'Thainess': the history of a national identity constructed, imposed and contested

In official speeches, at school and in public debate, *khwam pen thai*, 'Thainess', literally 'the fact of being Thai', is taken as self-evident. Yet its definition remains elusive. The historians who have studied it see it less as an essence handed down from time immemorial than as a political construction. It took shape from the late 19th century onwards, under pressure from the colonial empires, and every regime since has remoulded it. From the map to the flag, from Phibun's decrees to the 'twelve values' of 2014, here are the main avenues for understanding this notion, the uses to which it has been put and the debates it raises about the place of diversity.

Self-evident, yet impossible to define

In contemporary Thailand, the expression khwam pen thai (ความเป็นไทย, 'the fact of being Thai', rendered in English as Thainess) belongs to everyday vocabulary. It turns up in school curricula, official campaigns and discussions about language, dress or good manners. It denotes a supposed set of traits peculiar to the Thai people, their culture and their country. The available overviews agree on one point: the notion lies at the heart of nationalist discourse, but its contours remain blurred. What most often gives it substance is a professed loyalty to three pillars: nation, religion and king.

The standard analysis is that of the historian Thongchai Winichakul, in Siam Mapped (1994). He starts from an observation. There is in Thailand a widely shared belief in a common Thai 'nature', and it extends even to academics. His argument is that the content of this identity has never been fixed. It has been defined 'discursively', that is to say through a succession of discourses issued by authorities of varying ideological persuasions. History itself has become an arbiter, deciding what is Thai and what is not.

Thongchai distinguishes two ways of articulating Thainess. 'Positive' identification states what it is. 'Negative' identification defines it by what it is not, setting it against an Other whose face changes with the times and the needs of the moment. This second operation is often the more effective: people can rarely say what Thainess is, but they readily point to what is foreign to it.

Two caveats are needed from the outset. First, the academic works consulted for this article almost all adopt this 'constructivist' reading. The opposing position sees Thainess as an ancient essence, handed down from the kingdom of Sukhothai, which is held up as the cradle of the nation. It is chiefly advanced by official and conservative discourse, and it is not presented here through the arguments of an identified author. This is a limitation of which the reader should be aware. Second, saying that a national identity is constructed is not the same as saying that lived practices are false. Language, Buddhist rites, cuisines and festivals are perfectly real. What is constructed is their assembly into a single model, presented as the yardstick of belonging.

The 19th century: a nation born of the map and of colonial pressure

Modernising the state to remain master in one's own house

Siam was never directly colonised. Yet in the second half of the 19th century it lived under the threat of Western encroachment. The Bangkok elites responded with a series of administrative reforms: modernising and, to a large extent, Westernising the state in order to preserve their own authority. Historians read Siamese nation-building as a response to this colonial pressure. It was a way of speaking the language of the empires, the language of borders, administrations and defined peoples, the better to resist them.

The book Thailand: A Struggle for the Nation (ISEAS, 2022) emphasises three drivers of this shift. First came the questions that Westerners settled in Bangkok were asking about the origins of the Thais. Then came printing, followed by cartography. Together they moved the Thai world from a religious and dynastic frame of thought, centred on the king and Buddhism, to a national one.

The map as the matrix of territory

This is where Thongchai Winichakul's best-known concept comes in: the 'geo-body'. In his view, modern cartography, introduced in the 19th century in the face of the colonial powers, did not merely describe a pre-existing territory: it created it. Once drawn and recognised, this territory became one of the foundations of identity, to the point of appearing natural. The notion has since been widely taken up to think about borders and the shifting conception of modern nations, as the historian was still explaining in an interview in 2019.

When satsana became 'religion'

The same movement affected religion. A study published by Kyoto University's Center for Southeast Asian Studies shows that before these reforms the word satsana was synonymous with Buddhism. The idea of 'religion' as a neutral category, allowing beliefs to be compared with one another, is a recent one in Thailand. Nor was there any monastic institution organised on a nationwide scale. The centralisation of the state was also the centralisation of the sangha, the community of monks. National Buddhism as we know it today is in part a product of that era.

Vajiravudh and the 'Holy Trinity'

A king educated in England

If any reign gave Thainess its formula, it was that of Vajiravudh, Rama VI (1910–1925). The future king returned from England in 1902, aged twenty-one, after nine years of study. He disseminated the state ideology of chat, satsana, phra maha kasat: nation, religion, monarchy. He taught it himself to the Wild Tiger Corps, a paramilitary organisation he had founded. These three words became the 'three pillars' of the modern Siamese state.

Writing the national narrative

Vajiravudh was also a man of letters. Some two hundred texts are attributed to him, signed under more than a hundred pseudonyms: travel writing, plays, poems, songs, articles, sermons. He is honoured today as the 'Great Scholar King'. In 1908 he published Ruang Thieo Muang Phra Ruang, a narrative with an appendix reproducing the inscription attributed to King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai. He thereby helped to establish Sukhothai as a golden age and the starting point of national history. This work formed part of the policy known as pluk chat-pluk chai, 'awakening the nation'. According to an encyclopaedic entry that has yet to be cross-checked, the king drew on the historical writings of Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, a towering figure of Siamese historiography.

A more nuanced trinity than it seems

It would nevertheless be reductive to cast Vajiravudh as the champion of an exclusive Buddhism. The Kyoto study recalls that, according to the historian Walter Vella, the king stressed the fundamental similarities between all religions. His promotion of Buddhism rested on the idea that the Thais had chosen it from among religions of equal worth. A form of 'freedom of satsana' already existed, moreover: a 19th-century edict concerning the missionaries settled in Chiang Mai spoke of Satsana Phra Yesu, the 'religion of Jesus'.

What became of the formula is another matter. For the authors of Thailand: A Struggle for the Nation, this 'Holy Trinity' has since been extensively exploited by right-wing military regimes. This is an interpretation, but one shared by a large part of critical historiography. Finally, a widespread tradition holds that the tricolour flag adopted in 1917 represents this trinity; this point, relayed by general overviews, would merit confirmation from an institutional source.

From Siam to Thailand: Phibun's Thaification

The state decrees

The end of absolute monarchy in 1932 did not bring the national project to an end: it changed its actors. Under the government of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, a series of twelve ratthaniyom ('state decrees', sometimes translated as 'cultural mandates') was promulgated between 1939 and 1942. The first, dated 24 June 1939, replaced the name Siam with Thailand. It justified the change by the need for the country's name to reflect the 'Thai race'.

A popular overview, which needs to be cross-checked against the work of Thai historians, groups these decrees around four themes:

• the country's name, henceforth aligned with the Thai ethnonym;
• assimilation: minorities and those who did not speak Thai were required to prove that they belonged to the national community;
• unity: 'North-eastern Thais' or 'Southern Thais' ceased to be officially distinguished, and songs referring to these differences were banned or censored;
• progress, to be achieved through self-sufficiency and buying Thai products.

Posters of the period contrasted dress deemed improper with the 'civilised' attire that ought to be adopted. In 1942 a National Culture Commission was charged with defining, disseminating and moralising Thai culture. Thainess was no longer merely a narrative: it became a norm of behaviour, regulated by the state. Some habits introduced at the time are said to have survived to the present day, but a precise inventory of them has yet to be drawn up.

The Victory Monument: Thainess in concrete

This programme had its material expression. The Franco-Thai War of 1940–1941 sought to recover 'historical territories' lost to French Indochina. Here the geo-body is at work: a map perceived as amputated becomes a national wound. Bangkok's Victory Monument grew out of it. A study published in a Thai journal of architecture and urban planning reads it as a giving of form to Thai identity, constructed in dialogue with colonial discourse. Its author stresses that the monument also became an awkward reminder of an expansion he describes as 'fascist', since the territories had to be returned after the war. The term is a historiographical characterisation rather than a neutral observation. It nonetheless captures well the difficulty of Thai memory with regard to this period.

A royal and moral Thainess, revived in the 21st century

The reign of Bhumibol and the power of the image

After the war, the centre of gravity shifted. During the long reign of Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX (1946–2016), the monarchy came to occupy an increasingly central place in discourse on identity. A thesis submitted at the University of Sydney shows how photography became an instrument of this construction. It established a visual discourse founded on a 'royal and moral vision' of Thai identity. The author notes, however, that photojournalism was able to produce other, less conformist narratives. Thainess was never a perfectly sealed monopoly.

Building 'ultra-Thai'

The political crises of the 21st century gave the movement fresh impetus. An article published in 2020 in South East Asia Research examines the rise, after the 2006 coup, of an architecture it describes as 'ultra-Thai'. It is marked by an escalation of forms perceived as traditional. Building on the work of Saichol Sattayanurak and Thongchai Winichakul, the author argues that the dominant meaning of Thainess, produced by the state, forms part of the 'structure of violence' of Thai society. In other words, it belongs to an order that ranks and excludes. This is a strong thesis, to be attributed to its author, but it shows that Thainess is also inscribed in the urban landscape.

The twelve values of 2014

After the army seized power in May 2014, the junta, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), launched a 'core values' policy. On 11 July 2014, General Prayut Chan-o-cha set out twelve of them:

• upholding the nation, the religions and the monarchy;
• honesty, sacrifice and patience;
• gratitude towards parents, guardians and teachers;
• the pursuit of knowledge;
• attachment to Thai tradition;
• morality and generosity;
• understanding of democracy with the king as head of state;
• discipline and respect for the law and for one's elders;
• acting in accordance with the king's words;
• the sufficiency economy;
• physical and mental health, and shame of sin according to religious principles;
• putting the public and national interest before personal interest.

From the second semester of the 2014 school year, reciting them became compulsory for pupils, at the flag-raising ceremony or in class. Vajiravudh's trinity heads the list. One detail stands out: the plural 'the religions'. The rest combines filial morality, discipline and an explicit reference to the royal word.

The measure did not go uncriticised. In an editorial of 4 November 2014, the Bangkok Post objected to imposing on everyone values chosen by 'a few generals', with no regard for ideological, cultural and religious differences. The newspaper also noted that these values were included in the official assessment of schools and pupils. The Nation, for its part, spoke of a charter with no constitutional basis, inspired by Buddhist principles and taught right down to nursery level. Researchers measured adherence to these values among some thousand students at four public and private universities in Bangkok in 2015. The mere fact that such a survey was conducted shows that an identity proclaimed from above still has to be gauged within society.

Diversity: blind spot or heart of the debate?

Critical voices within Thailand itself

This is probably the most sensitive question. Thailand is home to many communities with distinct languages, religions and histories. Among them are Malay-speaking Muslim populations in the far South, who call themselves Melayu. There are also the inhabitants of Isan, the North-East, a large proportion of whom speak Lao varieties, Thais of Chinese descent, and numerous groups gathered under the administrative label of 'hill tribes'. Each of these groupings is itself diverse. In the absence of recent, verified demographic data, no figures are given here.

The sharpest criticism comes from Thailand. The historian Saichol Sattayanurak, of Chiang Mai University, devoted a book in 2007 to the construction of dominant thinking on Thainess and to the 'truth' that this thinking itself produced. During a debate reported by the outlet Prachatai, she attributed to Thainess and 'Thaification', dominant for several decades, a share of responsibility for the insurgency affecting the South. The link is debated and must remain attributed to her. It nonetheless chimes with work documenting the conflicts surrounding the construction of Thainess in that region, such as that of the researcher Marte Nilsen, cited in the South East Asia Research article.

In the same debate, Thirayuth Boonmi, a former student leader of the 1970s, offered a more cautious reading. He accepts that Thainess was built through assimilation and integration. But he rejects shortcuts and considers that it is for the various groups to choose what they wish to preserve. The disagreement, then, is not about the constructed nature of national identity, but about its effects and how to move beyond it.

A loss of material diversity

The debate is not confined to politics. An article in the Journal of the Siam Society on the conservation of the mural paintings of a temple in Khon Kaen province, in Isan, draws on Saichol's analyses. It highlights the erosion of the regions' material diversity. When a central model of art and architecture establishes itself as 'the' Thai style, local traditions risk appearing provincial, even mistaken. Phibun's decree banning songs that referred to regional differences followed the same logic of standardisation, in a more brutal form.

How might Thai identity be read?

At the end of this survey, several interpretative keys emerge. None is sufficient on its own.

• Date the discourses. Vajiravudh's Thainess is not Phibun's, nor that of 2014. Each version responds to a specific situation: colonial pressure, war, the Cold War, recent political crises. The useful question is not 'what is Thainess?' but 'who defines it, when and to what end?'.
• Look at the objects. The map, the flag, the Victory Monument, royal photographs and 'ultra-Thai' buildings are all media through which national identity becomes visible. The attentive visitor can read them as documents.
• Distinguish the norm from the practice. The official model does not tell us how Thais live their belonging. That belonging also finds expression through a regional language, a mosque, a village festival or a family's cooking.
• Listen to the regions and the minorities. The South, Isan, the North and the hills are not peripheries of Thai identity, but places where it is negotiated.
• Do not invert the cliché. Denouncing a manufactured essence should not lead to denying the sincere attachment that many feel towards the language, Buddhism or the monarchy. This attachment is a social fact, which the historian must seek to understand rather than to judge.

Understanding khwam pen thai, then, means accepting that two realities must be held together. On one side, a state discourse, powerful and constantly rewritten for more than a century. On the other, a plural society that adopts it, subverts it or contests it. The question remains open: what was a debate among historians in the 1990s has become a public controversy, and the place given to diversity will no doubt be its central issue.

Sources and further reading

1. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, University of Hawai'i Press, 1994.
2. non relevé, The Victory Monument: the Politics of Representations of Thai Identity and Colonial Discourse in Built Forms, Journal of Architectural/Planning Research and Studies (JARS), ThaiJo, non relevé.
3. non relevé, Article, Southeast Asian Studies Vol. 1 No. 3 (pp. 461-485) – religion (satsana) et État en Thaïlande, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, 2012.
4. à vérifier (probablement Charnvit Kasetsiri), Thailand: A Struggle for the Nation (ISBN 9789815011258), ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022.
5. Pacific Atrocities Education, Phibun's Domestic and International Policies, Pacific Atrocities Education, non relevé.
6. Prachatai, Concept of 'Thainess' Denies Diversity in Thai Society, Prachatai English, non relevé.
7. non relevé (thèse), Thainess Framed: Photography and Thai Identity, 1946-2010, University of Sydney, non relevé.
8. Zikri Rahman, The Map, the Geo-body, and the Forging of 'Thainess': Interview with Professor Thongchai Winichakul, No Man's Land (heath.tw), 2019.
9. non relevé, Ultra-Thai Architecture after the 2006 coup d'état, South East Asia Research, vol. 28 n°2 (Taylor & Francis), 2020.
10. non relevé, A Comparison of the Twelve Core Values of Thai People found in Thai University Students, ERIC (ED564141), 2015-2016.
11. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Thainess / Thai cultural mandates / Thai nationalism / Thongchai Winichakul (orientation seulement), Wikipedia, consulté 2025.
12. Bangkok Pundit, Thai students required to recite Prayuth's 12 core values daily, Asian Correspondent, 2014.
13. Bangkok Post (opinion), Students need more than 12 core values, Bangkok Post, 2014.
14. non relevé, Myanmar education offers Thailand a lesson in pluralism, The Nation (Thailand), non relevé.
15. Brereton, Preserving Temple Murals in Isan: Wat Chaisi, Sawatthi Village, Khon Kaen, Journal of the Siam Society, vol. 103, 2015.