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Patrick Jory
The Lost Territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation By Shane Strate. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015.
During a recent overland visit to Cambodia I was completing an immigration form at a border checkpoint near Anlong Veng in the northeast of the country, just across the Thai-Cambodia border, when a stern-looking immigration official asked me where I had entered from. I told him the name of the checkpoint on the Thai side of the border, "Chong Sangam." The official immediately corrected me, giving the Khmer pronunciation, adding in a harsh tone, "You are not in Thailand now. You are in Cambodia!" Not wanting to jeopardize my visa application I repeated the name to him, this time according to the Khmer pronunciation. I got my visa.
This incident brought home to me the strength of the feelings that the drawing of borders in mainland Southeast Asia during the colonial period over a century ago still provokes. In this case feelings on both sides of the border were particularly raw, because of the escalation of the conflict between the Thai and Cambodian governments over the sovereignty of the region adjacent to the spectacular twelfth-century Preah Vihear temple, situated on a clifftop bordering the two countries. The bitterness on the Thai side is well over a century old, dating from its loss of sovereignty over this region to the French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Memory of "The Lost Territories"-including the Lao territories on the "leftbank" of the Mekong river (present day Laos), as well as much of Cambodia-is deeply etched into the Thai nationalist imagination.
In The Lost Territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation we now have...