What I Started Looking Into And Could Not Stop
I have spent twenty years in Thailand. My wife is from the north, but I have travelled the country properly, including the northeast, the region the Thais call Isan. Twenty provinces of rolling rice country between the Mekong River and the Phetchabun Mountains, a region that is regularly described in Thai tourism material as the country’s “traditional heart” and as the soul of “real” Thailand.
And yet the more I looked at it, the more I noticed something nobody who lives in Bangkok or Chiang Mai ever talks about openly. The people of Isan are not, in any honest historical sense, Thai. They are Lao. The food is Lao food. The language is Lao language. The folk traditions, the music, the religious practice, the silk weaving, the rice cultivation patterns, the temple architecture in the older villages, all of it is Lao, not Thai. The thirty per cent of Thailand’s population that lives in the northeast is, by ethnic origin, language, and cultural lineage, the people whose ancestors lived in the Lao Kingdom of Lan Xang for centuries before the Siamese state ever drew a border around them.
The Thai state has spent the last hundred and twenty years pretending otherwise. The Thai school system teaches Isan children that they are Thai. The Thai census refuses to record ethnicity. The Thai government, at the turn of the twentieth century, formally banned the word “Lao” from official use in describing the people of the northeast. The region was renamed “Isan”, which is simply a Thai-language word meaning “north-east”, and the people were reclassified as “Northeastern Thais”, as if the question of their ethnic origin had been answered by an act of government clerical work.
It has not been. The people are still Lao. They know they are Lao. The wider world’s anthropologists and linguists know they are Lao. Twenty-two million people in northeastern Thailand are, by every objective measure, ethnically Lao. They are the largest unrecognised transboundary ethnic group in mainland Southeast Asia. And the story of how they ended up inside Thailand instead of inside Laos is one of the most under-told stories of nineteenth-century colonial history, because the colonialism in question was not European. It was Thai.
I want to walk through what I have found.
The Lao Kingdom That Used To Exist
The region we now call Isan was, for most of recorded history, part of the Lao world. The Lao kingdom of Lan Xang, which translates as “the kingdom of a million elephants”, was founded in 1353 and at its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries covered a vast area of mainland Southeast Asia including most of modern Laos, the entirety of what is now northeastern Thailand, parts of northern Cambodia, and parts of southern Yunnan. The capital was Luang Prabang and later Vientiane. The kingdom shared the same Lao language, the same Theravada Buddhist tradition, the same court culture, and the same agricultural rhythm across the entire territory. The Mekong River was not a border between two peoples. The Mekong was the spine of one people, running through the centre of their kingdom from north to south.
In 1707, Lan Xang fragmented into three rival kingdoms following a succession dispute. The Kingdom of Vientiane in the centre. The Kingdom of Luang Prabang in the north. The Kingdom of Champasak in the south. The fragmentation made each of the successor kingdoms structurally weaker than the unified Lan Xang had been. The neighbouring Siamese state, which had been consolidating power under the Ayutthaya and later Rattanakosin kingdoms based in the Chao Phraya valley to the west, took advantage of the fragmentation. By the late eighteenth century, all three Lao successor kingdoms had been forced into vassal status under Siam. They paid tribute. They received Siamese envoys. Their kings sat under the political authority of the Siamese court in Bangkok. But they remained, internally, Lao kingdoms with Lao people and Lao culture.
That arrangement lasted approximately a hundred years.
The Rebellion That Burned Vientiane
In 1826, the king of Vientiane, Chao Anouvong, attempted to restore the independent Lao kingdom of Lan Xang by rebelling against Siamese suzerainty. He had genuine reasons. Forced labour corps of Lao men had been ill-treated by Siamese officials. Cultural artefacts, including the Emerald Buddha (which had originally been brought to Vientiane from Chiang Mai), had been carried off to Bangkok. Lao families relocated to Saraburi in central Siam during earlier conflicts had not been returned to their homes. Anouvong’s son and viceroy of Champasak, Nyô, joined the rebellion alongside Anouvong’s other sons Tissa and Ngao.
In January 1827, the Lao armies of Vientiane and Champasak marched south and west across the Khorat Plateau, advancing as far as Saraburi, just three days’ march from Bangkok itself. They captured the Siamese stronghold of Nakhon Ratchasima, the town the Thais call Korat. The expectation was that the Lao people of the Khorat Plateau, who had lived under Siamese tribute for a century but remained ethnically and linguistically Lao, would rise up alongside Anouvong to throw off Siamese control and reunify with the Lao kingdoms across the Mekong.
The expectation was wrong. The Lao communities on the Khorat Plateau, by this point, were divided. Some supported Anouvong. Others stayed neutral. Some collaborated with the Siamese counterattack. The Siamese under King Rama III mounted a massive counter-offensive, rolled the Lao forces back, and then continued north of the Mekong into Vientiane itself.
What happened next was the central event of the entire Isan story.
The Siamese armies destroyed Vientiane in 1828. They burned the city. They sacked the temples. They executed or enslaved the population they could capture. They tore down the palaces, the religious sites, and the administrative buildings of the Lao kingdom systematically. The city was reduced to ruins so completely that when French explorers arrived later in the nineteenth century, they described Vientiane as having been effectively erased from the map.
Chao Anouvong was captured. He was taken in chains to Bangkok. He was placed in an iron cage and publicly displayed in the city as the broken last king of the Lao kingdom. He died in that cage in 1829. His son Nyô was also taken to Bangkok, where he died trying to escape from confinement in 1828. The Lao monarchy that had ruled the territory for over four hundred years was, in a single coordinated military operation, eliminated.
And then came the part that nobody outside specialist academic circles ever talks about.
The Forced Population Transfer That Built Modern Isan
After the destruction of Vientiane, the Siamese state systematically moved the Lao population that had lived on the east bank of the Mekong River, the Vientiane side, to the west bank of the Mekong, the Siamese-controlled side. The transfer was not a refugee flow. It was a deliberate state policy of demographic relocation. The records describe families being moved, villages being relocated, communities being broken up and resettled. The Lao population that had lived on the east bank of the Mekong was depopulated. The Lao population on the west bank was reinforced by the new arrivals.
The strategic logic was simple. The Siamese wanted the Lao population to live inside Siamese-controlled territory where they could be administered, taxed, and conscripted, rather than across the river where they could potentially organise another rebellion. The Mekong River, which had been the spine of the Lao world for five centuries, was repositioned by Siamese policy as the western edge of an emptied Lao territory and the eastern edge of a Siamese province being populated by relocated Lao families.
The descendants of those relocated families are the Lao Isan population of northeastern Thailand today. They are not, as the modern Thai state likes to imply, simply ethnic Thais who happen to live in a region with a slightly different dialect. They are the descendants of Lao families that were physically moved across the Mekong by the Siamese state in the late 1820s, settled in territory that the Siamese state had separated from the Lao kingdom by the simple act of destroying the kingdom’s capital and executing its king.
The mass forced population transfers continued through the rest of the nineteenth century in various waves. By the 1880s, the Lao population on the west bank of the Mekong substantially outnumbered the Lao population on the east bank. The region that we now call Isan had been demographically built by Siamese state policy out of forcibly relocated Lao families.
The French Border And The Final Severance
The fate of the rest of the Lao territory was then sealed by a colonial border that the Lao people themselves had no say in.
In the late nineteenth century, the French were expanding their control across Indochina from a base in Vietnam. The French were interested in the territory east of the Mekong, including what remained of the Lao kingdoms of Luang Prabang and the remnants of Vientiane and Champasak. The Siamese, having destroyed the central Lao kingdom in the 1820s, were unable to resist the French pressure half a century later. A series of Franco-Siamese treaties between 1893 and 1907 established the Mekong River as the border between French Indochina (which would later become Laos) and Siam (which would later become Thailand).
The border was set down the middle of the river. The Lao people on the east bank, the people whose ancestors had been left in the depopulated remnant of the old Vientiane kingdom, became colonial subjects of France. The Lao people on the west bank, the people whose families had been forcibly relocated by Siam half a century earlier, were now formally part of Siamese territory. The same people, the same language, the same villages on opposite sides of a river that had been chosen as a border for the convenience of two competing colonial powers, neither of which was Lao.
That is when the Lao identity of the people on the western bank, the people we now call Isan, was formally locked inside the borders of what would later become Thailand. They had been forcibly relocated to that bank by Siamese policy. They had been separated from their eastern-bank relatives by a French colonial border. And they were, from that moment, residents of a country that would spend the next century trying to convince them they were not Lao at all.
The Thaification Programme That Followed
What the Siamese state did next was the part of the story that the modern Thai government does not want examined.
Starting in the reign of King Rama V in the late nineteenth century and accelerating through the early twentieth century, the Siamese (and later Thai) state implemented a systematic programme of cultural assimilation aimed at the Lao population of the northeast. The programme had several explicit components.
First, the name. In 1890, the Siamese government formally renamed the northeastern region. The word “Lao” was banned from official use. The new official name was “Isan”, a Thai word simply meaning “northeast”, which carries no ethnic content. The administrative re-labelling erased, in a single bureaucratic act, the Lao identity of the entire region.
Second, the people. The 1904 Siamese census listed the Lao population of the northeast as “Thai” rather than as Lao. From that moment forward, official Thai data has not recorded the Lao population as a distinct ethnic group. The Thai government to this day refuses to record ethnicity in the census. The Lao population of the northeast simply disappeared from the administrative record by being relabelled as Thai.
Third, the language. Strict assimilatory laws in the 1930s under Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram (Phibun) prohibited the use of Lao in official settings, in education, and in publishing. Thai-language education was made compulsory across the northeast. The Lao language survived in the region only because it was so widely spoken in everyday life that the state could not suppress it entirely, but it was reduced to an informal, domestic register, never an official or educational one. To this day, the Isan dialect of Lao has no formal role in Thai schools, government, or media. Education is conducted entirely in central Thai. The Lao language of twenty-two million Thai citizens has no official status in the country they live in.
Fourth, the politicians. Lao Isan politicians who attempted to organise the region’s distinctive interests have, throughout Thai history, met with state hostility. In the 1940s, several prominent Isan-identified politicians who sought to represent the region’s specific interests were murdered by the Thai state. The 1947 killing of four Isan MPs by the Thai police remains one of the most chilling, and most underreported, episodes in Thai political history. The Isan region has, ever since, produced relatively few political figures of national stature despite making up almost thirty per cent of the population. The political class of Thailand has been overwhelmingly central Thai, with the Lao majority of the northeast represented largely by figures who first had to demonstrate their loyalty to the central Thai national identity before being allowed political prominence.
Fifth, the economy. The Lao Isan region has been the poorest region of Thailand for the entire period of integration into the Thai state. The Thai government’s development policy has, in the words of one academic study I have seen, “drained the countryside like conquered provinces” to fund Bangkok and the central plains. The northeast has the highest rates of rural poverty, the highest engagement in the informal economy, the lowest education attainment, and the highest rates of internal migration to Bangkok for low-paid work. The Lao Isan population is, in effect, the agricultural and domestic labour reserve of the central Thai economy, performing the work that central Thais would not do, on land that pays them less than land in the central plains, while the wealth their work produces flows toward Bangkok.
What This Means For The Lao Identity Today
The twenty-two million Lao Isan people in Thailand today are aware of their Lao heritage. They speak Lao at home. They eat Lao food (the famous “Thai” cuisine that Western tourists love, the sticky rice, the green papaya salad, the grilled chicken, the larb, almost all of it is actually Lao food from the northeast). They listen to Lao music (mor lam, which has entered the Thai national mainstream in commodified form but originates entirely from the Lao tradition). They maintain Lao folk religious practices alongside Theravada Buddhism. They marry within their region in large numbers. They know which side of the family came from Vientiane and which side from Champasak. The Lao identity has survived in the region despite a century of Thaification, because it is too deeply embedded in daily life to be erased by administrative decree.
But the legal and political identity has been comprehensively suppressed. The Lao language has no official status. The Lao ethnicity has no official recognition. The Lao history of the region is not taught in Thai schools. The Lao kingdom of Lan Xang is barely mentioned in Thai education. The destruction of Vientiane in 1828 is presented, where it is presented at all, as a Thai military victory rather than as the deliberate destruction of a neighbouring kingdom and the forced relocation of its population.
Charles F. Keyes, the American anthropologist who first studied the Isan question seriously in 1967, described the Lao Isan as caught between two faces. They can be Lao or they can be Thai depending on the context. They cannot, in modern Thailand, be openly and simultaneously both. The state has not given them the option.
What I Make Of This After Twenty Years In Thailand
I have lived in Thailand for twenty years. I have eaten the food, listened to the music, met the people from Khon Kaen and Udon Thani and Ubon Ratchathani and Nakhon Ratchasima. I have liked them. I have found them, on balance, more open and warmer and less status-obsessed than the central Thais of Bangkok. I have noticed, over time, that the things in Thailand that I have come to genuinely love, the food, the music, the traditional textiles, the warmth of the village welcome, the architectural detail of the older temples, are almost all of them things that originated in the Lao tradition and were absorbed by the Thai national identity without acknowledgement.
The “Thainess” that Bangkok promotes to the world is, in significant part, Lao culture that the Thai state has rebranded. The papaya salad that Western tourists order in Bangkok is Lao. The mor lam music that fills the radio across the northeast is Lao. The sticky rice that goes with every meal is Lao. The villages where Western foreigners go on cultural tours are Lao. The country I have lived in for twenty years has, at its cultural heart, a population that the country itself refuses to officially recognise as the people they actually are.
The story of the Lao Isan is not a footnote to Thai history. It is, in a very real sense, the central story of how modern Thailand was constructed. A central Thai state with its capital in Bangkok absorbed a neighbouring Lao kingdom, destroyed its centre, forcibly moved its population, banned its language from official use, suppressed its political voice, and then claimed the cultural products of the absorbed population as its own national identity.
The twenty-two million Lao people of Isan are not stolen in the same way that an object can be stolen. They are something more difficult to articulate. They are a population whose identity, language, history, and political voice have been taken away from them through a sustained programme of state policy, while their food and music and traditions have been simultaneously appropriated by the state that took those things from them and sold to the world as Thai. That is a strange and uncomfortable kind of theft. But it is, I think, the most accurate word for what has happened.
They are the Lao people that Thailand stole. And the longer I live in this country and the more carefully I look at how it actually works, the harder it is for me to call it anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are the people of northeastern Thailand actually Lao or Thai?
By ethnic origin, language, and historical lineage, the people of Isan (northeastern Thailand) are overwhelmingly Lao. They are descendants of populations that lived in the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang and its successor states (Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and Champasak) and that were relocated across the Mekong River in the nineteenth century after Siam destroyed Vientiane in 1828. They speak Lao (called “Isan” inside Thailand to avoid the politically sensitive name). They eat Lao food. They follow Lao folk traditions blended with Theravada Buddhism. The modern Thai state classifies them as Thai for administrative purposes, but their ethnic and cultural identity is Lao.
How many ethnic Lao people are in Thailand?
Approximately 22 million Lao Isan people live in northeastern Thailand, representing approximately one-third of Thailand’s total population. They constitute over 80 per cent of all Lao speakers in the world (the population of Laos itself is only around 7 million). The Lao Isan are Thailand’s largest unrecognised ethnic group and the largest unrecognised transboundary ethnic population in mainland Southeast Asia.
What was the Lao Rebellion of 1826-1828?
A war launched by King Chao Anouvong of Vientiane to end Siamese suzerainty over the Lao kingdoms and restore the unified Lao kingdom of Lan Xang. Anouvong’s forces, alongside those of his sons Tissa, Ngao, and Nyô (the viceroy of Champasak), marched across the Khorat Plateau in January 1827 and advanced as far as Saraburi, three days’ march from Bangkok. The Siamese counterattacked under King Rama III, drove the Lao forces back, and continued north of the Mekong to destroy Vientiane in 1828. Anouvong was captured, taken in an iron cage to Bangkok, and died there in 1829. His son Nyô also died in Bangkok in 1828.
What happened to Vientiane in 1828?
The Siamese armies destroyed the city. They burned the palaces, the temples, and the administrative buildings. They executed or enslaved much of the population they captured. The city was reduced to ruins so completely that when French explorers arrived later in the nineteenth century, they described Vientiane as having been effectively erased from the map. The destruction was a deliberate act of military policy designed to eliminate the Lao kingdom as a political entity and to make any future Lao rebellion against Siam impossible.
Why did so many Lao people end up living in Thailand instead of Laos?
Because Siam forcibly relocated them. After the destruction of Vientiane in 1828, the Siamese state systematically moved the Lao population from the east bank of the Mekong River (Vientiane side) to the west bank (Siamese side). The transfers continued through the rest of the nineteenth century in waves. The strategic logic was that a Lao population inside Siamese-controlled territory could be administered, taxed, and conscripted, whereas a Lao population across the river could potentially organise another rebellion. The descendants of those forcibly relocated families are the Lao Isan population of Thailand today.
When was the word “Lao” banned from official Thai use?
In 1890, during the reign of King Rama V, the Siamese government formally renamed the northeastern region “Isan”, a Thai-language word meaning “northeast”, and prohibited the use of “Lao” in official descriptions of the region or its people. The 1904 Siamese census listed the Lao population of the northeast as “Thai” rather than as Lao. Assimilatory laws in the 1930s under Prime Minister Phibun further restricted the use of the Lao language in education, government, and publishing. The cumulative effect was the administrative erasure of Lao ethnic identity from official Thai records.
What is the difference between Isan and Lao language?
There is almost none. Isan and Lao are mutually intelligible dialects of the same language, with minor regional variations in vocabulary and pronunciation. The Thai government calls the language “Isan” inside Thailand and “Lao” outside Thailand, but linguistically they are the same language. The Isan dialect of Lao has no official status in Thai schools, government, or media. Education in northeastern Thailand is conducted entirely in central Thai. The Lao language of twenty-two million Thai citizens is treated by the Thai state as a regional dialect with no formal role.
Has the Thai government ever acknowledged the Lao identity of Isan people?
Only partially and reluctantly. In 2011, Thailand formally recognised most of its ethnolinguistic groups, including the Lao population of the northeast. The recognition is administrative rather than substantive, in the sense that the official status of the Lao language has not changed, the curriculum in Isan schools is still entirely in central Thai, and the political and economic disadvantages of the Lao Isan population have not been addressed. The Thai state continues to treat the Isan region as a peripheral Thai region rather than as the homeland of a distinct ethnic population with a separate national history.
Is Isan food really Lao food?
Yes, overwhelmingly. The cuisine that most foreign visitors to Thailand identify as “Thai food”, including sticky rice, papaya salad (som tam / tam mak hoong), grilled chicken (gai yang), spicy minced meat salad (larb), fermented fish (pla ra), and sausages (sai krok Isan), is in its origins Lao cuisine from the northeastern region. The Thai state and the Thai tourism industry have rebranded this food as “Thai” for international marketing, but its cultural origins are Lao. The Lao population of Isan, and the Lao population of Laos, share the same culinary tradition.
What does this history mean for Western foreigners living in Thailand?
It means the country is more complicated than the official narrative presents. The “Thainess” that the Thai state promotes is a constructed national identity that emerged from the suppression of multiple regional identities, particularly the Lao identity of the northeast. For Western foreigners who travel in Isan, who eat the food, listen to the music, visit the villages, and meet the people, the experience is partly an encounter with a distinct Lao culture that the Thai state has spent a century attempting to assimilate. Recognising the Lao identity of the people of Isan does not change the practical realities of living in Thailand, but it does change how honestly the long-term foreign resident can describe the country he lives in.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Isan People, the comprehensive demographic and historical documentation of the approximately 22 million ethnic Lao population of northeastern Thailand, confirming the 1826 Lao Rebellion as the trigger for the mass forced population transfers of ethnic Lao into Isan, the subsequent integration into the Thai nation state, and the central government’s policy of Thaification that produced a regional identity differing from both the Laotians of Laos and the Thais of Central Thailand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isan_people - Wikipedia — Lao People, the documentation of the global Lao population at approximately 22 million including Lao Isan, with Thailand hosting 17,822,432 (including Lao Isan people) in 2010, compared to Laos itself at 3,427,665, demonstrating that the majority of all ethnic Lao people in the world live inside Thailand rather than inside Laos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_people - Wikipedia — Lao Rebellion (1826-1828), the historical documentation of King Anouvong’s rebellion against Siamese suzerainty, the Lao army advance to Saraburi in January 1827, the Siamese counterattack under King Rama III, the destruction of Vientiane in 1828, the capture and death of King Anouvong, and the massive resettlement of Lao people to the west bank of the Mekong River that demographically built modern Isan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lao_rebellion_(1826%E2%80%931828) - Wikipedia — Anouvong, the biographical documentation of King Chao Anouvong of Vientiane (1767-1828), Xaiya Setthathirath V, the last king of the Lao Kingdom of Vientiane, whose 1826 rebellion sought the return of the Emerald Buddha taken to Bangkok, the release of his sister held hostage for 45 years, and the return of Lao families relocated to Saraburi. His three sons Tissa, Ngao, and Nyô commanded the three Lao armies. Captured by Siam in 1828, taken in an iron cage to Bangkok, died there in 1829
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anouvong - Wikipedia — Nyô of Champasak, the documentation of King Anouvong’s son who was given the title Chao raja putra in 1804 and appointed Vice-King of Champasak by Siamese King Rama II in 1821. He aided his father in the 1826 rebellion against Siamese suzerainty, was captured and taken to Bangkok, and died there in 1828 after falling from the roof of a temple while attempting to escape from confinement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ny%C3%B4 - Wikipedia — Tissa of Vientiane, the documentation of the Lao prince and viceroy of Vientiane from 1826 to 1827, half-brother of Chao Anouvong, who served as deputy commander-in-chief of the Vientiane army during the rebellion against Siam and was falsely accused of treason after releasing a senior Siamese official who later revealed the Lao campaign plan to Bangkok
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissa_of_Vientiane - Wikipedia — Ngao of Vientiane, the documentation of the second son of Chao Anouvong (born 1802), who served as a political hostage in Bangkok in his youth and commanded a Lao menial labour corps that was ill-treated by Siamese, one of the principal causes of his father’s revolt. In the rebellion he served as commander-in-chief of the Vientiane army
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngao_of_Vientiane - Chao Anouvong – Last King of Lane Xang (J&C Expeditions Lao tourism), the published historical analysis confirming that Chao Anouvong ruled from 1805 to 1828, initially captured the Thai stronghold of Korat (Nakhon Ratchasima) during the 1826 rebellion, and assumed that the local Lao people in modern-day Isaan would follow and support him in his attempt to liberate the area inhabited mostly by Lao people. The expectation that the Khorat Plateau Lao would rise alongside him was central to the strategic logic of the rebellion
https://jclao.com/chao-anouvong-laos-last-king/ - Lan Xang Kingdom (Wikipedia) — The documentation of the Lao kingdom founded in 1353 by Fa Ngum, the kingdom whose name translates as “kingdom of a million elephants,” which at its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries covered most of modern Laos, the entirety of what is now northeastern Thailand, parts of northern Cambodia, and parts of southern Yunnan. The kingdom fragmented in 1707 into three rival successor kingdoms (Vientiane, Luang Prabang, Champasak) following a succession dispute
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lan_Xang - Wikipedia — Kingdom of Vientiane, the documentation of the Lao successor kingdom that emerged from the 1707 partition of Lan Xang and existed until its annexation by Siam in 1828 following the failure of Anouvong’s rebellion. The kingdom was the central of the three Lao successor states and the most directly affected by Siamese suzerainty during the 18th and early 19th centuries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Vientiane - Minority Rights Group — Lao-Isan in Thailand, the international human rights organisation’s profile of Thailand’s largest minority population at approximately 16 million, concentrated in the northeast plateau, with the Isan dialect of Lao spoken daily by tens of millions yet having no formal role in schools, government, or media. Education is conducted entirely in central Thai, a policy that sidelines children’s mother tongue and reinforces hierarchies of prestige and mobility
https://minorityrights.org/communities/lao-isan-in-thailand/ - Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia — Integration despite Exclusion: Thai National Identity among Isan People, the academic analysis confirming that Lao-speaking people of northeastern Thailand have long been subject to discrimination and exclusion from developmental benefits, that government policy for decades “drained the countryside like conquered provinces” in order to fund the capital and subsidise urban workers, and that strict linguistic requirements in education and the state bureaucracy disadvantage Isan natives. The piece documents that several Isan-identified politicians who rose to higher political office during the 1940s were murdered by the Thai state
https://kyotoreview.org/issue-27/integration-despite-exclusion-thai-national-identity-among-isan-people/ - McCargo and Hongladarom — Contesting Isan-ness: Discourses of Politics and Identity in Northeast Thailand, the academic paper documenting the “two faces” framework of Lao Isan identity, the position that being a person from Isan is not a real choice but rather a means of obfuscating the real choice between being Lao and being Thai, the priority between ethnicity and heritage on one side and legal nationality and citizenship on the other
https://thaipolitics.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/87/2022/02/McCargo-and-Krisadawan-Isan-identity-2004.pdf - Peera Songkunnatham (2019) — The Thai Lao, Thailand’s Largest Unrecognized Transboundary National Ethnicity, the academic article published in Nations and Nationalism 25(4): 1131-1152, providing the foundational scholarly framework for understanding the Lao Isan as Thailand’s largest unrecognised ethnic group and as a transboundary population whose identity has been systematically suppressed by the Thai state’s nation-building project
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.12572 - State institutions in Northeast Thailand: Lao ethnics and Thai identity (Singapore Management University research), the academic analysis confirming the Thai state’s consolidation of Thai identity through both positive and negative reinforcement throughout the past century, with successive Thai governments promoting a unified Thai identity to reduce threats to the state from within. The piece confirms that “Isan people display greater commitment to the national identity than native speakers of central Thai” as a measurable outcome of the assimilation programme
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5156&context=soss_research - The Dynamic Development of Isan Issues in Thailand (Chiang Mai University, ICIRD7 Conference), the academic conference paper confirming that the 1904 Siamese census listed Northeastern ethnic groups directly as Thai ethnic and began the abolition of the Lao ethnic group name. The piece confirms that in 1890 Siam set up a new province in the northeast region with the word “Lao” abandoned and replaced with the geographical marker “Isan,” accelerating the administrative integration of various ethnic groups into the Siamese system
https://icird7.soc.cmu.ac.th/proceeding-161/ - Wikipedia — Isan Language, the documentation of the Northeastern Thai (Isan) language spoken by 13-16 million native speakers (2005) and 22 million L1 and L2 speakers (2013), comprising more than 80% of the population of Lao speakers overall. The language was officially banned from being referred to as “Lao” in official Thai documents at the turn of the 20th century, with assimilatory laws of the 1930s under Phibun further restricting Lao language use in education and government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isan_language - Wikipedia — Thaification, the historical documentation of the Thai state’s nationalist programme of cultural assimilation aimed at non-Thai ethnic groups within the borders of modern Thailand, the policy framework under which the Lao identity of the Isan population was officially suppressed through the renaming of the region, the suppression of the Lao language, and the imposition of central Thai cultural norms across the northeast
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaification - Wikipedia — Plaek Phibunsongkhram, the biographical documentation of the Thai Prime Minister (1938-1944, 1948-1957) whose nationalist government implemented the assimilatory laws of the 1930s and 1940s that prohibited the use of Lao and other minority languages in education and government, the central architect of the Thaification programme that suppressed the Lao Isan ethnic identity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaek_Phibunsongkhram - Wikipedia — Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1893, the documentation of the treaty that established French Indochina’s expansion into Lao territory east of the Mekong River and set the precedent for the Mekong as the boundary between French and Siamese spheres of influence. The treaty formally separated the Lao population on the east bank (which would become French Laos) from the Lao population on the west bank (which would remain Siamese, later Thai)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Siamese_War - Wikipedia — Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1907, the documentation of the further Franco-Siamese border settlement that completed the formal demarcation of the Mekong River as the border between French Indochina (modern Laos) and Siam (modern Thailand). The 1893-1907 treaty series collectively fixed the Mekong as the dividing line that separated the Lao Isan population from the eastern-bank Lao population
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Siamese_Treaty_of_1907 - Wikipedia — Demographics of Thailand, the comprehensive documentation of Thailand’s ethnic composition confirming that the vast majority of the Isan people, one-third of Thailand’s population, are of ethnic Lao with some belonging to the Khmer minority. The Thai government continues to refuse to record ethnicity in the official census, classifying all Tai-speaking groups as Central Thai despite their distinct ethnic origins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Thailand - Encyclopedia.com — Lao Isan, the comprehensive entry on the Lao Isan population, the language demography, the cultural traditions, and the historical relationship between the Lao kingdoms and the Siamese state. The entry confirms that Lao speakers constitute the majority of the population of northeast Thailand, with Central Thai speakers concentrated in urban areas alongside large Chinese or Sino-Thai populations
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/lao-isan - Facts and Details — Isan People and Northeast Thailand, the comprehensive cultural and historical analysis confirming that until the mid-20th century the Isan people felt they belonged to the Lao ethnic group, with Isan writer Kamsingh Srinok quoted: “We have been looked down upon and controlled by the central government throughout our history.” The piece documents the cultural origins of Isan food, music, and folk traditions in the Lao tradition
https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Thailand/sub5_8j/entry-3524.html - Charles F. Keyes (1967) — Isan: Regionalism in Northeastern Thailand, the foundational anthropological study by the US anthropologist who was the first Western scholar to identify and study the distinct “ethno-regional” identity of khon isan. Keyes’ framework characterising the Isan as an ethno-regional group rather than an ethnic minority became the standard scholarly approach to understanding the relationship between Lao ethnic identity and Thai national identity in the northeast
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780877279013/isan/ - Wikipedia — Emerald Buddha, the documentation of the most revered Buddha image in Thailand, originally housed in Vientiane after being moved there from Chiang Mai, then taken to Bangkok by Siamese forces in 1779 following the first Siamese conquest of Vientiane. The return of the Emerald Buddha was one of King Anouvong’s stated demands when seeking concessions from Siam before launching the 1826 rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Buddha - Wikipedia — Chulalongkorn (King Rama V), the documentation of the Siamese king who reigned 1868-1910 and whose administrative reforms in the late 19th century created the modern centralised Thai state. The 1890 renaming of the northeastern region from Lao territory to “Isan” was part of the broader Rama V administrative consolidation that brought the historically Lao territories under direct Siamese administrative control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chulalongkorn - Wikipedia — Mor Lam, the documentation of the Lao folk musical tradition originating in Laos and northeastern Thailand, characterised by the partnership of a singer (mor lam) and the khaen reed mouth organ. The tradition is Lao in origin and is the dominant musical form of the Isan region. The Thai national music industry has commercialised mor lam for mainstream Thai consumption while obscuring its Lao cultural origins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor_lam - Wikipedia — Som Tam (Tam Mak Hoong), the documentation of the spicy green papaya salad that originates in the Lao culinary tradition of northeastern Thailand and Laos. The dish is now marketed internationally as “Thai food” but its cultural origins are Lao, with the dish’s name “tam mak hoong” being the original Lao name and “som tam” being the central Thai adaptation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Som_tam - Wikipedia — Khao Niao (Sticky Rice), the documentation of the glutinous rice that is the dietary staple of northeastern Thailand and Laos, originating in the Lao culinary tradition. Sticky rice is eaten by hand, dipped in dishes, and forms the foundation of Lao Isan cuisine, in contrast to the steamed jasmine rice that is the staple of central Thailand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khao_niao - Wikipedia — Larb (Laap), the documentation of the spicy minced meat salad that is the unofficial national dish of Laos and the principal traditional dish of the Lao Isan region of Thailand. The dish has Lao origins and is widely served across both Laos and northeastern Thailand, with the central Thai version representing a later adaptation rather than an original Thai culinary tradition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larb - John Draper and Joel Sawat Selway (2019) — A New Dataset on Horizontal Inequalities for Thailand, the academic research providing the quantitative framework documenting the structural economic disadvantage of the Lao Isan region relative to the central plains and Bangkok, the persistent poverty differentials, and the political under-representation of the Lao Isan population in Thai national institutions despite making up approximately 30 percent of the country’s population
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-019-02091-2
