Reinterpreting Nirat Nongkhai: an historical account of settlement and land use in north-eastern Thailand during the nineteenth century

Due to insufficient historical accounts of the north-eastern region of Siam (modern-day Thailand) during the nineteenth century, the landscape, settlement and land use in this area are only vaguely understood. This article thus analyses and interprets the region’s settlement and land use by employing a unique nineteenth-century poetic source, the famous Nirat Nongkhai, a classic Siamese ‘journey-poem’ (nirat), composed in 1875. The poem effectively represents an account (i.e. journal) of a military expedition from Bangkok to the north-eastern region to suppress the Haw people. The poet wrote Nirat Nongkhai with great attention to detail and the key purpose of turning it into an historical travel archive. The poem was framed in the realist style, so it is particularly valuable for the study of landscape. Thus, it helps to clarify settlement and land use characteristics in the region during the late nineteenth century. The settings and contexts of Nirat Nongkhai show that geographical factors were the prime reasons why most of the flat areas remained unused, dry grasslands. Conversely, the low hills were inhabited. The essential settlement pattern was thus one of ‘island villages’ dispersed over waterside hills, mirroring the basic pattern of forested land (the pa khok) on the hills and river levees. Nirat also demonstrates that topography proved problematic for travel. For these reasons, communities remained largely impoverished and isolated from other regions of Siam.