, which belong to different language families.

Wyatt distinguishes three movements of people into the country north of the plain: down the Yom from Phrae, Phayao and Chiang Rai, down the Nan from the U River valley, and down the Ping from Lampang and Lamphun, the last from country already Mōn in its culture, Theravada in religion and literate where the others were not. He reads the movement as the working of an ultimogeniture in which elder sons were sent south to find towns of their own while the youngest inherited, and notes that they moved into country already held by Mōn and Khmer speakers.

The Tais from the north gradually settled in the Chao Phraya valley from the tenth century onwards, in lands of the Dvaravati culture, assimilating the earlier Austroasiatic Mon and Khmer people, as well as coming into contact with the Khmer Empire. Those who reached what is now Thailand took up the Theravada Buddhism of the Mon together with Hindu-Khmer culture and statecraft, so that Thai culture became a mixture of Tai traditions with Indic, Mon and Khmer elements.

Chingduang Yurayong and colleagues read the outcome as elite dominance, a small Tai-speaking group holding authority while a larger Austroasiatic-speaking population shifted language and carried its own sound patterns into the one it adopted. They point to the central and southern Thai varieties, which kept complex vowel systems and initial consonant clusters that their northern relatives lost.

Early kingdoms

The most recognized early Thai chiefdoms included the Yonok Kingdom , Sukhothai Kingdom and Suphannaphum. The Lavo Kingdom, which was the center of Khmer culture in the Chao Phraya valley from the 10th to 11th century, was also the rallying point for the Thais.

The Thai were called "Siam" by the Angkorians and they appeared on the bas relief at Angkor Wat as a part of the army of the Lavo Kingdom. Zhou Daguan, who was at Yasodharapura in 1296–97, reports Siamese living there in large numbers and practising sericulture, which he says the Angkorians did not, bringing mulberry and silkworms from Siam and weaving a dark patterned satin; he adds that Siamese women could sew and mend with needle and thread, a skill he says local women lacked, so that Angkorians brought them clothing to repair.

The Thai chiefdoms of the Chao Phraya valley are sometimes said to have come under Angkorian control under strong monarchs such as Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII, but to have been independent for most of the period. Baker and Pasuk find little to support administrative control that far west. The plain has yielded none of the temple-endowment inscriptions characteristic of Angkorian provinces, and Jayavarman VII's hospital foundations reach no further west than Prachin Buri.

Xiān and the port polities

Chinese records of the late 13th and 14th centuries call the polities of the lower Chao Phraya Xiān (暹). Yoneo Ishii argued that the name covered several port polities of the Bay of Bangkok rather than one place, and that in the Chinese classification of tributary countries a name written in Chinese characters need not denote a single locality. Baker and Pasuk make the same reservation, reading Xiān as Ayodhya from the late 13th century while allowing that the Chinese may first have applied the name elsewhere.

The earliest notices of the name are Vietnamese. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư records that in 1149 merchant ships from Xiān and two other countries reached Hǎidōng and were granted a trading post at Vân Đồn. In the Chinese record the name first appears in 1282 or 1283, when an official fleeing the Mongol army took refuge there. It sent its first mission in 1292, its ruler presented a gold plate at court in 1295, and further missions followed in 1299, 1300, 1314, 1319 and 1323; over the same span Lavo sent four missions between 1289 and 1299 and Phetchaburi one in 1294. Suphan Buri appears later as Su-men-bang, whose prince, described as heir to the king of Siam, sent missions between the 1370s and 1398. Baker and Pasuk count four towns of the lower plain — Lavo, Suphan Buri, Ayodhya and Phetchaburi — that had each dealt with China in its own name before the union.

What a mission attests is a separate question. Under the tribute system a local ruler gained access to trade with China together with political recognition, and between 600 and 850 the court received 110 missions from thirty-four named places in Southeast Asia, half of which sent only one. The Chinese texts also graded these units, calling Phetchaburi a chéng (城), city, rather than a guó (國), country. The identification of Xiān with Sukhothai began with a translator of the Chinese annals and spread through Cœdès; Yamamoto Tatsurō challenged it in 1989 from the Guangzhou gazetteer of 1297–1307, in which Sukhothai stands as the object of a verb meaning to control and Xiān as its subject, so that the two cannot name one place. Xiān and Luó hú (Lavo) were joined in 1349, after which the records treat the pair as Xiānluó hú.

Ayutthaya to the nineteenth century

A new city-state known as Ayutthaya covering the areas of central and southern Thailand, named after the Indian city of Ayodhya, was founded by Ramathibodi and emerged as the center of the growing Thai empire starting in 1350. Inspired by the then Hindu-based Khmer Empire, the Ayutthayan empire's continued conquests led to more Thai settlements as the Khmer empire weakened after their defeat at Angkor in 1431. During this period Ayutthaya built a hierarchy of vassal states that paid homage to its kings. Even as Thai power expanded at the expense of the Mon and Khmer, the Thai Ayutthayans faced setbacks at the hands of the Malays at Malacca and were checked by the Toungoo of Burma.

Though sporadic wars continued with the Burmese and other neighbors, Chinese wars with Burma and European intervention elsewhere in Southeast Asia allowed the Thais to develop an independent course by trading with the Europeans as well as playing the major powers against each other in order to remain independent. The Chakkri dynasty under Rama I held the Burmese at bay, while Rama II and Rama III helped to shape much of Thai society, but also led to Thai setbacks as the Europeans moved into areas surrounding modern Thailand and curtailed any claims the Thai had over Cambodia, in dispute with Burma and Vietnam.

The Thai learned from European traders and diplomats, while maintaining an independent course. Chinese, Malay, and British influences helped to further shape the Thai people who often assimilated foreign ideas, but managed to preserve much of their culture and resisted the European colonization that engulfed their neighbors. Thailand is also the only country in Southeast Asia that was not colonized by European powers in modern history. The 1893 "Map to Illustrate the Siamese Question", lithographed by the Scottish William Johnston (1802–1888) and his brother Alexander Keith Johnston (1804–1871), describes the demographics: "the population is very mixed consisting of Siamese, Chinese, Laosians, Malays and a few Europeans."

Thaification: 20th century

The concept of a Thai nation was not developed until the beginning of the 20th century, under Prince Damrong and then King Rama VI (Vajiravudh). Before this era, Thai did not even have a word for 'nation'. King Rama VI also imposed the idea of "Thai-ness" (khwam-pen-thai) on his subjects and strictly defined what was "Thai" and "un-Thai". Authors of this period re-wrote Thai history from an ethno-nationalist viewpoint, disregarding the fact that the concept of ethnicity had not played an important role in Southeast Asia until the 19th century. Wyatt made the same point a working rule for writing about earlier centuries, preferring geographical terms to ethnic ones and speaking of the ruler of a named town rather than of a Thai or Khmer ruler. Saipan Puriwanchana describes the content of that re-writing. On her account Thais were taught that they share ancestors, the people of Lavo and of Sukhothai, under Phra Ruang as a father of the nation. The memory held to bind them is a shared expulsion of the Khom, cast as the outsiders against whom the group was defined.

This newly developed nationalism was the base of the policy of "Thaification" of Thailand which was intensified after the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 and especially under the rule of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram (1938–1944). Minorities were forced to assimilate and the regional differences of northern, northeastern and southern Thailand were repressed in favour of one homogenous "Thai" culture. As a result, many citizens of Thailand cannot differentiate between their nationality (san-chat) and ethnic origin (chuea-chat). It is thus common for descendants of Jek เจ๊ก (Chinese) and Khaek แขก (Indian, Arab, Muslim), after several generations in Thailand, to consider themselves as "chuea-chat Thai" (ethnic Thai) rather than identifying with their ancestors' ethnic identity.

Other peoples living under Thai rule, mainly Mon, Khmer, and Lao, as well as Chinese, Indian or Muslim immigrants continued to be assimilated by Thais, but at the same time they influenced Thai culture, philosophy, economy and politics. In his 1987 paper Jek pon Lao (เจ้กปนลาว, Chinese mixed with Lao), Sujit Wongthet claims that the present-day Thai are really Chinese mixed with Lao. He describes himself in the paper in the same terms. He insinuates that the Thai are no longer a well-defined race but an ethnicity composed of many races and cultures. The biggest and most influential group economically and politically in modern Thailand are the Thai Chinese. Theraphan Luangthongkum, a Thai linguist of Chinese ancestry, claims that 40 percent of the contemporary Thai population have some distant Chinese ancestry. She attributes it mainly to the successive waves of Han Chinese immigration of the last several centuries.

Genetics

Research on the population of Thailand groups it by the family each language belongs to, and genetic structure follows those families more closely than it follows region. Differences between the four regions are slight and graded rather than sharp, resemblance to Tai-Kadai speakers of southern China falling from north to south, and region accounts for under one percent of the variation measured.

Ancestry and admixture

A study of maternal lineages from nineteen Tai-speaking populations places their formation in southern Yunnan. Most Kra-Dai-speaking populations in Thailand are read as the product of admixture between migrants from southern China and resident Austroasiatic speakers, with Laos as the main gateway. Dai- and Zhuang-related ancestry in some northern and central populations points to a second route. Several studies report high affinities between Thai populations and groups of Southwestern China. Movement from southern China continued into recent centuries, King Kawila's repopulation of the war-damaged towns of the Lan Na Kingdom drawing mainly on southwestern China and Myanmar.

Regional variation

Northern Tai-Kadai groups are close to the Dai and to the Kinh Vietnamese and carry less Austroasiatic admixture, and Dai-related ancestry predominates there, at 19 to 100 percent. Northeastern groups are close to Khmu and Katu speakers who reached Thailand from Laos more recently, and to Cambodians; Lao-related ancestry reaches 100 percent in some of them. Central and southern groups combine ancestry shared with other Tai groups with admixture from Mon populations already present, and show greater affinity with Han Chinese than their Neolithic predecessors do.

The central region is the most internally varied of the four, no single group forming a majority, and more than half the ancestry of its Tai-Kadai populations comes from outside the Tai-Kadai world. How far the Mon contributed to it is disputed, two studies making them the closest match to the central Thai, while a reanalysis of earlier data finds no close affinity except in two individuals from Photharam in Ratchaburi. That reanalysis traces more than half the recent ancestry of central Tai-Kadai populations to a Lao-related source and about a quarter to one related to the Bamar. In the south, Thai and Nayu populations show admixture in both directions, the Nayu being closely related to Austronesian speakers of island Southeast Asia.

Ancestry related to the Indian subcontinent has been reported in central and southern populations, and modelling with the GLOBETROTTER method assigns small shares to Gujarati and Tiwari sources. A later study finds links between Indian lineages and a group of northern Tai-Kadai populations, and additional input to central and southern groups from Sino-Tibetan, Hmong-Mien and possibly Bengali and Gujarati sources.

Ethnolinguistic variation

Austroasiatic-speaking groups fall into Monic, Khmu-Katu and Palaungic sets. The first and last are admixed with Sino-Tibetan groups, the Khmu-Katu with Tai-Kadai populations of the northeast and of Laos. Southern Thai Austronesian speakers are not close to the Austronesians of Taiwan but to the Mamanwa, the Mon and central and southern Tai-Kadai groups.

The Hmong, Mlabri and Iu Mien are relatively isolated genetically, although the Iu Mien show some affinity with Hmong, Tai-Kadai and Sino-Tibetan groups of Thailand and China, while the Lawa and Lisu are less so. A microsatellite study places the Mlabri with other Austroasiatic groups of Thailand and with Vietnamese, Lao and Indonesian samples, and Thai Hmong and Iu Mien with southern Chinese and Tai-Kadai groups. Burmese samples in the same study cluster instead with East Asian, Sino-Tibetan and other Austroasiatic populations.

Geography and demographics

The vast majority of the Thai people live in Thailand, although some Thais can also be found in other parts of Southeast Asia. They are the majority population of Thailand and are also present in Laos, with minorities in Vietnam, Myanmar, India and southern China. About 51–57 million live in Thailand alone, while large communities can also be found in the United States, China, Laos, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, South Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates.

Culture and society

The Thais can be broken down into various regional groups with their own regional varieties of Thai. These groups include the Central Thai (also the standard variety of the language and Culture), the Southern Thai, the Isan (more closely related to the standard Lao of Laos than to standard Thai) and Lanna Thai. Within each regions exist multiple ethnic groups. Modern Central Thai culture has become more dominant due to official government policy, which was designed to assimilate and unify the disparate Thai in spite of ethnolinguistic and cultural ties between the non-Central-Thai-speaking people and their communities.

Indigenous arts include muay Thai (kick boxing), Thai dance, makruk (Thai Chess), Likay, and nang yai (shadow play).

Religion

Thai form the second largest ethno-linguistic group among Buddhists in the world. The modern Thai are predominantly Theravada Buddhist and strongly identify their ethnic identity with their religious practices that include aspects of ancestor worship, among other beliefs of the ancient folklore of Thailand. Thais predominantly (more than 90%) avow themselves Buddhists. Since the rule of King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai and again since the "orthodox reformation" of King Mongkut in the 19th century, it is modeled on the "original" Sri Lankan Theravada Buddhism. The Thais' folk belief however is a syncretic blend of the official Buddhist teachings, animistic elements that trace back to the original beliefs of Tai peoples, and Brahmin-Hindu elements from India, partly inherited from the Hindu Khmer Empire of Angkor.

The belief in local, nature and household spirits, that influence secular issues like health or prosperity, as well as ghosts (Thai: phi, ผี) is widespread. It is visible, for example, in so-called spirit houses (san phra phum) that may be found near many homes. Phi play an important role in local folklore, but also in modern popular culture, like television series and films. "Ghost films" (nang phi) are a distinct, important genre of Thai cinema.

Hinduism has left substantial and present marks on Thai culture. Some Thais worship Hindu gods like Ganesha, Shiva, Vishnu, or Brahma (e.g., at Bangkok's well-known Erawan Shrine). They do not see a contradiction between this practice and their primary Buddhist faith. The Thai national epic Ramakien is an adaption of the Hindu Ramayana. Hindu mythological figures like Devas, Yakshas, Nagas, gods and their mounts (vahana) characterise the mythology of Thais and are often depicted in Thai art, even as decoration of Buddhist temples. Thailand's national symbol Garuda is taken from Hindu mythology as well.

A characteristic feature of Thai Buddhism is the practice of tham boon (ทำบุญ) ("merit-making"). This can be done mainly by food and in-kind donations to monks, contributions to the renovation and adornment of temples, releasing captive creatures (fish, birds), etc. Moreover, many Thais idolise famous and charismatic monks, who may be credited with thaumaturgy or with the status of a perfected Buddhist saint (Arahant). Other significant features of Thai popular belief are astrology, numerology, talismans and amulets (often images of the revered monks)

Besides Thailand's two million Muslim Malays, there are an additional more than a million ethnic Thais who profess Islam, especially in the south, but also in greater Bangkok. As a result of missionary work, there is also a minority of approximately 500,000 Christian Thais: Catholics and various Protestant denominations. Buddhist temples in Thailand are characterized by tall golden stupas, and the Buddhist architecture of Thailand is similar to that in other Southeast Asian countries, particularly Cambodia and Laos, with which Thailand shares cultural and historical heritage.