Far East Kingdoms

Early Thailand / Siam

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The modern kingdom of Thailand occupies much of the Indochinese peninsula in South-East Asia. It is bordered by Laos to the north and much of the east, with Cambodia taking up the lower eastern border, and then by Malaysia to the south, while the long western border is filled by the Andaman Sea and Burma. It contains several minority populations which include the Akha people and others.

The perspective on Thai history has been changed by archaeological excavations in the north-east of the country. Discoveries which have included bronze metallurgy seem to suggest, controversially, that the Thais may have originated in Thailand itself following the initial arrival of Homo sapiens in the region, later expanding outwards to various parts of Asia, including ancient China (see feature link for a fuller history of Homo sapiens).

No definite conclusion has been reached at the time of writing, and many more theories have been put forward with some suggesting that Thais were originally of Austronesian rather than Mongoloid origin.

The established story looks at a date of about 2000 BC, when Chinese rice and millet farmers spread southwards into a region which stretched between Vietnam and Burma. There they interbred with local hunter-gatherers in two main pulses, this being the first with the second pulse of migration taking place around the end of the first century BC.

These events and many lesser integrations produced a people which bore a highly mixed ethnic heritage, albeit one which was initially provided by Thai migrants as they pushed southwards into South-East Asia from the eighth century AD kingdom of Nanzhao in what is now south-western China. That movement increased when the Mongols invaded China, entirely sidelining the collected native Akha people.

A team led in 2017 by Harvard Medical School geneticist, Mark Lipson, concluded that these population movements brought agriculture into the region and triggered the spread of Austroasiatic languages which still remain spoken in parts of south and South-East Asia.

Over the preceding twenty years, archaeology had already accumulated increasing amounts of evidence to support the emergence of rice farming in South-East Asia between 2500-2000 BC, accompanied by tools and pottery which revealed links to southern China.

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(Information by Peter Kessler & John De Cleene, with additional introductory details by Kris Tang, and additional information from the John De Cleene Archive, from The Restoration of Thailand under Rama I, 1782-1809, Klaus Wenk (1968), from A History of Thailand, Chris Baker & Pasuk Phongpaichit (2005), from Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopaedia, from Angkor Wat to East Timor, Keat Gin Ooi (ABC-Clio, 2004), from Early Mainland Southeast Asia, C Higham (River Books Co, 2014), from Encyclopaedia of Ancient Asian Civilizations, Charles F W Higham (Facts on File, 2004), from Historical Atlas of the World, R R Palmer (Ed, Chicago, 1963), and from External Links: Thai History at sunsite.au.ac.th (dead link), and Ancient Chinese farmers sowed literal seeds of change in south-east Asia (Science News), and The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, George Coedès (Walter F Vella (Ed), Susan Brown Cowing (Trans), University of Hawaii Press, 1968, and available online via the Internet Archive).)