Coronation Day

I’m a little late, since it’s just past midnight as I sit down to type this, but it’s been a fairly full day.

Monday was a holiday for me here in Bangkok; it was Coronation Day. I spent the day with a Thai girl I know. She came over last night and slept at my place. I woke up fairly early, but she (being a Thai girl) snoozed until after 1 p.m. I spent the morning trolling through the internet planning a 6-day holiday in Northern Thailand that I have coming up in about a month. I was finalizing the air, hotel and tour info.

The girl who was napping in my bed is coming up for 5 of those 6 days, so when she finally woke up, I reviewed the plans, then paid for her air ticket & hotel online, then asked her to call and book a three day trekking tour for the two of us.

After that we went to lunch, then shopping and then the movies. There wasn’t a lot to choose from at the cinema, so we went to see Iron Man… my second time in two days. I didn’t mind – in fact it may have been better the second time around. With the limited selection of English language programming, I’m accustomed to seeing the same movies again and again on my cable channel. I don’t know why, but the tickets today were 50 baht cheaper than the identical tickets yesterday. Hmmmm?

Last night, before drifting off to sleep, my friend asked me to explain Cinco de Mayo to her. I assumed that it was the Mexican Independence Day, but I wasn’t sure, so I checked Wikipedia (do you get the feeling I spend a lot of time on that site?). Here’s what it said about the 5th of May in Mexico:

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for “5th of May”) is a regional holiday in Mexico, primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla. It is not an obligatory federal holiday. The holiday commemorates an initial victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín over French forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. The date is observed in the United States and other locations around the world as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride.

A common misconception in the United States is that Cinco de Mayo is Mexico’s Independence Day; Mexico’s Independence Day is actually September 16 (dieciséis de septiembre in Spanish), which is the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico.

Although the Mexican army was victorious over the French at Puebla, the victory only delayed the French invasion of Mexico City; a year later, the French occupied Mexico.

So there you go; I fell prey to a common misconception in the US. Not such a terrible thing, I guess, but I hate being so predictably wrong about something that is so easy to learn about.

Telling my friend about Cinco de Mayo made me think about the facts that I had recently learned about Thailand’s Victory Monument… about the fact that it was erected to celebrate the Thai victory over the French in 1941 that resulted in France returning land to Thailand. I remembered that Thailand had been forced to give the land back to the French just four years later in 1946.

It seemed that in both cases (Cinco de Mayo and Victory Monument) the French had the last laugh, although the victory celebrations of the Mexicans and Thais were undiminished. To paraphrase the Roman army commander in the movie Gladiator, ‘people should know when they’re beaten’.

The explanation of Cinco de Mayo, and relating it to the story of Victory Monument, led me to explain to my friend about how Thailand used to be much larger in size, and how approximately 120 years ago French gunboats threatened Bangkok, winning all the land East of the Mekong River for France from King Rama V. That land, today, makes up most of the country of Laos.

My Thai friend didn’t know any of it. She had no idea that three or four generations ago, Laos was actually part of Thailand. She knew nothing about the battle and events that led to the erection of Victory Monument. She seemed interested, but generally unconcerned that such large parts of her country’s history could remain outside her knowledge.

She was a little confused about my explanation that I initially thought Cinco de Mayo was Mexican Independence Day. She was confused because she didn’t know what “independence day” referred to. This led me to launch into an explanation of colonialism as a general concept, and British colonialism as a specific idea. (Here it helped that she had watched the movie Braveheart with me before). She quickly understood the idea of Independence Day, and seemed quite content that Thailand had no real equivalent.

She was genuinely amazed at the idea of transportation of prisoners to Australia, and she had no idea that America had originally been a group of English colonies. I was really starting to enjoy my role as lecturer when I finally realized that I was talking to a girl who had fallen asleep five or ten minutes earlier.

When I had first gone looking on Wikipedia for the information in Cinco de Mayo I had no idea of the correct spelling, and had found it by simply entering ‘5 May’ in the search box.

I got a list of important events that had occurred on this date through history. In 1260 Kublai Khan became the ruler of the Mongol Empire, in 1891 Carnagie Hall had it’s grand opening with Tchaikovsky as the guest conductor and in 1904 Cy Young of the Boston Americans threw a perfect game. In 1920 Sacco & Vanzetti were arrested and accused of robbery and murder, and five years later John T. Scopes was served an arrest warrant for teaching the theory of evolution in the great state of Tennessee. In 1941 Emporor Haile Selassie returned to Ethiopia, now commemorated at Liberation Day.

And then I spotted it. 1950.

Bhumibol Adulyadej was crowned the ninth King of the Chakri dynasty in Thailand. Coronation day — the reason I didn’t have to get up early this morning and go out to work.

I clicked on the link to see what Wiki had to say about the King of Thailand. We hear so much about him here in Thailand that it’s hard to find anything different to talk about.  There was plenty of information there to choose from, but what interesting tidbit could I find that readers wouldn’t already know about?

The photo on Wiki seemed particularly unflattering, as it showed His Majesty straight on, highlighting the fact that his eyes do not both look the same way at the same time. It occurred to me that many people living outside of Thailand might not be aware that the King has only one eye.

So that is my factoid for Coronation Day. Let me again quote Wiki on the event that led to the King’s disfigurement:

On October 4, 1948, while Bhumibol was driving a Fiat Topolino on the Geneva-Lausanne highway, he collided into the rear of a braking truck 10 km outside of Lausanne. He hurt his back and incurred cuts on his face that cost him sight in his right eye. He subsequently wore an ocular prosthetic.

As far as I know, the term ‘ocular prosthetic’ means ‘glass eye’. In case you’ve never before seen a photo of the King that shows his glass eye, let me show you the one from the Wiki page that made me go looking for this entry.

The woman who would later become his wife and the Queen of Thailand, Sirikit, visited him in the hospital daily following the accident. They were married less than a year later.

Sixty years on, they are still married and Thailand has enjoyed six decades of relative peace and prosperity in a changing world.

Happy Coronation Day!