I guess I'm conflating the movies and the history . . . In the mid-Nineteenth Century, the king of Thailand saw clearly which way the wind was blowing, and decided that his heir needed all the Western knowledge he could get. So the king hired an English tutor for his children. (IIRC, this is the king who offered to send President Lincoln some war elephants to help with the Civil War.) Along with other political and educational measures, it worked spectacularly: Thailand was never owned by a European power. The entire Western Hemisphere was. The entire continent of Africa was. Most of Asia was owned or utterly controlled (c.f., Opium Wars). But Thailand was never formally owned or controlled. I'm dumbfounded. To this day, Thailand has the best king in the world. It is a constitutional monarchy, but the king is held in such regard that some years ago when there was a very severe sequence of escalating riots, he summoned the commander in chief of the army and the leader of the opposition to an audience together, and told them, "this must stop," . . . and it did.
The schoolteacher's memoirs, which are very interesting, have been made into a series of movies. The first kept in a variety of unhappy and/or ugly sequences of events. The musical t/r/e/a/c/l/e/ version used Thailand mostly for "color" (in the prismatic, not racial sense!). And I probably haven't seen the most recent, though I assume it's no better.
DISCLAIMER: A lot of this is written in shorthand which can be seen as problematic. Please don't conflate idiomatic brevity with ignorance or malice.
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In the mid-Nineteenth Century, the king of Thailand saw clearly which way the wind was blowing, and decided that his heir needed all the Western knowledge he could get. So the king hired an English tutor for his children. (IIRC, this is the king who offered to send President Lincoln some war elephants to help with the Civil War.)
Along with other political and educational measures, it worked spectacularly: Thailand was never owned by a European power. The entire Western Hemisphere was. The entire continent of Africa was. Most of Asia was owned or utterly controlled (c.f., Opium Wars). But Thailand was never formally owned or controlled.
I'm dumbfounded. To this day, Thailand has the best king in the world. It is a constitutional monarchy, but the king is held in such regard that some years ago when there was a very severe sequence of escalating riots, he summoned the commander in chief of the army and the leader of the opposition to an audience together, and told them, "this must stop," . . . and it did.
The schoolteacher's memoirs, which are very interesting, have been made into a series of movies. The first kept in a variety of unhappy and/or ugly sequences of events.
The musical t/r/e/a/c/l/e/ version used Thailand mostly for "color" (in the prismatic, not racial sense!). And I probably haven't seen the most recent, though I assume it's no better.
DISCLAIMER: A lot of this is written in shorthand which can be seen as problematic. Please don't conflate idiomatic brevity with ignorance or malice.