Tai Peoples and Theirs Languages: A Preliminary ... - Khamkoo

enumerated chronologically (the oldest theory first) in the following. Again I must be
cautious that all of these are still theories, not proven facts.
1. The Altaic homeland This theory may be recorded as one of the most unlikely ideas
of the century, yet it had won the official sanction of the Thai government until very
recently. Even today there are still some diehard believers who consider those who
question this theory unpatriotic. How is it that locating the homeland of the Tai speaking
people at the foot of the Altai mountains amounts to patriotism? We might understand
this attitude if we put this theory into the time-frame when it was first conceived. In the
later years of the reign of King Rama VI (AD.1910-1926) and in the early years of King
Rama VII (AD.1926-1934), there was a strong movement of nationalism in Thailand and
particularly an anti-sinitic movement. King Rama VI wrote an essay in which he called
the Chinese “the Oriental Jew” and in many plays that he wrote he depicted Chinese men
as “bad guys” or “spies of the (some unspecified) enemy”. The idea underneath the Altaic
homeland theory was that the Thai people, as a nation, had suffered much under the hands
of the Chinese intruders who plundered our land incessantly and forced us to move down
a long way from the Altai mountains in Mongolia to the present site of Thailand. The
crux of this theory is that at present the Thai is at the last ditch from where there will be
no possible retreat: further steps will put the Thai people into the Gulf of Thailand to be
swept out into the Pacific ocean. When we understand the idea underneath the Altai
theory, it will not be difficult to understand why the government sponsored lectures
among the village-scouts, in the campaign against the communist insurgents a decade
ago. We used to proclaim the theory about the Altai origin of the Thai people. It is
unbelievable that they stated it as a sacred-fact, not a possible theory. Who was
responsible for putting forth this theory? It would be difficult to pinpoint the originator; as
it has been said above, the theory reflected the ideas prevalent among educated Thais in
the early part of this century. However, the man who put it forth in writing is Khun
Vichit-Matra, a jurist and man-of-letters. His book entitled Lak Thai (literal translation is
Thai Pillar), written under his penname “Kancanakaphan”, won the Thai government
award as the best essay of the year in 1928 AD. In this book, the Altaic homeland of the
Tai-speaking people was described and the time frame was speculated at 7,000 years ago.
As it reflected the ideas of the period so it caught on rapidly. In 1937, the Royal Survey
Department of the Ministry of Defense printed a map of the historical movements of the
Tai-speaking people depicting the starting point of the journey to be the Altai mountains.
The Altaic idea and the map, showing an elephant moving down along a vertical line
from the Altai mountains, and following the longitude of 100˚ across the Kansu and
Szechuan provinces of China to Yunnan, and finally to Thailand, were repeated in many
books that followed Khun Vichit-Matra’s Lak Thai, such as in Phra Barihan-Thepthani’s
Prawat Chat Thai (History of the Thai Nation) which was printed as late as A.D. 1968
(though the manuscript was written much earlier as Phra Barihan-Thepthani is a
contemporary of Khun Vichit-Matra). Some dissenting voices were raised, nevertheless,
among Khun Vichit-Matra’s own contemporaries, notably Phya Kosakorn-Vicarn; in the
Silpakorn Journal in 1948 A.D. He questioned the theory which, as he said, was based on
such little thing as the likeness of the names Altai and the Tai people. However,
dissenting voices have been feeble for many years, at least among the Thais. It awaited
the arrival of western anthropologists, who could point out the obvious without suffering
202
Tai Peoples and Their Languages: A Preliminary Observation