Thailand, is a country at the centre of the Southeast Asian Indochinese Peninsula composed of 76 provinces. At 513,120km2 and over 68 million people, Thailand is the world’s 50th-largest country by total area and the 21st-most-populous country.Thailand is bordered to the north by Myanmar and Laos, to the east by Laos and Cambodia, to the south by the Gulf of Thailand and Malaysia, and to the west by the Andaman Sea and the southern extremity of Myanmar.Its maritime boundaries include Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand to the southeast, and Indonesia and India on the Andaman Sea to the southwest.Nominally the country is a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, however, its unstable political structure turns it to military dictatorship in several occasions.
Documented European contact began in 1511 with a Portuguese diplomatic mission to Ayutthaya, now one of the great powers in the region. Ayutthaya reached its peak during cosmopolitan Narai’s reign , gradually declining thereafter until being ultimately destroyed in the 1767 BurmeseSiamese War.
Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Siam faced pressure from France and the United Kingdom, including forced concessions of territory; nevertheless, it remained the only Southeast Asian country to avoid direct Western rule.
Apart from a brief period of parliamentary democracy in the mid-1970s, Thailand has periodically alternated between democracy and military rule.
