This chapter argues that Thai manners today, although expressed in secular terms, contain vestiges of an older Buddhist theory of how to master the self. This theory, which is based on well-known Buddhist scripture as well as monastic and lay practice, places importance on training oneself to restrain one's body (kai), one’s speech (waja), and the mind (jai). Ideals of Buddhist conduct in the Theravada Buddhist world are often associated with the stories of the bodhisatta, the future Buddha, particularly through the Jataka tales. However, Buddhist scriptures also prescribe ideal forms of behaviour for the bourgeois 'householder', especially in the Sigalovada Sutta, which was popular throughout the Theravada Buddhist world. The chapter situates these discourses of good conduct within Thai history in the nineteenth century, when political, economic, and social changes were producing a more bourgeois society, albeit within the political framework of a traditional absolute monarchy.

This chapter looks at the history of prostration in Thailand. The practice appears to have been adopted from the Angkorean Empire of the Khmers and was used at the Kingdom of Ayutthaya. It examines the modes of etiquette that were required in royal audiences for both Thais and foreign visitors. The chapter argues that by the nineteenth century Europeans regarded such practices as slavish and 'uncivilized'. This led, in 1873, to the young new king, Chulalongkorn, issuing a famous edict abolishing the custom of prostration and replacing it with European modes of paying respect such as bowing. But while in public functions involving Europeans the new modes of paying respect were observed, privately the custom of prostration before one’s superiors continued with little change.

This chapter examines two competing ideals about appropriate conduct for women: the lady of the court and the bourgeois woman. Interaction between courtly and bourgeois ideals of femininity had been taking place for centuries. Until the early twentieth century, courtly ideals of femininity continued to hold sway at the upper level of Thai society, although they were tempered by the rising influence of a bourgeois view of the world due to economic transformation. The declining social position of the aristocracy in the early decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, dealt a blow to courtly conceptions of behaviour for women while helping to elevate the bourgeois housewife as the new ideal of exemplary feminine conduct. The chapter also highlights the very influential role that many elite women played in the twentieth century in writing about manners, including in the new literary genre of novels of manners. The chapter examines the works of numerous well-known women writers on manners.

This chapter argues that as the European powers moved into South, East, and Southeast Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Thai kingdom, while remaining formally independent, was drawn into the diplomatic and economic orbit of the British Empire. One of the effects of this shift was that the old courtly styles of conduct were challenged by new bourgeois ideals of how to behave. This led to the emergence of the concept of the phu di, the gentleperson. The key aspect of the concept of the phu di was that one did not have to have been born into a noble family in order to perform good behaviour. The Thai court promoted the new ideal especially in what would become Thailand’s most famous manners manual, Qualities of a Gentleman (the manual continues to be published today). The chapter outlines how the Thai gentleperson ought to behave. The chapter also argues that from this period there were intense debates about what constituted good conduct, which was a reflection of the growing political tensions between the aristocracy and Western-educated civil and military government officials.

This chapter examines debates about manners and civility in the first half of the twentieth century. Tensions between aristocrats and Western-educated civil and military government officials culminated in the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. This period saw an outpouring of works about politeness and manners targeting the bureaucratic elite and the emerging middle class. Thai statesmen devoted a remarkable amount of attention to what they perceived to be the problem of manners and morals. Leading political figures on all sides of politics wrote about the subject. The model of ideal conduct that the absolute monarchy had developed for bureaucrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a hybrid between the palace courtier and the English gentleman, began to be challenged by new and more diverse conceptualizations of social relations, pushed by supporters of a more progressive political order. Yet the new rules for how to behave were resisted by supporters of the old aristocratic order. Some of them attempted to salvage what was left of the old courtly ways in books and novels and their own etiquette manuals.

In the conclusion I argue that rather than seeing Thai manners as one element within an essentialized 'Thai culture', we ought to understand the history of manners in Thailand as a variation of Norbert Elias’s notion of a civilizing process. Seen as a historical process, change in conduct and modes of civility in Thailand looks remarkably like that which has taken place in the West. I also explain why the courtly ethos has been so prominent in Thai conceptions of good manners and civility, by contrast to many of its Asian neighbours. I end the chapter and the book by arguing along Braudellian lines for the importance of an understanding of Thai history over the long term.

This chapter argues that since the October 1973 student-led demonstrations which overthrew the military regime, the consensus surrounding the ideal of the gentleperson (phu di) has broken down. The political instability of the period since 1973, with repeated coups, bloody crackdowns, wild swings from relatively liberal, open government to reactionary conservative military regimes, and the frequent ripping up of constitutions and drafting of new ones, reflected the entry of the middle class and the rural and urban lower classes onto the political scene and the challenge they posed to the political domination of the military, bureaucracy, and the monarchy. Just as there was no consensus over how the country was to be governed, in the period following October 1973 there was great contention over appropriate conduct. Changes in government were typically followed by official moral and behavioural campaigns. The long-reigning King Bhumibol came to represent the ideal of the gentleperson. His death in 2016 symbolized the passing of a particular kind of civility.