Art and Culture

The Thais have their own culture (including literature, drama, architecture, music, painting, sculpture, folk dances and many handicrafts), their own language, their own cuisine, their own martial arts and their own beliefs. Though many fortuitous Indian and Chinese influences partially had a hold upon Thai culture in many aspects, it is the mixture of these and Thai eclecticism that founded its idiosyncratic culture.

Towards the end of the 19th century, a passion for the outward trappings of Western culture manifested itself in Thailand. However, the more refined Thai arts and crafts, those elegant accessories and ceremonial objects created for use in royal palaces, aristocratic homes and Buddhist temples, were not entirely suppressed by the new found taste for Western goods. Such items, displaying the highest levels of skill, had been produced in the first independent Thai capital of Sukhothai and continued through the 400-year rule of Ayutthaya and into the Rattanakosin, or Bangkok,period. They and their creators were known as "chang”, which roughly means craft or craftsmen. Production of such refined crafts increased enormously in the Ayutthaya period. To supply these needs, a large body of changs evolved, passing their specialised skills down from master to apprentice and eventually forming a hierarchy of their own. They were never regarded as artists in the Western sense but rather as superior manual labourers and, even in early Bangkok, the names of only a handful of gifted mural painters, goldsmiths and wood carvers were preserved for posterity, but they formed a significant segment of Ayutthayan society and played a major role in its cultural development. It seems probable that artisans who worked on royal commissions were grouped by category as they were in the early Bangkok period. Some of these categories overlapped, and some of the Thai terms for them that have been passed down through historical chronicles are obscure. For the sake of convenience, however, they are usually divided into ten classic crafts, or chang sip moo:
(1) Drawing (which includes lacquer painters, muralists, manuscript illustrators, engravers and draughtsmen); '
(2) Engraving (which includesornamental, architectural and sculptural woodcarvers, precious metal inlayers, jewelers and seal engravers);
(3) Turning (lathe workers, carpenters and joiners, ivory carvers and cabinet workers, often working to gether with other specialists);
(4) Sculpting (not in stone, as for Buddha images, but rather decorative fruit and vegetable carvers and makers of banana-leaf items used for ceremonies);
(5) Modelling (bronze casters,dance mask and puppet makers,stucco and clay figure modellers);
(6) Figuring (makers of animal and mythological figures, dummies,possibly also puppets and masks);
(7) Moulding (makers of clay and beeswax moulds, part of the work of bronze and metal casting);
(8) Plastering (plaster craftsmen,bricklayers, makers of Buddha images out of brick, plaster and stucco);
(9) Lacquering (involves the finishing of a variety of crafts, including lacquerwork, glass mosaic,mother-of—pearl inlay, and gilding);
(10) Beating (metal beaters,closely related to, but distinct from, makers of monks’ bowls, jewellery and small Buddha images).