A BRIEF SURVEY OF CULTURAL

     Thailand is in Indo-China. She has as her nieghbour Burma in the West, and Franch Indo-China in the east and on her northern frontier. Down south through the Malay Peninsula she borders on the Malayan Union. Prior to the appearance of the Thai as a political unit, Central Thailand in the Menam (Chao Phya) valley was known archaeologically as the Dvaravati Kingdom peopled by a Mon-speaking race. Later on the Khmer, a race linguistically akin to the Mon, overran Dvaravati and established the Khmer Empire, Down south in the Malay Peninsula and contemporaneously with the Khmer was part of the Srivijaya Empire. These three peoples, the Mon of Dvaravati, the Khmer of the Khmer Empire, and the Malays of Srivijaya left important marks of their highly hinduized civilization in what is now Thailand.

     Now for a cursory glimpse of the Thai. Originally the Thai were an off shoot of the Thai race whose homeland was in historical time in Southern China. Since Many hundred years before the Christian Era many of the Thai people, owing to circumstances and vicissitudes. migrated from their old homeland finding their ways grandually in a southward direction into Indo-China. Some of them settled down in the mountainous district of Chiangsen in the north of Thailand and formed themselves into many free small principalities. Parts of these Thais together with other streams of this Thai race migrated further south, mingled and settled down in the north of the alluvial plain of the Menam valley in Central Thailand. They again formed themselves into many small principalities, this time not independently but under the suzerainty of the Khmer Empire with its headquarter in Central Thailand at Lophaburi (Lavapuri). In the 13th century of the Christian Era they succeeded in establishing themselves as a unified Thai Kingdom of Sukhothai. A century later arose upon the last remnants of the now declining Khmer Empire in the lower portion of the Menam valley, another Thai Kingdom of Ayuthia (Ayudhya). Its first dynastic kings came from U-thong, a district to the north west of Bangkok. Eventually these two kingdoms Sukhothai and Ayuthia and later Chiangsen and other parts of Thailand were amalgamated into one unified kingdkom of Thailand.