Flood Barriers Hold Firm in Shielding Bangkok - ABC News

According to this news article from ABC, the residents of Bangkok are hoping that a series of dams, canals and tunnels spares the city from this year's intense flooding that has caused catastrophic damage to Thailand's rice-basket region, just upstream from Bangkok. Recent news reports have shown footage of residents in Ayutthaya using boats to travel down the city's streets.

This seems like deja vu. Exactly four years ago, I wrote this blog post: Flooding in Phitsanulok, Thailand. My wife says that her family in Ban Dong Phayom (Phitsanulok Province) has been hit hard by the flooding. Houses are raised on piles in the rural farming village where she grew up. Even so, her brothers and sisters have reported that the water level has risen enough to enter a large percentage of the elevated dwellings.



Typical home in Ban Dong Phayom. Photo by Kevin Borland.

My newphew's wife just sent me these photos she took near her home in Nonthaburi. Nonthaburi is just northwest of Bangkok.

Origin of the Tai Peoples

Comparative linguistic research seems to indicate that the Tai people were a proto Tai-Kadai speaking culture of southern China, and that they, like the Malay-Polynesians, may have originally been of Austronesian descent. Prior to inhabiting mainland China, the Tai are suspected to have migrated from a homeland on the island of Taiwan where they spoke a dialect of Proto-Austronesian or one of its descendant languages. After the arrival of Sino-Tibetan speaking ethnic groups from mainland China to the island of Taiwan, the Tai would have then migrated into mainland China, perhaps along the Pearl River, where their language greatly changed in character from the other Austonesian languages under influence of Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien language infusion. The coming of the Han Chinese to this region of southern China may have prompted the Tai to migrate in mass once again, this time southward over the mountains of southern China into Southeast Asia via the mountains of Burma and Laos to the north of Thailand. It is believed that the Tai ethnic groups began migrating southward from China and into Southeast Asia during the first millennium A.D. While this theory of the origin of the Tai is currently the leading theory, there is insufficient archaeological evidence to prove or disprove the proposition at this time, and the linguistic evidence alone is not conclusive. However, in further support of the theory, it is believed that the O1 Y-DNA haplogroup is associated with both the Austronesian people and the Tai.