Eight centuries of kingdoms, and the only country in the region that was never colonised.
Before the kingdoms
Bronze was being cast at Ban Chiang, in the north-east, more than three thousand years ago; the site is on the Unesco list and its painted pottery is in every museum in the country. The Mon and Khmer states came later, and the Khmer built as far west as Phanom Rung, whose sandstone towers still stand on an extinct volcano in Buriram.
Sukhothai (1238–1438)
The first kingdom the Thais call their own rose at Sukhothai, „the dawn of happiness". Its most famous ruler, Ramkhamhaeng, is credited with the Thai alphabet and with an inscription describing a kingdom where „there is fish in the water and rice in the fields". The ruined city, with its lotus-bud towers and its walking Buddha, is a Unesco site.
Ayutthaya (1351–1767)
Power moved south to Ayutthaya, an island city between three rivers that grew into one of the largest and richest places on earth — French, Dutch, Portuguese, Persian and Japanese quarters, and a court that received embassies from Louis XIV. In 1767 a Burmese army took and burned it after a fifteen-month siege. What is left is a field of brick towers and headless Buddhas, and one stone head held in the roots of a fig tree.
Bangkok and the Chakri dynasty
After a brief capital at Thonburi, Rama I founded the present dynasty in 1782 and built Bangkok on the east bank of the Chao Phraya, deliberately echoing Ayutthaya. The city's full ceremonial name runs to over a hundred and sixty letters and is the longest place name in the world.
Keeping independence
In the nineteenth century Britain took Burma and France took Indochina. Mongkut (Rama IV) and his son Chulalongkorn (Rama V) kept Siam independent by reforming it and by ceding border territory — a diplomacy Thais still describe as bending like bamboo. Chulalongkorn abolished slavery and corvée labour, built the railways and sent his sons to study in Europe.
The modern state
A bloodless coup in 1932 ended absolute monarchy. The country was renamed Thailand in 1939. Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX) reigned from 1946 to 2016 — seventy years, the longest of any Thai monarch and among the longest anywhere — and his image still hangs in shops and stations across the country. His son Vajiralongkorn (Rama X) succeeded him.
Thailand's post-war history has been marked by repeated military coups and by an economy that grew from rice and tin to electronics and tourism. The 2004 tsunami struck the Andaman coast on 26 December, killing more than five thousand people in the country and reshaping the way the coastline is built on.