Word: bangkok
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...begun to fall, it was time for the planting of rice, and throughout the Far East last week, Buddhists were bowed in prayer. They had flocked to their temples carrying offerings of flowers and incense, and many had journeyed to Nakorn Pathom (meaning First City), 40 miles west of Bangkok, to honor the local temple's huge, pumpkin-colored, glazed stupa (tower) that marks the site of Buddhism's establishment in Thailand 21 centuries ago. The occasion: Purima Pansa, the three-months-long Buddhist Lent that gives many of the devout a chance to live in a monastery...
...something known as the Corsican brotherhood. From here the business gets into illicit channels and high prices. By pony caravan, or by light planes that take off from jungle airfields built by the French during their five-year war with Communist Viet Minh, the raw opium is transported to Bangkok and Hong Kong, bought by Chinese dealers at up to $1,000 a kilo and refined into morphine and heroin, as well as smokable opium. Smugglers then take possession, hoping for the vast profits to be gained from selling the narcotics in the big cities of Asia, Europe...
Thailand also had a bonfire last week when police raided 854 opium dens throughout the nation, sealed up unsold stocks and piled almost 9,000 opium pipes, many of ivory and rare mandarin wood, in front of Bangkok's Grand Palace. Drenched with gasoline and set afire, the blaze was watched by thousands until dawn. Boasted Thailand's boss. Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat, who has also closed down nightclubs, "massage parlors" and brothels: "From this day we can proudly claim that we are a civilized people. Gone will be those trying days when we were pilloried...
...Into Bangkok last week to star in an all-cotton fashion show and present two high-style cotton dresses to Thailand's Queen Sirikit flew the U.S.A.'s 1959 Maid of Cotton, pretty, blue-eyed, brunette Malinda Diggs Berry, 21-year-old Oklahoma State University coed. Like a debutante on a grand tour, Malinda arrived with a chaperone, a pressagent and nine suitcases containing 25 costume changes (including a native dress for each land she would visit). But she had little time to enjoy them. Hardly was she through with her style show when...
...Administration bought and shipped $1,500,000 worth of road-building and repairing equipment and signed up an American engineering firm to teach Laotians how to operate the machinery. But the engineers arrived to find that, without Washington's knowledge, the local ICA mission had arranged for a Bangkok company, Universal Construction Co., to handle the job. One explanation emerged in testimony last week before a House subcommittee; Edward T. McNamara, husky ICA public-works officer in Laos from 1955 to 1957, admitted receiving stock and cash amounting to more than $12,000 from Universal "for assistance rendered...