Word: phya
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...Year as other rituals like the slaughtering of buffalo. "But," she says, "animal sacrifice isn't great for tourism." What's more, the Dai did not always engage in unruly street battles using buckets filled to the icy brim and unforgiving water pistols. Writes Thai folklorist Phya Anuman Rajadhon: "The water-throwing later degenerated into vicious forms." Older villagers remember a time when these exuberant clashes - splashing has gotten so out of hand in Bangkok that it has been banned in certain areas - instead took the form of gentle blessings...
...picked up kindling scraps, he barely glanced at a pair of bloated bodies splayed on the riverbank. Death is so pervasive in the delta now, what are two more corpses? Like hundreds of villages across the delta, almost all the bamboo shacks in Mya Hen's hamlet of Phya Chaung, near the town of Bogalay, collapsed under the force of a massive tidal surge triggered by the storm. No one is sure of the death toll, but if other nearby villages are any indication, at least half of the residents perished. "I was lucky to have survived," Mya Hen says...
...some 7 million people. It is also a lyrical place where it seems almost natural to spend a morning in a walled compound full of temples, an afternoon shopping for sapphires, silks and lacquerware in an air-conditioned arcade, an evening dining in spicy splendor along the Chao Phya River, and a night on Patpong, the most freewheeling bar strip in the world. Pleasure becomes business in a city that is both sedative and stimulant. At first light you can ride along the back canals around the Temple of the Dawn, where saffron-robed monks paddle from river house...
...gold-clad drummers and long lines of soldiers marched solemnly past the gold-spired Grand Palace in Bangkok last week. With them came a single flutist playing Phya Sok (Great Sadness). One year after her death at the age of 79, Thailand's Queen Rambhai Barni took her last earthly journey in dignified splendor. Granddaughter of King Rama IV, the Thai monarch romanticized in The King and I, she was the wife of Thailand's last absolute ruler, before a coup installed a constitutional monarchy in 1932. The Queen's remains were borne on the traditional 40-ton, gilded teakwood...
...desperate students managed to escape by the Chao Phya River at the rear of the campus. Others who ran for the streets were set on by the rightist mob. Several were beaten close to death, then hanged, or doused with gasoline and set afire. One was decapitated. The bodies of the lynched victims strung up on trees were mutilated by rioters, who gouged out their eyes, slit their throats and lashed at them with clubs and chains...