[Michaelnewerb]

This is quite a can of worms you've opened up, Stacker, and it's clearly an issue that has affected you personally. I can remember standing on the bank of the Mekhong River at Tat Phanom for the "Lao market day", watching a stream of longtail boats cross the river from Laos and back, bringing goods in both directions. The Thai border guards checked no one. It didn't feel like an international border. Isaan is a fascinating place, on many levels.

Quote[/b] ]So is anyone going to have a comment on how this could have come about? Is it simply the class distinction? If so why do these Thai people feel they are any better? What happened?

I think it's necessary to go back to the history of the Kingdom of Ayutthaya and the subsequent transition to the early Chakri Dynasty to help understand how things developed. During the Ayutthaya period (1569-1767), most of the Korat Plateau (Northeast Thailand and Southern Laos) as well as Laos up to just past Luang Prabang was part of the Kingdom of Lan Sang.

I mention Lan Sang so that the following quote will make sense. Also, the reference to the "Tai" people is to the general linguistic and cultural group that eventually became the Thai people of modern times. So "Tai" includes Lan Sang, Ayutthaya (Ayudhya), and some others, as distinct from groups like the Mon, Khmer, and Burmese. The following paragraph is from Thailand: A Short History by David K. Wyatt (chapter 5, pages 99-100 of the softcover edition).

Quote[/b] ]Of all the institutions that needed to be fashioned out of the chaos of the late sixteenth century, an effective military organization was especially important in order to defeat the Burmese. The challenge Burma posed to Tai survival was sufficiently strong to spur quick action, yet also sufficiently distant and intermittent to allow Ayudhya and Lan Sang time to mobilize their scattered resources and develop new leadership. Two hundred years later, in the 1760s, the Tai world again was laid waste by Burmese armies, but it was not because Ayudhya and Lan Sang had stagnated in the interim. On the contrary, both states had developed and matured, and had experienced golden ages that subsequent generations would remember with pride. They did, however, develop differently. Uniquely in the Tai world, Ayudhya now underwent important social change that made its governing elite much more cosmopolitan than their Lao and Tai Yuan couterparts, that made them, indeed, the nucleus for what ultimately would become a national elite.