To picture Thailand's shape, imagine a big cardboard box with a broken bulging bottom. On top of it, imagine a smaller box--about half the large one's width--sitting precarious off to the left, tilting, maybe because of the weakoned support below. Now to these two boxes, add a long tail emerging from the bottom left and drooping in a slight curve, concave to the right.
Between the bulge in the bottom and the tail is the mouth of the Chao Praya. Straight north runs a fertile agricultural valley ending about at the top box. The right hand side of the big box--excepting the bulge--is a plateau divided from the central valley and the coast by low mountains. The Mekong(2) flows along much of the north and east of the large box, forming much of the Laotian border. The Mun flows across the southern half of the plateau and enters the Mekong just where it departs eastward into southwestern Laos. The Chi and its feeders drain the northern half of the plateau before adding their waters to the Mun.
Low mountains fill the little box and the widest side of the big one. The northwest is drained by the headwaters of the Chao Praya, such as the Ping. The Mae Klong system emerges from the west to enter the Gulf of Thailand not far west of the Chao Praya.
The tail is Thailand's piece of the tropically forested Malay Peninsula.(3) It owns only the eastern half until about ten degrees north, then all of it until it begins to widen at about six degrees north. Near the peninsula are several islands, including Phuket in the Andaman Sea and Samui in the Gulf of Thailand.
Thailand is no more linguistically than physiographically unified. Thai speakers are less than four in ten, and include most people in the central lowlands and some further north. Residents of the northeast plateau speak Lao, though it is not called that on this side of the Mekong.(4) They comprise more than one in three. Around one in ten speak Northern (or Lanna) Thai(5), all in the northwest. Slightly less speak Southern (or Pak) Thai, and these share the peninsula with Malay speakers who make up about one twentieth of the nation.
Nineteen in every twenty are Buddhists; the rest consists of several religions.
Krung Thep(6), the capital, near the Chao Praya's mouth, has a metropolitan area approaching ten million. It is famed for canals, the Grand Palace and Buddhist temples.
Speakers of Tai languages probably arrived here from southeast China in the twelfth century and rapidly becomae dominant, though divided into the northwest, the northeast and the central lowlands: today's major linguistic divisions.
Before this Austro-Asiatic languages--like today's Mon and Khmer--had most likely been spoken for thousands of years in the area and beyond it. By the end of the seventh century C.E., one of them, Mon, was spoken along the lower Chao Praya, and Khmer was used in the northeast. Both were overwhelmed by Tai migrations.
Both Mon and Khmer cultures had, by the seventh century, been Indianized: acquiring Buddhism and aspects of Hinduism, as well as a script and legal codes from the sub-continent. This influence also extended down the peninsula.
It was no later than this same century that Malay, an Austronesian language expanded northward up the peninsula into the Kra Isthmus.
west and northwest
northeast and east
southeast
south of the non-peninsular nation, and east of the Kra Isthmus.
south of the Kra Isthmus
west of the Kra Isthmus
(1) Officially Prathet Thai; previously Siam.
(2) Khong in Thai.
(3) The narrow part of this peninsula, separating the Andaman Sea from the Gulf of Thailand, is the Kra Isthmus.
(4) It is called Northeastern Thai or Isan. Thai and Lao belong to the East Central Tai Group, a majority.
(5) Also called Tai Yuan.
(6) It is sometimes loosely translated as City of the Angels, and is often known by its Chinese name, Bangkok.