By                             H. G. DEIGNAN (Publication 3703)...

                      The Lord Baltimore Press                       BALTIMORE, MD., U. S. A.   Geography   Peoples   Prehistory   Kingdom of Sukhothai-Sawankhalok   Kingdom of Ayuthia   Kingdom of Tonburi   Kingdom of Siam   Thailand...

1. Map of Siam [Illustration: FIG. 1.—Map of Siam.]                            By H. G. DEIGNAN                  Associate Curator, Division of Birds                         U. S. National Museum...

From the earliest times the great peninsula which lies between India and China …. has been peculiarly subject to foreign intrusion. Successive waves of Mongolian humanity have broken over it from the north, Dravidians from India have colonised it, Buddhist missions from Ceylon have penetrated it, and buccaneers from the islands in the south have invaded it. Race has fought against race, tribe against tribe, and clan against clan. Predominant powers have arisen and declined. Civilisations have gr

Whatever more or less final rectifications of frontiers result from the current war, the land of the Thai will still, for general purposes, fall into four geographic divisions of major importance: Northern, Central, Eastern, and Peninsular. Northern Thailand, lying between the Salwin and the Me Khong, two of the world's most majestic rivers, is, for the most part, a country of roughly parallel ranges and valleys running north and south. At the heads of the flat-floored valleys, which vary in ele

Archeology can still tell us little of the first human occupants of Siam. The earliest evidence of man's existence here is furnished by celts, uncovered in the Peninsula and on the eastern plateau, which are supposed to date from the later Neolithic period; geology, however, gives us no reason to conclude that the makers of these implements were not preceded by other races. [Illustration: 1. The rivers fall from the northern plateaus to the central plain through narrow defiles.] [Illustration: 2

The history of Siam prior to the fourteenth century A.D. is chiefly known from a hodgepodge of disconnected stories and fragments known as the "Pongsawadon Mu'ang Nu'a" ("Annals of the North Country"), compiled at different periods from such of the official records of various cities and kingdoms as had escaped the destruction which at intervals overtook the communities to which they referred. With the omission of the numerous supernatural happenings there recorded and comparative study of the ch

The most ancient Mon-Khmer settlement of which anything definite is known was Sukhothai (located on the river Me Yom some 200 miles north of the site of modern Bangkok), which by 300 B.C. was already a sizable village. At first putting forth no pretensions to the status of kingdom, the community evidently increased rapidly in importance, for some two centuries later the chief, Phraya Thammarat, declared himself King of the district, founded the new capital of Sawankhalok, and appointed one of hi

Phra Chao Uthong (under the name of Phra Ramathibodi) became King at Ayuthia in A.D. 1350 and thereafter was fully occupied in bringing the outlying states and provinces into line, in organizing his government, and in setting up a system of law, parts of which continue in use to the present time. Before his death in 1369, he had brought together the whole of the components of the Sukhothai-Sawankhalok Kingdom and had welded them so closely together that, when Cambodia, annoyed by the independent

Sin Byu Shin, leaving a viceroy with a small garrison to rule the country, withdrew his army to meet a threatened Chinese invasion of Burma and once again Siam fell into an interregnum of anarchy, with outlying districts setting themselves up as independent while robber bands preyed upon the people. An ex-official named Phraya Taksin, who had deserted his King when Ayuthia seemed likely to fall, gathered about himself a large number of deserters and broken men like himself and, by guile and trea

Phraya Chakkri (hereafter to be styled as King Rama I) had scarcely assumed his new dignity when Bodaw Phra, King of Burma, attempted a new conquest of Siam. King Rama's military ability was such that the Burmese were finally everywhere defeated and, with the abandonment of Mergui and Tavoy by the Siamese in 1792, the recurrent wars between the two powers may be said to have ended for good. With the foreign danger averted, the King was able to organize his government, the seat of which was trans

Whether the modern traveler enters Siam by steamer from Hongkong or Singapore or by comfortable Diesel-engined train from the Malay States, his destination is certain to be Bangkok. Here, in bewildering juxtaposition, the old Siam and the new Thailand confront him together on every side. The former is represented in the complicated network of canals, upon which thousands of boat-dwellers pass their lives; in the narrow streets hung with the vertical signboards of the inevitable multitude of Chin