Thailand Tuttle Travel Pack. Jim Algie

      Thais refer to the country’s shape as an “axe”, the long handle formed by the Kra Isthmus with the Gulf of Thailand on one side and the Andaman Sea on the other. On the western flank is Myanmar, with Cambodia and Laos to the east. The head of the axe is serrated by the mountains of the “Golden Triangle” where Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar merge.

      Occupying a total of 514,000 square kilometers, Thailand is twice the size of England. It has six regions. The mountainous highlands of the north are home to many of the country’s hilltribe minorities. This region is irrigated by the Wang, Ping, Yom and Nan Rivers, which are tributaries of the mighty, long Chao Phaya River that also bisects Bangkok.

      In the northeast is the Khorat Plateau of deciduous and evergreen forests. The central plains, known as the country’s “rice bowl”, are endowed with fecund farmlands. And extending into Cambodia are the South east Uplands that consist of moist evergreen forest. In contrast, the Tenasserim Hills, covered with semi-evergreen forests at higher altitudes, run alongside the border with Burma all the way down to the Kra Isthmus in the south.

      In the multi-millennium-spanning epic that is Thai history, many ethnic groups—the Tai, Mons, Khmers, Indians and Europeans—have all contributed substantial chapters to this ongoing saga. From Southern China came the Tai people around AD 1100. From the Mons and Khmers came major advancements in language, art and architecture. From India came Buddhism. And from the Chinese immigrants came commercial acumen and family-first values.

      The arrival of Buddhist missionaries from India around the second or third century BC is nebulous. More certain is that Buddhism began to spread during the Dvaravati period (6th–13th centuries AD), a loose configuration of city-states.

      As in most of Southeast Asia, Theravada Buddhism is the kingdom’s main form of spiritual solace (though it’s been influenced by so many different strains of Brahmanism, Hinduism, shamanism and animism that it’s almost a religion unto itself). Theravadan Buddhists pride themselves on a fundamentalist interpretation of the canon. Many of the loan words from Sanskrit and Pali, which defined the Buddhist scriptures, then became the linguistic roots of the tonal Thai tongue.

      Smaller groups of Christians, Hindus, Taoists, Sikhs and Muslims coexist in relative peace except for the three southern provinces abutting Malaysia (Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat) where a spate of bombings and beheadings has left a trail of murder and carnage since 2004.