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Early
Thai history and art
is mainly one of the fluctuations of power
and influence between Sukhothai and the
kingdom called Lan Na, to the north, whose
capital was the city which is still Thailand's second largest, Chiang Mai. Sukhothai itself was in the cultural
vanguard, in direct touch with Ceylon; and
the first successful attempts to create a
Thai Hinayana Buddha image seem to have been
made there.
In 1349 Sukhothai
was taken over
and made into a dependency of Ayutthaya in
the south, though it retained its cultural
integrity. Then, in the later part of the
fourteenth century, when Buddhism and
Buddhist art were at their zenith in
Sukhothai, King Guna of Lan Na decided to
improve his strain of Buddhism by
importing a body of Sinhalese-led
monks
It may well be that
the old form of Buddhism, descended from Mon
times, which had survived in Lanna before
King Guna's reform, had compromised with the
spirits in some way, rather as
Burmese Buddhism did.
From
the sixth to the twelfth centuries
AD the Thai Dvarawati kingdom survived for about
six hundred years, . It was the chief of
the Mon confederation, and its religion was Hinayana,
like that of the western Mon of
Lower Burma.
The style of the
Buddhist imagery seems to have been close to
that of post-Gupta, pre-Pala eastern India,
slightly cruder, but vigorous. The facial
features of the figures are of Mon type,
with the averted lips emphasized by an
incised line. A number of Buddha's, more or
less fragmentary, are known from various |
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places, including Lopburi. But the art of
that period was entirely superseded. During
the eleventh century, the kingdom of
DvaraWati lost the leadership and
support of the Mon confederation, and was
open to capture by the Khmer.
The art of Dvarawati
and its Buddha types were then adopted as
canons for the growing Buddhist tradition of
Cambodia, which culminated in the art of the Bayon
and Angkor Thorn.
King Tiloka, by maintaining
full contact between Thailand and the
Buddhist world of Ceylon, even
India,
ensured that Thailand Buddhism should be as
direct an inheritor of the Truth as it could
possibly be. This concern with lineage is
closely reflected in the art.
The fact that
valuable bronze was liberally used for
making huge images,
and the fact that Thailand
has remained a Buddhist
country eager to conserve
its sacred images, means
that there is today an
unrivalled continuous series
of Hinayana Buddhas in
Thailand.
So for
many centuries Thailand craftsmen
have been hard at work producing
replicas, large and small, of most
of the old prestigious images some
were for private use. Some were
merely to be stored in shrines as
permanent testimony to the piety of
the donor.
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Of all the mass of works
thus fabricated only certain pieces
in northern Thailand are dated. It
is therefore impossible to write a
true art-history of Thailand, for
all the different types have been
continuously imitated with more or
less success, ever since they were
first made. The imitations have been
preserved without date, context or
document.
The Chao Phraya River
is deeply
interconnected with the history. Only until
a few decades ago travel Thailand was
mainly done on the rivers, very much
depending on the weather. The river is
lifeline by delivering water for the paddy
fields and disaster area from time to time
by gigantic flooding which was no big
problem in the past since the people didn't
settle too close to the river because of
that. Only in resent years carelessness
produced flood disasters such as by the end
of 2010 in central Thailand and particular
Bangkok.
The
Chao Phraya river starts at the
confluence of the Ping and Nan river
at Nakhon Sawan (also Pak Nam
Pho). For about 370 km the brown
water moves through the
central plains to Bangkok
and empty into the Gulf of
Thailand. Along the way are many
small canals (khlong)
branching off from the main waterway. |
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The Khlong are used for
navigation and irrigation of the
region's rice fields. On many places
rice field disappear, making space
for golf courses, hotels,
theexponential growing real estate
business and industrial estates.
The industry is mainly
located at the eastern
seaboard, this is the area
south east of Bangkok and
south of Pattaya.
Thailand is experiencing a rapid
transformation into modern days.
Most of the time this transformation
goes to fast and the education
system cant supply enough people
with the needed education.
Most
of the rice fields in central
Thailand,
Nakhon Sawan
is one area pictured at right, are
still maintained in the same
traditional ways done since hundreds
of years. |
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Today
Thailand is a mayor rice exporter
and created years ago a special type
of fragrant rice which is sold as "Hom
Mali" rice, hom in Thai
language means -smells good. They
try a lot that this rice seedling
are not exported illegally or fall
into the hand of the western
agriculture
industry.
Thailand's success in the
rice trade is mainly because of the excellent quality of the long grain
white rice.
Thai fragrant or
"Hom Mali" rice-
, which
fetches top prices.
More history
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Buddhist imagery |
Khmer shrines associated with the Hinduized cult of royalty were built in
southern Thailand. Examples are at Phi Mai,
where one of the personal cult statues of Jayavarman II has been found, and Phra Prang
Sam.
Yot, at Lopburi, which is perhaps the
best surviving example in brick and
stucco of the Khmer provincial art
of Thailand.
During the period when the Khmer had
taken over the southern Mon region
of Thailand, the northern 'region
was falling under the domination of
the immigrating Thai peoples, who
seem, at that time, to have
professed a kind of animist
nature-religion, somewhat resembling
the early form of the Burmese or
Myanmar cult
of the
Nats.
To the far north of
Thailand however, in what is now the Chinese
province of Yunnan, there was a remote
kingdom called Nan Chao, in which the Thai
were somehow important.
The rulers of this
kingdom seem to have followed a Mahayana
form of Buddhism which may have reached them
via the Ari priesthood of Upper Burma. The
worship of a Bodhisattva as a personal
patron of royalty played an important part
in this cult. A number of rather small
bronze Bodhisattva icons are known from Nan
Chao,
in a style somewhat reminiscent of
the late Pallava art of the east
coast of peninsular India. From the
general direction of Nan Chao the
Thai seem to have moved very
gradually south, establishing small
kingdoms in the tropical forest
lands as they went. |
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The social structure was based on tribal
pyramids, with chieftains at the top, some
of whom came gradually to acquire the idea
of themselves as kings; for the concept of
kingship is a cultural phenomenon, which the
Thai had to assimilate, just as they
assimilated Himayana Buddhism. |
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Some of Thai
gained the experience of living within the
boundaries of the
Khmer empire, with
their own chieftains under a Khmer
official. When the Khmer
power was removed
from central and
southern Thailand, the Thai moved into that
region as well, intermarrying with the Mon.
But even when the Thai occupation of
Thailand was complete, the country remained
a series of small principalities, whose
rulers owed, from time to time, a more or
less nominal allegiance to a greater king.
All Thai
peoples had buildings of wood,
there
were no hotels just simple accommodations, mainly
bamboo; but already medium size markets as
it was common at that time. Only sacral and
some government buildings were made from
bricks or other stones. They were rice
farmers, and knew how to navigate the large
rivers. Their religion of the spirits gave
ground only partially to
Buddhism, and even today is very
much alive: the guardian spirits of
trees still need to be pacified, and
the ancestors can be powerful
helpers. |
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Bronze casting
Buddha Statue |
Shamans can,
in a state of trance, make contact
with the spirit-world to work good
and sometimes ill. The
prevalence in Thailand of this
feeling for the spirits and their
world is one of the reasons for the
genuine affinity between certain
aspects of Thailand and Burmese art.
It seems probable that the Thai who
settled in the northern region of
Thailand did not at first know
anything of
Buddhism, despite the
contact of other branches of the
Thai with forms of Buddhism in Nan Chao, Ceylon
and the Khmer empire.
What
probably is
that from one of these sources the Thai of
Sukhothai acquired the difficult art of
large-scale bronze-casting. The earliest
known reference to the art of casting bronze Buddha in the north is to the reign of King Guna. By the fifteenth century the art was
widely established everywhere in Thailand. By
this time too all the Thai as Buddhists,
maintained direct links with Ceylon, the
homeland of Hinayana Buddhism, through Lower
Burma.
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In the central
region of Thailand , Ayutthaya learned likewise from the
Buddhism and art tradition of Sukhothai. The
styles which prevailed there in the
fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were based
on an amalgam of the classical Sukhothai
style with the fairly strong vestiges of
Khmer traditions among a population still
predominantly Mon.
It is
impossible at present, however, to
disentangle the architectural and history of
the south of Thailand at all satisfactorily,
since the necessary archaeological
investigations on the spot have not
been done. |
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It
seems probable
that the majority of
important structures and works
surviving at Ayutthaya
and all those around Bangkok date from a
period subsequent to the wars which the
Buddhist king of Burma, Bayinnaung Bayi,
conducted against the Thai kingdoms in north
and south Thailand during the later
sixteenth century. The
King of Burma attempted to palliate
his gross human cruelty by schematic acts of
Buddhist piety-feeding monks, distributing
copies of the scriptures, and building
pagodas and monasteries.
Thus
Thailand art styles in the south were
subject to a strong Burmese or Myanmar art influence, which
virtually obliterated old native forms. In
the north, especially in Lan Na and the Thai
kingdoms of Laos, which did not suffer so
severely from this Burmese incursion, the
older styles survived, developing slowly,
into modern times. |
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Buddhists |
It
must be said that,
like the art of
Burma or Myanmar , the Buddhist art
of Thailand is interesting mainly
in its early formative stages.
Once the canonical patterns were
laid down, artistic invention
virtually ceased.
Standard types were repeated again and
again, ad nauseam, and architecture made no
attempt to organize' and articulate space. There was a positive religious reason for
this state of affairs. In the Buddhist world
there was long a belief, erroneous but
potent, that an authorized image of the
Buddha had been carved during his lifetime.
Following primitive conceptions which are,
strictly speaking, abhorrent to
well-educated Buddhists, this image was
supposed to have absorbed much of the
Buddha's own magical potency.
All the major
images of
Buddhist shrines were supposed to
contain their own share of this magical
potency of the original image by virtue of
their exact likeness to the great original.
To ensure this likeness, immense care was
taken to adhere as closely as human
craftsmen could to the iconographic pattern,
which was reduced for safety to a series of
diagrams, measurements and canonical
proportions.
Such differences of style as do
occur between the Buddhas of different times
and places are unintentional and
unavoidable, the natural consequence of
craftsmen working in their own artistic
idiom. They were only cultivated
intentionally when an attempt was being made
to capture the likeness of a famous magical
image in a style which had already evolved
its idiosyncrasy. |
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