Skip to main content

Queen of Lungasuka & the Pirate Queens of Pattani

I have a weak spot for the sea. I have always lived near the sea and love the people who live on it.

When I was a boy, my grandfather told me stories of the four great Queens who ruled a pirate kingdom in Thailand.

I came to love the Queens of Pattani in Southern Thailand through his stories; during Pattani's golden age the reign of its four successive queens from 1584,were known as Raja Hijau (The Green Queen), Raja Biru (The Blue Queen), Raja Ungu (The Purple Queen) and Raja Kuning (The Yellow Queen), where the kingdom's economic and military strength was greatly increased to the point that it was able to fight off four major Siamese invasions with the help of the eastern Malay kingdom of Pahang and the southern Malay Sultanate of Johore.

After the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767 to the forces of Burma, King Taksin asked for military assistance from Pattani against Burma but the Sultan did not send help to him. After the founding of the Chakri dynasty Rama I sent Prince Surasi to pacify the region and wage a war against them which ended the sovereignty of the Pattani kingdoms of the south. Throughout the 19th century southern Thailand was subdued and the symbols of its military might were moved and are still on display at the Thai ministry of defense today, as a token symbol of their submission.

In 1902 Pattani was finally annexed into Thailand and was recognized by the British in the 1909 Siam treaty.

These historical circumstances, explain in part why the largely Muslim (minority Buddhist and Hindu) south of Thailand is still having difficulty today. But it is the sea surrounding the south that brings back so many happy memories for me, and I miss so much. It is a large red sea in the evening, and so blue that you cannot tell where the sky begins and the sea ends along the horizon.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?