Thailand PHYSICAL SETTING
Figure 7. Topography and Drainage.
Thailand's 514,000 square kilometers lie in the middle of
mainland Southeast Asia. The nation's axial position influenced
many aspects of Thailand's society and culture. The earliest
speakers of the
Tai (see Glossary) language migrated from what is
now China, following rivers into northern Thailand and southward
to the Mae Nam (river) Chao Phraya Valley. The fertile floodplain
and tropical monsoon climate, ideally suited to wet-rice
(thamna) cultivation, attracted settlers to this central
area rather than to the marginal uplands and mountains of the
northern region or the Khorat Plateau to the northeast. By the
twelfth century, a number of loosely connected rice-growing and
trading states flourished in the upper Chao Phraya Valley.
Starting in the middle of the fourteenth century, these central
chiefdoms gradually came under the control of the kingdom of
Ayutthaya at the southern extremity of the floodplain. Successive
capitals, built at various points along the river, became centers
of great Thai kingdoms based on rice cultivation and foreign
commerce. Unlike the neighboring Khmer and Burmese, the Thai
continued to look outward across the Gulf of Thailand and the
Andaman Sea toward foreign ports of trade. When European
imperialism brought a new phase in Southeast Asian commerce in
the late 1800s, Thailand (known then as
Siam--see Glossary) was
able to maintain its independence as a buffer zone between
British-controlled Burma to the west and French-dominated
Indochina to the east
(see The Bangkok Period, 1767-1932
, ch. 1).
Data as of September 1987
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