Thai Heritage

Spirit houses

A spirit house is a dedicated structure to honor the spirit guardians of the land. It is a place to tune into the present moment and pay respect to Mother Earth and the way of connecting to the land since early beginnings and different kinds of spirit houses can be found all over Asia.

Chinese Antique table and chairs

Thai Chinese consist of people of full or partial Chinese ancestry – particularly Han Chinese. Thailand is home to the largest overseas Chinese community in the world with a population of approximately nine million people, it is also the oldest, most prominent, and best integrated overseas Chinese community. Slightly more than half of the ethnic Chinese population in Thailand trace their ancestry to eastern Guangdong Province. This is evidenced by the prevalence of the Minnan Chaozhou dialect among the Chinese in Thailand. A minority trace their ancestry to Hakka and Hainanese immigrants.The Thai Chinese have been deeply ingrained into all elements of Thai society over the past 200 years. The present Thai royal family, the Chakri Dynasty, was founded by King Rama I who himself was partly Chinese. His predecessor, King Taksin of the Thonburi Dynasty, was the son of a Chinese immigrant from Guangdong Province and a Thai mother. With the highly successful integration of historic Chinese immigrant communities throughout Thailand, a significant number of Thai Chinese are the descendants of intermarriages between Chinese immigrants and native Thais.

Terracotta

Ayutthaya terracotta : One of the oldest province in Thailand is Ayutthaya (full name Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, Thai: พระนครศรีอยุธยา, Located in the valley of the Chao Phraya River, the city was founded in 1350 by King U Thong, who went there to escape a smallpox outbreak in Lop Buri and proclaimed it the capital of his kingdom, often referred to as the Ayutthaya kingdom or Siam. Ayutthaya became the second Siamese capital after Sukhothai. It is estimated that Ayutthaya by the year 1600 CE had a population of about 300,000, with the population perhaps reaching 1,000,000 around 1700 CE, making it one of the world's largest cities at that time, when it was sometimes known as the "Venice of the East".In 1767, the city was destroyed by the Burmese army, resulting in the collapse of the kingdom. The ruins of the old city are preserved in the Ayutthaya historical park, which is recognized internationally as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Thai Xylophone

Traditional Thai Xylophone (Thai music instrument).