Author: Mary Bulkley Stanton Publisher: Hara Publishing Group ISBN: 9781887542142 Category : Thailand Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Journey to fabulous, legendary Siam with 20 year old Edna Bruner as she impulsively agreed to teach in a missionary girls school in 1903. Through her eyes we glimpse this fascinating country and its people. Go with her as copes with monsoon rains, troublesome insects, encounters primitive tribes and strange animals, witness ceremonies seldom seen by foreigners and participate in the pagentry of royal celebrations. Edna raised seven children with her doctor-husband and witnessed the reign of five kings during her 34 year stay.
Author: Thongchai Winichakul Publisher: University of Hawaii Press ISBN: 9780824819743 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
This unusual and intriguing study of nationhood explores the 19th-century confrontation of ideas that transformed the kingdom of Siam into the modern conception of a nation. Siam Mapped challenges much that has been written on Thai history because it demonstrates convincingly that the physical and political definition of Thailand on which other works are based is anachronistic.
Author: Judith A. Stowe Publisher: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
Since the end of the absolute monarchy in Siam in 1932, the country has seemed to lurch from one military coup to another despite the democratic ideals proclaimed by the men who established the first constitutional government. Just how the military came to play such a dominant role in Thai politics is the main theme of this book. But it also looks at the nebulous period during World war II when Thailand fought a little-known war against the French in Indo-China and then aligned itself with Japan, declaring war on Britain and the United States.
Author: Dirk Van der Cruysse Publisher: Silkworm Books ISBN: 1630411620 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 318
Book Description
Ambassadors from Versailles in wigs and lace mounted on elephants crossing rice fields... Siamese mandarins prostrate before the throne of Louis XIV... a Greek adventurer... a scheming French Jesuit— these are just a few of the colourful characters that playa role in the early history of relations between Siam and the West. In a lively and engaging style, Professor Dirk Van der Cruysse traces the history of European-Siamese relations, from the arrival of the Portuguese around the beginning of the sixteenth century followed by the Dutch, the British, and the French. Explorers, merchants, missionaries, and ambassadors came and went across the oceans, sometimes producing vivid accounts of lengthy voyages, lavish courts, and strange customs. In these descriptions and anecdotes we observe the startling juxtaposition of fundamentally different worldviews arising from two distinct religious milieux. Van der Cruysse expertly weaves together material from journals,memoirs, and other archival documents, quoting from them extensively to construct a compelling historical account of a fascinating relationship. Originally published as Louis XIV et le Siam (Fayard, 1991), this English version has been ably translated by Michael Smithies, author of numerous books and articles on the French involvement in Siam during the seventeenth century.
Author: Abbot Low Moffat Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 150174271X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
This is an engaging, real-life portrait of one of the great Asian rulers of the nineteenth century, who set the course that preserved his country's independence and enabled it to remain the only country in Southeast Asia never to fall under European domination. It is not a conventional biography of King Mongkut or a history of his reign; rather, the author sketches the man in his many facets, furnishing a factual outline, but applying the color from the King's own writings—through which his personality and character shine so clearly—and from other contemporary sources. Many of these appear in English for the first time. As ruler and diplomat, as philosopher and scientist, as monk and head of a large family, Mongkut showed powers of mind and spirit extraordinary in any age. As here presented, he is even more remarkable than the caricature of him depicted in some recent popular accounts.
Author: Pitchaya Sudbanthad Publisher: ISBN: 0525534768 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 370
Book Description
"A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Mary Bulkley Stanton
Author: Thongchai Winichakul
Author: Judith A. Stowe
Author: Leigh R. Kambhu
Author: John Bowring
Author: Dirk Van der Cruysse
Author: Abbot Low Moffat
Author: Samuel John Smith
Author: Chris Baker
Author: Pitchaya Sudbanthad