New Mandala

The National Archives of Australia have substantial holdings on Thai Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn’s years in Australia.  One of the files is “Closed”, some are currently “Withheld pending agency advice” or “Not yet examined”, and others are “Open”.  The archival material covers the Crown Prince’s initial time at the King’s School in Sydney and his training [...]

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Political Prisoners in Thailand has a neat little story about a new district in Chiang Mai province that will be named in honour of Princess Galyani Vadhana.  The ever-reliable Tambon has more details, as does this Thai-language report.
I am fascinated by this administrative change, and not least because I know the area (in the far [...]

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Note: This article consolidates my preliminary observations based on one book. Due to time constraints and lack of sources, I am unable to gather wider knowledge about kite flying activities. I would be happy to hear corrections and comments from historians, as well as from those who know more about kite flying. Thai names and [...]

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New Mandala readers keen for something a bit different will enjoy John Stanton’s 1950 report, published as “Siam: Garden of Smiles” by TIME Magazine. It includes many details on royal life and the first years of King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s reign. The report also touches on the death of King Ananda Mahidol and a range of other contentious matters.

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Saranukrom watthanatham thai phak tai [The Encyclopedia of Thai Culture: The South]. Bangkok, Thanakhan Thai Phanit Munnithi Saranukrom Watthanatham Thai, 1999. 18 volumes, 8613 pp. In Thai language.
In the National Library of Australia while reading up on religion, banditry, and the environment in Thailand’s mid-south, I stumbled across the Encyclopedia of Thai Culture: The South [...]

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This month at the National Library of Australia’s Asian Collections we have put together a display of Thai ephemera: late 19th and early 20th century advertisements and cigarette cards. The images of advertisements we display are reproduced from the books by Anake Nawikamune; the cigarette cards are originals which we acquired recently.
Anake Nawigamune was born in Songkhla [...]

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Chatthip Nartsupha, The Thai Village Economy in the Past. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books (distributed by University of Washington Press), 1999. pp. viii + 131.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It is worth pointing out that this book review interacts with some of the the key themes examined in Andrew Walker’s new edited collection, Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and [...]

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Tamara Loos. Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. pp. x + 212.
Rare is the appearance of a newly published English-language monograph in Thai history, rarer still one that sets such a high standard of intellectual rigor and revisionist finesse. Tamara Loos’s Subject Siam puts forward the thesis [...]

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Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830. Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland (Studies in Comparative World History). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xxiii, 484
This hugely ambitious project, marked by the publication of this, the first of two volumes, aims at nothing less than the repositioning of mainland [...]

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Han ten Brummelhuis, King of the Waters: Homan van der Heide and the Origin of Modern Irrigation in Siam, Leiden, KITLV Press, 2005. pp. xvi, 409
This important work of scholarship breaks new ground in the history of Siam’s political economy and the transfer of technology that took place in Southeast Asia during the colonial [...]

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