This work presents the first English-language account of the role of the important thinker, writer and politician, Luang Wichit Wathakan, in the development of state nationalism during the period of political upheaval and conflict immediately following the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932.

Nidhi Eoseewong is the most innovative, famed, and controversial Thai historian of his generation. This book founded his reputation and is the first of his major works to appear in English. On its publication in Thai, he was immediately hailed as "a major historian, the most capable of the present era." Pen and Sail combines intellectual history and economic history. Nidhi argues that the emergence of a market economy in the early Bangkok era (1782-1855) was the driving force behind a major change in mentality and worldview seen in poetry, early prose works, biographies of the Buddha, scripts for chanting the Jataka tales, language primers, manuals of behavior, and revisions of the royal chronicles. Nidhi Eoseewong's outstanding career as a historian and leading public intellectual was recognized by award of the prestigious Fukuoka Asia Prize in 2000.

A look at the customs and great temples of Thailand. This book includes views of Bangkok, The Grand Palace, Wat Arun, Wat Pho, Dusit Zoo and much more in Bangkok. It also has great views and video of Sukhothai National Park and surrounding grounds, with views of over 40 different sites. Sure to be a great adventure!

Fourteen papers on Thai literature presented at Fifth International Conference on Thai Studies held at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, July 1993.

“Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok’s transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

The first edition of this book was hailed as original and challenging in its analyses of Thai national identity. The topic is today no less worthy of discussion and comment. The essays boldly offer insights into the formation of Thai identity from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, human geography, and media and religious studies. Written in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a new chapter reflects on the way older concepts of Thai identity were transformed by the economic boom as well as by the financial crisis that followed. Topics include the debates among public intellectuals about the perils and opportunities of globalization, the dynamic relationship between local and global knowledge, and perceived challenges to Thailand's sovereignty, all of which have deep roots in the country's modern history.