soc.culture.thai

Long-form reference · 9,382 words · about a 41-minute read

A newsgroup proposed five days after a coup

Most soc.culture.* groups were proposed because somebody was homesick. This one was proposed because the government had changed. On 23 February 1991 the Thai armed forces removed the elected government of Chatichai Choonhavan and installed a junta calling itself the National Peace Keeping Council; five days later, on 28 February 1991, a Call For Discussion for soc.culture.thai was posted to news.announce.newgroups by Nittida Nuansri, whose article carries the organisation line Comp Sci, Melbourne Uni, Australia. The proposal did not pretend to be about cookery.

We, a group of Thai students who are abroad, think it is the right time to create a news group to discuss and post information about Thailand. It will be particularly useful for those who want to know about the situation in Thailand, after the coup this weekend. We also can communicate almong Thai people on the net. It is not restricted for only Thai, any who are interested in this subject are always welcome.

The typing error is the original's. So is the sequence of priorities that follows it in the document: travel information, news from Thailand, political circumstances, Thai food and recipes. That the same paragraph can hold a coup and a recipe request is not a failure of seriousness; it is an accurate description of what a national newsgroup was for, and of what the people who wanted one expected to use it for once the immediate emergency had passed.

The proposal was crossposted to news.groups for the debate itself and to three existing groups whose readers were the natural constituency: soc.culture.asean, soc.culture.asian.american and soc.culture.misc. In February 1991 those were the rooms in which a Thai reader on Usenet already sat. The point of the exercise was to give them one of their own.

A small detail of the document is worth keeping, because it recurs later. The article's From: header gives the proposer's address as [email protected], but the signature at the foot of the same article is typed [email protected]. Both were hers; munnari was the Melbourne host through which Australian traffic reached the wider network, and it will appear again on the ballot.

Every document quoted in this article survives in the Internet Systems Consortium's mirror of the news.announce.newgroups archive, which for this group holds the whole creation file: the Call For Discussion, two Calls For Votes and the RESULT posting. A separate control-message archive holds the newgroup message that created the group. The mail-style headers at the top of each file record when the archive's mailbox received them, which for some of the files is 1993 or 1995; the Date: headers inside the articles record when they were posted, which is what is used throughout below.

The paperwork, in sequence

The general machinery of Big-Seven group creation — the discussion period, the neutral votetaker, the hundred-vote margin and the two-thirds supermajority — belongs to the culture branch's own page and is not retold here. What follows is only this group's file, with its dates.

• 28 February 1991 — Call For Discussion posted to news.announce.newgroups, crossposted to news.groups, soc.culture.asean, soc.culture.asian.american and soc.culture.misc; followups directed to news.groups. The article carries the Approved: header of [email protected], David C. Lawrence, then the moderator of news.announce.newgroups.
• 20 March 1991 — first Call For Votes. Voting period declared as 20 March through 20 April 1991; ballots by e-mail to the proposer; one vote per person.
• 11 April 1991 — second Call For Votes, reissuing the same text nine days before the close, in the usual manner of a votetaker who suspects the first posting did not propagate everywhere.
• 24 April 1991 — RESULT posted, under the subject line RESULT: soc.culture.thai passes 300: 27, with the full roll of voters' names and addresses appended.
• 28 April 1991 — newgroup control message issued by David C. Lawrence, four days after the result.

The arithmetic was not close. The RESULT states it plainly:

There were 327 valid votes, 27 against and 300 for. Therefore, the result of the vote satisfies both criteria of the guidelines for USENET group creation, namely that there must be at least 100 YES votes and at least 2/3 of the vote be in favour of creation.

A pedant may note that the two Calls For Votes stated the threshold in its other and stricter form — the proposer wrote that the group would be created if she received a hundred more YES votes than NO votes — while the RESULT restated it as a hundred YES votes outright. The two phrasings of the guideline were routinely confused across the network, and it made no difference here: 300 against 27 clears a margin of 273 and a share of nearly ninety-two per cent, so the group passed on either reading.

The RESULT also records what the votetaker threw away, in a note that says a good deal about how these ballots were actually counted:

I didn't count votes from some people who said "I'm not sure if I can vote or not, if so I'd like to vote YES" (or any other ambiguous words), nor those votes that reached me before or after the voting period.

The same note sets the creation date, and the group was made slightly early. The RESULT says that if no problems were detected the group would be created in 5 days, that is, on (or about) April 29; the control message went out on 28 April. Nothing turns on the day, but it is the kind of thing a reader can check for himself, which is the merit of an archive that kept the paperwork rather than a summary of it.

One further detail is visible only to a reader who counts the published lists rather than trusting the headline. The NO roll is headed twenty-seven and contains twenty-seven lines, but two addresses appear on it twice; twenty-five distinct people are named. Five of the twenty-seven lines were sent from a single corporate host. Neither observation moves the result by any amount that matters, and both are the kind of thing that only survives because the votetaker published the roll in full — which was the entire point of publishing it.

The control archive has an afterlife of its own, and it is a good illustration of how a newsgroup actually spread. Besides Lawrence's message of 28 April 1991 it holds four later newgroup messages for the same group, each issued by a local news administrator with a restricted Distribution: header — from a company in Wakefield, Massachusetts in May 1991, from a firm in Campbell, California in December 1991, from New York University in April 1992 and from the University of Maine that same month. None of them is an act of hierarchy governance; each is a site creating the group in its own spool because a reader there had asked for it. The file ends with a single rmgroup control message dated 3 November 2001, sent from outside the news.announce.newgroups process, carrying the line please remove the bogus newsgroup soc.culture.thai. The group's one-line entry is still in the newsgroups file distributed from the same archive today.

The charter, and the line that outlived it

The newgroup control message of 28 April 1991 is the group's founding document in the strict sense: it is the message that told several thousand news administrators to create the group, and it carried both of the texts by which the group would afterwards be known. It opens flatly — soc.culture.thai is an unmoderated newsgroup which passed its vote for creation by 300:27 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 24 April 1991 — and then supplies, first, the one-line entry for the newsgroups file and, second, the charter, introduced with the words The charter, culled from the call for votes. The charter reads, in full:

Purposes: - for Thais & any others who are interested in Thai culture and other aspects such as : - travel information - news from Thailand - political circumstances - Thai food & recipes etc. Language of discussion is English.

In the original the four topics are set as an indented list, one to a line, and the ampersands are typed rather than spelled; the wording is otherwise exactly as above, and it is word for word the text that had already appeared in the Call For Discussion of February and in both Calls For Votes. Two of its provisions are worth dwelling on. The first is that the charter is a list of invitations rather than restrictions: it names four things the group is for and closes with etc., which is among the least enforceable clauses in the history of Usenet charters and was clearly meant to be. The second is the last sentence. A group about Thailand, proposed by Thai students, declared English its language of discussion — a decision consistent both with the courtesy the proposal extended to the non-Thai readers it explicitly welcomed and with the plain fact that in 1991 the network could not reliably carry written Thai at all. The rest of this article is, in large part, an explanation of that sentence.

The one-line description is the other half of the control message, and it has proved remarkably durable. The line written into the message on 28 April 1991 was soc.culture.thai — Thai people and their culture. The same line, tab-separated and character for character identical, still appears in the newsgroups file distributed today from the same archive that holds the 1991 paperwork; it was checked byte for byte against that file for this page. Thirty-five years of hierarchy maintenance and the near-total collapse of Usenet's readership have not altered a full stop of it. It is the line at the head of this page, and it is worth being clear about what it is: not the charter, but the namespace's index entry for the group — the single line a news administrator saw when deciding whether to carry it.

Who voted, and from where the votes came

Because the votetaker published the roll, soc.culture.thai has something almost no newsgroup of its era has: a dated, named list of three hundred and twenty-seven people who cared enough about its existence to send an e-mail in the spring of 1991. It is not a subscriber list and must not be read as one — voting cost one message and reading cost nothing, so the roll measures interest at a single moment rather than readership over time. An address is also not a nationality, and in a few cases not even a location. But as a snapshot of where the constituency physically sat, it is unusually good evidence, and the counts below are mechanical tallies of the domain on the last e-mail address printed on each of the three hundred YES lines, made for this page.

• 137 of 300 at .edu addresses — overwhelmingly American universities, and by a wide margin the largest single bloc, though short of half the roll.
• 55 at .com addresses, of which 23 are inside one company's internal mail network, Digital Equipment Corporation's enet.dec.com.
• 33 in Australia, at .oz.au, .edu.au and .oz addresses. Twenty of those thirty-three sit in a single domain, une.oz.au, the University of New England at Armidale in New South Wales; the proposer's own University of Melbourne accounts for seven.
• 12 in Japan, 10 in the United Kingdom, 10 in France and 9 across Finland, Norway and Sweden.
• 6 on hosts in the .bitnet domain, 6 at United States .gov addresses including three at NASA laboratories, 1 at a .mil address and 1 in Canada. Six further lines give no domain address at all, only a bang path, and cannot be placed this way.
• 10 — ten, out of three hundred — at addresses inside Thailand's own .th domain.

That last figure is the important one, and it is worth naming the institutions behind it, because all ten came from three of them: five from sritrang.psu.th at Prince of Songkla University in Hat Yai, three from chulkn.chula.th at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and two from ait.ait.th at the Asian Institute of Technology. Those were three of the small number of Thai institutions then reachable from the network at all. A group about Thailand was voted into existence by a constituency of whom roughly three in a hundred could vote from Thailand.

Two names on the YES roll are worth pointing out, not for colour but because they are load-bearing. One is Kanchana Kanchanasut, voting from [email protected], a University of Melbourne computer science address; she completed her doctorate at Melbourne in 1991, had become the first Thai person to use e-mail in 1986 while at the Asian Institute of Technology, set up Thailand's first Internet-connected server in 1988 and registered the .th country-code domain as a computer administrator in the same year. She was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013 and received the Jonathan B. Postel Service Award in 2016. The other is Robert Elz, voting from [email protected] — the same Melbourne host the proposer signed with — who operated the .au domain registry from 1986 to the late 1990s, managed the aus.* Usenet hierarchy from its beginnings until the mid-1990s, and who now lives in Hat Yai as an honorary lecturer in the Computer Engineering Department of Prince of Songkla University, the source of five of the ten Thai votes.

A third name on the roll is Trin Tantsetthi, at a Digital Equipment address in Thailand. It recurs in the next section but one, in a place nobody would look for it.

None of that was arranged. It is simply what a vote roll from 1991 looks like when the country in question has been on the network for four years and the people who put it there are still few enough to fit on one list. The character of the group can be read straight off the same document: a diaspora of students and engineers, an Australian axis inherited from the way Thailand had been connected in the first place, a large American academic contingent, and a thin but real line back to three campuses in Thailand itself.

An abugida with no spaces

The Thai script is not an alphabet, and the difference matters for everything that follows. It is an abugida: the consonant letters carry an inherent vowel, and the other vowels are written as marks that may sit to the left of the consonant, to the right of it, above it, below it, or in combinations of those positions at once. Standard Thai uses 44 consonant letters for 21 distinct consonant sounds, 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms, and four tone diacritics, which stack above the consonant line and interact with a three-way classification of the consonants — middle, high and low — to determine the tone of a syllable. There are no capital letters.

There are also, ordinarily, no spaces between words. Spaces in Thai text mark clause and sentence boundaries, roughly where an English writer would use a comma or a full stop, and Thai has punctuation of its own for abbreviation and for the ends of sections, including several characters now obsolete. What Thai does not have is the one convention on which nearly every piece of Western text-processing software of the 1980s and 1990s silently depended: a delimiter between words.

The script's ancestry runs from Brahmi through the South Indian Pallava alphabet to the Old Khmer script, and thence to the Sukhothai script from which Thai descends; the Khmer ancestry is a matter of script history rather than of politics, and is best left in the palaeographers' hands. The Ram Khamhaeng Inscription, conventionally dated 1292 and held since 1968 in the Bangkok National Museum, is often cited as the script's first appearance, though many scholars have questioned its authenticity and reliability as historical evidence, and others have argued from the Wat Bang Sanuk inscription in Phrae province that the earliest Thai script may date back to 1219. This article does not adjudicate that dispute; it notes only that the script the newsgroup could not transmit is roughly seven centuries old.

Machines had trouble with it long before computers did. When the first Thai typewriter was developed by Edwin Hunter McFarland in 1892, there was simply no space on the keyboard for all the characters, and two had to be left out: kho khuat and kho khon. Both are redundant in modern Thai — each is a modified form of the letter preceding it, with the same pronunciation and the same consonant class — and both once stood for a sound that has since merged with another. They have never really come back. They are no longer used in written Thai, yet they still appear on many keyboards and are dutifully encoded in every Thai character set to this day: the earliest documented case of a Thai text technology being designed around what would not fit.

A last practical point. Thai has its own digits, and the script's own currency mark for the baht. Both are encoded, both appear on Thai keyboards, and both are routinely replaced in ordinary text by their Western equivalents. A reader searching an archive for Thai material therefore has to consider that the same figure may have been written more than one way.

Seven bits, and what Thai needed

Usenet's article format was defined by RFC 1036, published in December 1987, which specifies news articles as a constrained subset of the Internet mail format of RFC 822 and states explicitly that where the two conflict, RFC 822 should be considered correct and RFC 1036 in error. RFC 822, in turn, defines the body of a message as a sequence of lines containing ASCII characters, and defines its character type as any ASCII character in the range 0 to 127. Seven bits. Anything with the eighth bit set travelled at the sender's risk, across an unknown number of intermediate hosts, mail gateways and news transports, any one of which might strip it, mangle it or reject the article outright.

Thailand's national standard for encoding its own script was ready before the newsgroup existed. The Thai Industrial Standards Institute, an organ of the Ministry of Industry, published Thai Industrial Standard 620 in two editions with the same code-page layout — TIS 620-2529, dated to the Buddhist Era year 2529, which is 1986, and the current TIS 620-2533, 2533 BE, which is 1990. Its descriptive name translates as the Standard for Thai Character Codes for Computers, and it is the sole official standard for encoding Thai in Thailand. Structurally it is a conventionally structured extended-ASCII national character set: it retains full compatibility with seven-bit ASCII, and the Thai letters occupy the eight-bit range from hexadecimal A1 to FB. The standard is intended for information interchange only — because Thai vowels and diacritics combine above and below the line, a separate display engine is required to compose the characters correctly on screen or on paper.

TIS-620 is also the name the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority uses for the charset: registry number 2259, source given as the Thai Industrial Standards Institute (TISI), with csTIS620 and ISO-8859-11 recorded alongside it as alternative names. The registry's contact record for that entry names Trin Tantsetthi, at a Thai address, last updated in September 1998. The same name appears on the group's published YES roll of April 1991. The Thai internet was small.

Having a standard and being able to use it over Usenet were different problems. The eight-bit encoding could not simply be poured into a 1991 news article; it needed either an eight-bit-clean path end to end, which nobody could guarantee, or a labelling and re-encoding mechanism, which did not yet exist. MIME supplied the second: RFC 1341, of June 1992, introduced the machinery for declaring a character set and for encoding eight-bit data as printable ASCII, and was revised as RFC 1521 in September 1993 and again as RFC 2045 in November 1996. Netnews itself did not formally catch up until RFC 5536, of November 2009, which obsoleted RFC 1036 and rebuilt the article format on the modern Internet message format and MIME. By then the group's active life was over. What was written instead, through the years that mattered, was written in English or in ad-hoc romanisation.

Even where eight-bit Thai did travel, it travelled into a thicket. TIS-620 was adopted with a single change as ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001, Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 11: Latin/Thai alphabet, whose only difference from the national standard is that it allocates a no-break space to position A0, which TIS-620 leaves undefined. Microsoft's Windows code page 874 and the MacThai code page used by the Thai version of the Apple Macintosh are both variants of TIS-620, and are incompatible with each other. A Thai post written on one platform, forwarded by a gateway that assumed another, and archived by a third, is not recoverable by guesswork. The regional dimension of this problem — Vietnamese, Khmer, Burmese and the archipelago scripts, each with its own incompatible solutions — belongs to soc.culture.asean, which covers it as a region.

Unicode, and the problem the encoding did not solve

Thai was in Unicode from the beginning. The Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on 3 January 1991 — seven weeks before the newsgroup was proposed — and the first volume of The Unicode Standard was published that October. The Thai block occupies U+0E00 to U+0E7F and is based on the national standard, Thai Industrial Standard 620-2533: the ordering was not merely consulted but taken over essentially as it stood, and TIS-620 Thai bytes convert to Unicode by the almost insultingly simple rule of subtracting hexadecimal A0 and prefixing 0E.

The assignments have been stable since the first release. The block's own version history records the same final code points at Unicode 1.0.0 as stand today: U+0E01 to U+0E3A and U+0E3F to U+0E5B, 87 code points in all, of which 86 carry the Thai script property and one, the currency sign, is script Common. They begin at U+0E01 THAI CHARACTER KO KAI, the letter named for the word for chicken by which Thai children learn it, and run through the tone marks — U+0E48 THAI CHARACTER MAI EK is a non-spacing mark with canonical combining class 107 — to the Thai digits and to U+0E5B THAI CHARACTER KHOMUT, the sign that once closed a document. Between them sits U+0E3F THAI CURRENCY SYMBOL BAHT, which acquired an unhappy prominence in the group's own lifetime.

Unicode solved the encoding problem completely and the harder problem not at all. Software that can store Thai text correctly still has to decide where the words are, and Thai does not say. The Unicode Standard's own line-breaking annex, UAX #14, gives Thai the line-break class SA — Complex Context Dependent (South East Asian), shared with Lao, Khmer and Burmese — which means only that a break opportunity exists somewhere and must be found by other means. The annex is candid about the limits of its own remit: scripts such as Thai, it says, allow line breaks only at word boundaries, but do not mark word boundaries in any way, so that the determination of line break opportunities requires language dependent text analysis, and algorithms and data for such analysis are beyond the scope of the Unicode Standard. It notes elsewhere that implementations therefore fall back on techniques outside the algorithm's framework, among them dictionaries of words for languages that do not use spaces, such as Thai.

That is where the matter still rests. Thai word segmentation is a dictionary-and-statistics problem, not a character-encoding one; it is solved approximately, by lookup tables and probabilistic models that disagree with one another at the margins, and it is the reason Thai text remains awkward for line-wrapping, spell-checking, indexing and full-text search in a way that a Latin-script language is not. Writers who need to force a break insert U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE, an invisible character that does its job in a rendering engine and quietly defeats a naive search at the same time.

For an archive, the consequences compound. A Thai-script post from the group's active years may have been written in TIS-620, in Windows-874, in MacThai or in an early Unicode encoding; may have been transported by a path that stripped its eighth bits or mislabelled its charset; may have been indexed by software with no Thai segmentation at all; and would in any case be matched by a modern query only if the searcher happened to break the words the same way the indexer did. The English-language material indexes cleanly. This is one reason the surviving record of a Thai newsgroup reads as more English than the group's readers necessarily were, and it is a reason to be sceptical of any claim about the group's content based on what a search engine can find in it today.

Romanisation: one place, several spellings

If the charter said the language of discussion was English, then every Thai proper noun in the group's traffic had to be spelled in Latin letters, and Thailand has never had one way of doing that. The official system is the Royal Thai General System of Transcription; sources disagree over when it first appeared, one giving early 1917 and another 1932, and the encyclopaedic account carries a maintenance notice over exactly that inconsistency, so this page does not pick a year. What is not in doubt is that four versions were promulgated, in 1932, 1939, 1968 and 1999, that the first was issued by the Ministry of Public Instruction and the later ones by the Royal Institute, that the rules in force were announced in the Royal Gazette on 11 May 1999, and that the system is almost identical to the one defined by the international standard ISO 11940-2.

RTGS is a transcription, not a transliteration, and it is deliberately lossy. It uses only unmodified letters from the Latin alphabet, without diacritics of any kind, which means it discards both tone and vowel length — the two features that do much of the work of distinguishing Thai words. The committee that set up the general system considered tone and quantity marks unneeded and left them to a separate precise system. Two words unrelated in Thai can therefore arrive in Latin script identical, and the transcription cannot get them back. It is designed for road signs and government publications, and at that it succeeds.

In practice even the government does not use it consistently, and private usage never has. Personal and place names are romanised by family tradition, by French- or English-influenced convention, or by whatever was written on somebody's passport decades ago; the same district can be spelled two ways on two adjacent street signs. For a newsgroup this was an everyday nuisance and, thirty years later, it is an archival one: a searcher looking for a Thai place, dish or surname in the group's traffic is looking for an unknown number of spellings, only some of which they will think to try. This is the ordinary condition of every soc.culture.* group whose subject does not use the Latin alphabet, but Thai is a particularly severe case, because the standard system throws away exactly the information that would have made the spellings unique.

The country, as a dated record

The group's active years coincide with a period of Thai history that remains politically contested, and the treatment here is deliberately narrow: dates and documented outcomes, with characterisations attributed to whoever made them, and no adjudication of any of it. Readers should note that Thai law places limits on public discussion of the monarchy that have no equivalent in most jurisdictions, and that this page therefore restricts itself to matters of public record. The events below are the ones a group chartered for news from Thailand and political circumstances existed to carry.

• 23 February 1991 — the armed forces remove the government of Chatichai Choonhavan; the National Peace Keeping Council, with General Sunthorn Kongsompong as its figurehead, takes power. The 1978 constitution is repealed. Anand Panyarachun is installed as prime minister.
• 19 November 1991 — 50,000 people demonstrate at Sanam Luang against the draft constitution then being prepared, the largest protest in Thailand since 1976.
• 22 March 1992 — general election, the first since the coup; 15 parties and 2,185 candidates contest 360 seats; turnout 59 per cent.
• 7 April 1992 — General Suchinda Kraprayoon, who had said in 1991 that he would not take the post, is appointed prime minister without having stood for election.
• 17–20 May 1992 — the events known in Thai as Phruetsapha Thamin and in English as Black May. A rally led by Chamlong Srimuang reaches some 200,000 people at Sanam Luang; the army and police open fire. Official statements record 52 dead, 696 injured and 175 disappeared; medical volunteers, quoted at the time by the New York Times, put the dead above 100. Over 3,500 people are arrested.
• 23–24 May 1992 — an amnesty decree is signed on 23 May; Suchinda resigns as prime minister on 24 May.
• 13 September 1992 — general election, the first after Black May; turnout 62 per cent; the Democrat Party takes 79 of 360 seats. Chuan Leekpai becomes prime minister on 23 September.
• June 1994 — a Committee of Democracy Development is established in the House of Representatives, following a hunger strike by the activist Chalard Vorachat; headed by Prawase Wasi, it amends the 1991 constitution and sets out frameworks that feed into the reform that follows.
• 2 July 1995 — general election; the Thai Nation Party takes 92 of 391 seats; turnout 62 per cent. The prevalence of vote-buying at this election has been described as among the highest to that date.
• 17 November 1996 — early general election; the New Aspiration Party wins 125 of 393 seats despite polling fewer votes than the Democrat Party. Chavalit Yongchaiyudh is appointed prime minister on 25 November.
• 26 December 1996 — the National Assembly elects the Constitution Drafting Assembly: 99 members, 76 directly elected one from each province and 23 short-listed by parliament from academia and elsewhere.
• 2 July 1997 — the baht is floated. See the following section.
• 11 October 1997 — the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand, Buddhist Era 2540 is enacted: 12 chapters and transitory provisions, 317 sections, the first Thai constitution drafted by a popularly elected drafting assembly, and the first under which both houses of the legislature were directly elected. Voting was made compulsory; a mixed electoral system gave 400 constituency seats and 100 party-list seats; a Constitutional Court, an Election Commission, a National Human Rights Commission, a National Counter Corruption Commission and an Ombudsman were among the bodies created.
• 6 November 1997 — Chavalit resigns amid the crisis; Chuan Leekpai returns as prime minister on 9 November.
• 6 January 2001 — the first House elections held under the 1997 constitution, for 500 seats. They have been called the most open, corruption-free elections in Thai history, and one study puts the effective number of parties in the legislature at 3.1, against an average of 6.2 before 1997.

The 1997 document was both praised and criticised, sometimes by the same people. It was widely hailed as a landmark of democratic constitutional reform and, by one of the members of its own drafting committee, Amorn Chantarasomboon, said to have produced a parliamentary dictatorship. Both characterisations are on the record and both are attributed here to their authors rather than endorsed. The constitution was repealed on 19 September 2006, following a military coup, and replaced by an interim charter on 1 October of that year — after the newsgroup's traffic had substantially gone. One number is deliberately missing above: the National Assembly's vote approving the draft is given in two different figures in the same reference work, so it is omitted rather than guessed.

The crisis that began in Bangkok

Between 1985 and 1996 the Thai economy grew at an average of more than nine per cent a year, the highest rate of any country at the time, with inflation held within a range of roughly 3.4 to 5.7 per cent. The baht was pegged at 25 to the United States dollar. This is the economy against which every subsequent number should be read.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis began in Thailand, and its Thai name says where: wikrit tom yam kung, the Tom Yum Kung crisis, after the soup. The sequence is short and well documented. On 14 and 15 May 1997 the baht was hit by massive speculative attacks. On 30 June the prime minister, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, said that he would not devalue. On 2 July 1997 the government, lacking the foreign reserves to hold the peg, floated the currency. Capital flight followed almost immediately, and the contagion spread across the region and then beyond it.

What it did to Thailand is measurable. The baht lost more than half its value, reaching a low of 56 to the dollar in January 1998. The stock market dropped 75 per cent. Finance One, until then the largest Thai finance company, collapsed. Layoffs in finance, real estate and construction sent large numbers of workers back to their home provinces and 600,000 foreign workers back to their own countries. On 11 August 1997 the International Monetary Fund unveiled a rescue package of more than 17 billion United States dollars, conditioned on bankruptcy and financial-regulation legislation; on 20 August it approved a further package of 2.9 billion. Poverty and inequality increased while employment, wages and social welfare declined. Chavalit resigned on 6 November.

For a newsgroup whose readers sat largely outside Thailand and were in good part students and professionals with families at home, this was not a spectator sport. Exchange rates, remittances, tuition fees denominated in dollars and job prospects on return all moved at once and in the same direction. It is also the point at which the group's subject became, briefly, everybody's subject: the crisis that began in Bangkok was a lead item in the financial press of a dozen countries for the better part of a year. The regional and multi-country dimensions of it are handled on the soc.culture.asean page and are not repeated here.

One footnote of the era belongs in a section about scripts as much as one about money. The crisis is named in Thai after a dish, and the currency at the centre of it has its own character in the Thai block, U+0E3F. The word that the world's newspapers spent 1997 printing in Latin letters as baht has, in its own script, a symbol that most of those newspapers could not set.

Who could post, and from where

Thailand's connection to the outside network is unusually well dated, and the dates explain the shape of the vote roll exactly.

• 1986 — Kanchana Kanchanasut, at the Asian Institute of Technology, becomes the first Thai person to use e-mail, after co-creating a computer network to exchange mail with universities in Melbourne and Tokyo.
• 1987 — Thailand's connection to the Internet begins by way of the Australian research and education network, using UUCP and the Sydney University Network software; this made Thailand an early participant in bringing the network to Asia.
• 7 September 1988 — IANA's root database records the registration date of the .th country-code domain. Kanchanasut registered it; Thailand's first Internet-connected server was set up in the same year.
• 1992 — the link is transformed to full TCP/IP, to UUNET.

The .th namespace was, and remains, organised at the third level beneath a fixed set of second-level categories — ac.th for academic institutions, co.th for companies, go.th for government, or.th for non-profits, mi.th for the military, net.th for service providers, and in.th for individuals. All three of the Thai institutions on the 1991 vote roll predate that structure and appear as bare second-level names: psu.th, chula.th and ait.th. That is itself a small dating clue, and it is the kind of thing a vote roll preserves and a summary destroys. A Thai-script top-level domain, registered in 2010, followed long after the group's traffic had gone.

Delegation of a domain is not the same as public access, and in Thailand's case the gap is a decade. The World Bank's series on individuals using the Internet, compiled from International Telecommunication Union returns, puts the Thai figure at 0.04 per cent of the population in 1994, 0.12 per cent in 1996, 0.36 per cent in 1997, 1.1 per cent in 1998, 2.4 per cent in 1999 and 3.7 per cent in 2000 — the year the news2mail gateway that produced this directory began operating. It reached 5.6 per cent in 2001, 9.3 per cent in 2003 and 10.7 per cent in 2004, the year the gateway closed. Thailand's population in 1991 was about 55.6 million; one per cent of it is over half a million people, which is a large number of individuals and a very small proportion of a country.

Two consequences follow, and they are the whole story of the group's demography. First, for most of its life soc.culture.thai was written by Thais abroad and read by Thais abroad, with a minority of correspondents at a handful of institutions at home; the balance shifted through the late 1990s but the domestic share stayed small during the group's busy years. Second, when domestic access finally arrived at scale in the 2000s, it arrived into a web of Thai-language forums and portals that could render the script natively and required no negotiation with a seven-bit transport at all. Usenet's Thai-language moment was over before it started, and its English-language moment was over shortly after the alternatives appeared.

The diaspora, and the students who were already there

The people the charter meant by Thais who are abroad were a specific and recent population. Thai immigration to the United States, the largest single destination in the group's readership, began in earnest during and after the Vietnam War, in which Thailand was an ally of the United States: records show some 5,000 Thais immigrating in the decade between 1960 and 1970, the number increasing to 44,000 in the following decade, and approximately 64,400 between 1981 and 1990. In other words, the great majority of Thai Americans in 1991 had arrived within the previous twenty years, and a substantial slice of them were students or recent graduates — precisely the population that had campus computer accounts.

The community kept growing after the group's founding: the 2010 United States census counted 237,629 Thai Americans, of whom 67,707 lived in California. Los Angeles has the largest Thai population outside Asia and is home to the world's first Thai Town. Australia's share, visible on the vote roll as 33 addresses counted in a single afternoon, reflects a student flow to Australian universities that long predated the network and outlasted it; the concentration of twenty of those addresses at one regional university is a reminder that such flows are lumpy rather than even.

The practical effect on the newsgroup was a permanent, structural time-shift. Thailand keeps a single time zone, UTC+07:00, seven hours ahead of Greenwich and twelve to fifteen ahead of the North American campuses where most of the readership sat. A piece of news from Bangkok arrived in California the previous evening; a reply from California arrived in Bangkok in the small hours; and the Australian contingent, only three or four hours from Thai time, was the part of the readership whose working day overlapped Thailand's. Culture groups whose readership sits mostly inside their subject country have a daily rhythm. This one had a relay.

It also had a particular relationship to news itself. In 1991 and 1992 a reader in Bangkok and a reader in Boston were not equally informed about Thailand, and not always in the direction one would guess: the domestic press operated under restrictions that a foreign wire service did not, and during the May 1992 emergency presses that might endanger public security were banned and three newspapers — the English-language Nation and the Thai dailies Naew Na and The Manager — were ordered to close for three days, an order revoked a few hours later. The general proposition that expatriate networks moved information across such gaps is well established for the period; what specifically moved across this newsgroup is not documented, and this page does not assert it.

The calendar, the festivals and the practice

Thailand dates its documents in the Buddhist Era, which runs 543 years ahead of the Common Era. The reckoning is not a curiosity but the legal default: the constitution enacted on 11 October 1997 is formally the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand, Buddhist Era 2540, and the character-set standard discussed above is TIS 620-2533 because its present version was published in 2533 BE, which is 1990. A reader of Thai documents who does not carry the offset in their head will misdate everything they touch.

The calendar itself is a layered thing, and the layers are dated. King Chulalongkorn adopted a Siamese version of the Gregorian calendar in 1888, replacing the lunar calendar as the legal one, and decreed a change to a Rattanakosin Era count in 1889, with the epoch for Year 1 at the accession of Rama I on 6 April 1782. King Vajiravudh replaced that count with the Buddhist Era and moved the start of the year back to 1 April, effective in 2455 BE, 1912; the transitional year accordingly ran only 356 days, from 11 April 1911 to 31 March 1912. On 6 September 1940 the government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram decreed 1 January 1941 as the start of 2484 BE, so that 2483 BE had only nine months, from 1 April to 31 December 1940. Because of that shift, converting a Thai date between 1 January and 31 March from before 1941 requires 542 rather than 543 — a trap that has produced published error, the standard example being the founding of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, widely given as 1350 by direct conversion from 1893 BE when the date is 1351.

Three New Years therefore coexist. The Gregorian 1 January is a public holiday. Songkran, the traditional new year, is celebrated on 13 April with the holiday period extending through the 15th, and in the traditional calendar it is when the zodiac animal of the year changes. Thai Chinese communities keep the lunisolar Chinese new year as well, on the date the Chinese calendar sets. Loy Krathong, in which decorated floating vessels are set on the water, falls on the evening of the full moon of the twelfth month of the Thai lunar calendar, so its Western date moves each year; scholarship treats its modern national form as an invented tradition of the post-war period, shaped by nationalism and by tourism, originally limited to Bangkok elites and with older roots in Brahmanical practice transmitted through the Khmer world.

Buddhism in Thailand is Theravada and is practised by the large majority; figures in the low-to-mid nineties as a percentage of the population are standard, with a Pew estimate of 94.4 per cent for 2020 and the United States State Department's 2023 religious-freedom report citing about 92.5 per cent for 2021. Two official orders, or nikayas, exist: the larger Maha Nikaya and the royally backed Dhammayuttika Nikaya, begun as a reform movement in 1833 by the future King Mongkut while he was himself a monk, and formally recognised as its own monastic order by the Thai government in 1902 — the year of the Sangha Act that remains the foundation of monastic administration. The Dhammayuttika order has long held a disproportionate share of senior offices while accounting for well under a tenth of Thai monks. What distinguishes Thai practice as practised, though, is temporary ordination: it is the norm rather than the exception, and most young men who ordain do so for the term of a single vassa — phansa in Thai, the three-month rains retreat — after which most return to lay life, to marriage, to further study or to the army.

All of which is the kind of thing a culture newsgroup handles constantly and unremarkably: what the date is in the other calendar, when the holiday falls this year, what one is supposed to do at an ordination, how to explain any of it to a colleague. It is also the kind of traffic that leaves no trace in any secondary source. The festivals and the practice are documented here because they are documented facts about the group's subject, not because any particular thread about them has been found.

Food, and a charter that mentioned it

It is worth restating that Thai food & recipes is not an editorial guess about what the group discussed. It is one of four topics named in the charter, written into the Call For Discussion in February 1991, repeated in both Calls For Votes and copied into the newgroup control message in April, which puts recipes on the same footing as political circumstances in the group's founding document. Anyone who has watched a diaspora newsgroup will recognise why: food is the part of a culture that expatriates lose first, miss most and can most nearly reconstruct, and the practical questions are endless and genuinely difficult — what to substitute for an ingredient that no shop within two hundred miles stocks, and how to explain a technique to somebody who has only ever seen the result.

The dishes themselves have documented and occasionally political histories. Pad thai, the stir-fried rice-noodle dish now treated abroad as a Thai national dish, is not ancient: stir-fried rice noodles were introduced to Thailand from China centuries ago, but the dish in its present identity was invented in the mid-twentieth century, and its very name, shortened from kuai tiao pad thai, carries a word borrowed from Teochew. The commonly held explanation is that wartime rice shortages led the government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram to promote noodle consumption in place of rice, in the same period as the twelve cultural mandates issued between 1939 and 1942, the first of which, of 24 June 1939, declared that the country, people and nationality were to be called Thai. The American author Mark Padoongpatt maintains that the dish was created in the 1930s in the service of nation-building rather than inherited from a long tradition; that is his characterisation and is given as such, and other writers place the invention with Thai Chinese cooks instead. Tom yum kung, at the other end of the register, gave its name to a currency crisis.

None of this is settled, and food arguments are exactly the arguments a culture newsgroup never finishes. Which is, one suspects, why the charter listed recipes and then wrote etc.

A law on the statute book

One structural fact about writing publicly on Thai subjects has to be stated, because omitting it would misrepresent the environment in which the group operated, and it is stated here as a matter of record and nothing else. Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code prohibits any act that defames, insults or threatens the King, the Queen, the heir-apparent or the Regent. Modern legislation of this kind has existed in Thailand since the criminal code of 1908, which penalised malice towards or defamation of those persons and set imprisonment not exceeding seven years, a fine, or both. Insult was added to the existing offences of threat and defamation when the 1956 code came into force on 1 January 1957, and the offence was at the same time reclassified as one against national security. On 21 October 1976, two weeks after the events of 6 October and on the day of the coup that followed them, the National Administrative Reform Council issued Order No. 41, raising the penalty from a maximum of seven years' imprisonment to between three and fifteen years for each count. That is the provision in force through the whole of the newsgroup's life and since.

The characterisations of the law that circulate in the international press are quoted here as characterisations by the outlets that made them, not adopted: the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has called it the world's harshest law of its type, and The Economist has called it possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere. Thailand's courts, parliament and public have argued about the provision for decades and continue to; that argument belongs to them, and this directory takes no side in it.

What can be said about the newsgroup specifically is very little, and it is better to say the little accurately than to speculate. A statute of general application governs speech by people within a jurisdiction regardless of the medium carrying it, and posters inside Thailand and posters abroad were therefore not in identical positions. Beyond that structural observation, the surviving record does not support any claim about what was or was not written in this group on the subject, by whom, or with what caution. No such claim is made here.

The region around it

Where a group sits in a namespace is visible in its own headers, and soc.culture.thai's are unusually explicit: the Call For Discussion was crossposted to soc.culture.asean, soc.culture.asian.american and soc.culture.misc, and the later ballots to overlapping sets of the same. Those were the group's neighbours in the sense that mattered — the rooms whose readers would want to know, and to whose regulars the new group would siphon a portion of the traffic.

This directory holds pages for several of them, each of which owns its own subject and is not summarised here. soc.culture.asean is the regional umbrella and covers the association as a body, the regional character-set and diacritics problem across its member states, and the multi-country chronology of the 1997 crisis and the haze. soc.culture.laos covers Laos, whose script is Thai's closest sibling and whose Unicode block was published in the same release as Thai's. soc.culture.cambodia covers Cambodia, whose older script is Thai's ancestor and whose modern one waited for Unicode 3.0. soc.culture.malaysia covers the southern neighbour. soc.culture.burma, soc.culture.singapore and the continental group soc.culture.asian round out the shelf. Each is its own story and is told in its own place.

What is worth noting from this group's side is only that the regional layer existed and was used. A question about a border, a shared dish or a shared script arrived in one national group with readers of another attached to it, and the umbrella group was where such a question could be asked of everybody at once. That was the design of the soc.culture.* namespace working as intended.

What the record does not show

The honest ledger for this group is lopsided. Its administrative half is essentially complete: proposer, dates, ballot, roll of voters, tally, charter, control message and current namespace entry all survive and have been quoted above from the primary documents. Its conversational half has almost nothing behind it.

• No readership figures. There is no surviving subscriber count, no article count and no traffic series for soc.culture.thai. The 327 people on the 1991 ballot are the only enumerated population the group has, and they are a count of voters in one month, not readers over fifteen years.
• No thread record. No specific discussion, argument, regular contributor, FAQ or in-joke is documented in any source consulted for this page. This article names none, and any page that does should be asked where it got them.
• No moderator. The group was unmoderated from creation, as the control message states, so there is no moderator's archive, no submission mailbox and no vacancy notice — the three kinds of document that give moderated groups a paper trail.
• Uneven archival coverage. Usenet archiving before the mid-1990s is patchy and depends on collections assembled long after the fact; coverage varies by group, by year and by the news server through which a given article happened to pass.
• Encoding damage. As set out above, any Thai-script material that did travel may survive as unrecoverable bytes, and searching for it requires guessing both the encoding and the word boundaries. Absence of Thai script in an archive is not evidence that none was posted.
• Romanisation scatter. Even the English-language traffic is hard to search by name, because Thai names in Latin letters have no canonical spelling.

There is also a limit of a different kind. Some questions about a group like this one — who felt able to say what, and where they were sitting when they said it — are not answerable from an archive at all, and would not be answerable even from a complete one. This page does not attempt them.

Scope and limits

What this page asserts, it asserts from documents. The creation record — the Call For Discussion of 28 February 1991, the Calls For Votes of 20 March and 11 April, the RESULT of 24 April recording 300 to 27, and the newgroup control message of 28 April — was read in full from the Internet Systems Consortium's mirrors of the news.announce.newgroups and control archives, and the charter and one-line description are quoted from them verbatim. The current one-line description was matched byte for byte against the newsgroups file distributed from the same archive today. The vote-roll tallies are mechanical counts of the domain on the last address printed on each line of the published YES list, and are labelled as such; they are this page's own counts, they do not always agree with a casual eye, and an address is neither a nationality nor reliably a location. Several of the 137 .edu voters were plainly Thai students at American universities rather than Americans.

Standards, code points and dates were verified against the issuing bodies where possible — the Unicode character database and Unicode Standard Annex #14 for the block, the code points and the line-breaking class; the IANA root database for the .th registration date and the IANA character-set registry for TIS-620; the RFC Editor for RFC 822, RFC 1036, RFC 1341, RFC 1521, RFC 2045 and RFC 5536 — and against encyclopaedic sources otherwise. Internet-penetration and population figures are from the World Bank's published series. Where sources conflict, as they do on the first publication year of the Royal Thai General System of Transcription and on the parliamentary vote count approving the 1997 draft constitution, the conflict is noted and the figure omitted rather than resolved.

On the political material the rule applied throughout is narrow and deliberate: state what happened and when, attribute every characterisation to whoever made it, and deliver no verdict. Thailand's politics in this period are argued about by people with far better standing to argue about them than a Usenet directory has. The subject of this page is a newsgroup — what it was chartered to do, who created it, who voted for it, what the network could and could not carry on its behalf, and what of it can honestly be said to survive.