Thailand

The only Southeast Asian land never colonised — a kingdom that bent so as not to break.

Thailand is the modern heir of a succession of Tai kingdoms that arose on the Chao Phraya plain amid older Mon and Khmer civilisations. The conventional national story begins with Sukhothai in 1238 and runs through the long, cosmopolitan reign of Ayutthaya (1351–1767), the dynasty's destruction by Burmese armies, the swift reunification under Taksin, and the foundation of the Chakri dynasty and Bangkok in 1782. Alone in Southeast Asia, the kingdom — known to the world as Siam — preserved its independence through the age of European empire, surviving as a buffer between British Burma and French Indochina while kings Mongkut and Chulalongkorn modernised the state from within. A bloodless revolution in 1932 turned the absolute monarchy into a constitutional one, the country was renamed Thailand in 1939, and the decades since have followed a turbulent cycle of elected governments and military coups beneath a deeply revered crown.