Bangkok (Lonely Planet) - Andrew Burke [21]
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ARCHITECTURAL ETHICS
Thailand has made numerous admirable efforts to preserve historic religious architecture, from venerable old stupas to ancient temple compounds. The Department of Fine Arts in fact enforces various legislation that makes it a crime to destroy or modify such monuments, and even structures found on private lands are protected.
On the other hand, Thailand has less to be proud of in terms of preserving secular civil architecture such as old government offices and shophouses. Only a few of Bangkok’s Ratanakosin and Asian Deco buildings have been preserved, along with a handful of private mansions and shophouses, but typically only because the owners of these buildings took the initiative to do so. Thailand has little legislation in place to protect historic buildings or neighbourhoods, and distinctive early Bangkok architecture is disappearing fast, often to be replaced by plain cement, steel and glass structures of little historic or artistic value. For an illustrated list of buildings in Thailand that have received government protection, seek out the coffee-table book 174 Architectural Heritage in Thailand (Saowalak Phongsatha Posayanan/Siam Architect Society, 2004).
Many other countries around the world have regulations that allow the registration of historic homes, and whole neighbourhoods can be designated as national monuments. In neighbouring Laos, Unesco has helped to preserve the charming Lao-French architecture of Luang Prabang by designating the city as a World Heritage Site.
While Bangkok has gone so far in the direction of modern development that it will never recover much of the charm of its 18th- to early 20th-century architecture, if the city or nation doesn’t take steps soon to preserve historic secular architecture, there will be nothing left but an internationally homogenous hodge-podge of styles.
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LITERATURE
Classical
The written word has a long history in Thailand, dating back to the 11th or 12th centuries when the first Thai script was fashioned from an older Mon alphabet. Sukhothai king Phaya Lithai is thought to have composed the first work of Thai literature in 1345. This was Traiphum Phra Ruang, a treatise that described the three realms of existence according to Hindu-Buddhist cosmology. According to contemporary scholars, this work and its symbolism continues to have considerable influence on Thailand’s art and culture.
Of all classical Thai literature, however, the Ramakian is the most pervasive and influential. Its Indian precursor – the Ramayana – came to Thailand with the Khmers 900 years ago, first appearing as stone reliefs on Prasat Hin Phimai and other Angkor temples in the northeast. Eventually, Thailand developed its own version of the epic, which was first written during the reign of Rama I. This version contains 60,000 stanzas and is a quarter again longer than the Sanskrit original.
The 30,000-line Phra Aphaimani, composed by poet Sunthorn Phu in the late 18th century, is Thailand’s most famous classical literary work. Like many of its epic predecessors around the world, it tells the story of an exiled prince who must triumph in an odyssey of love and war before returning to his kingdom.
During the Ayuthaya period, Thailand developed a classical poetic tradition based on five types of verse – chăn, gàhp, klong, glorn and râi. Each form uses a complex set of rules to regulate metre, rhyming patterns and number of syllables. During the political upheavals of the 1970s, several Thai newspaper editors, most notably Kukrit Pramoj, composed lightly disguised political commentary in glorn verse. Modern Thai poets seldom use the classical forms, preferring to compose in blank verse or