Thailand Buzz - Democracy Monument in Bangkok, Thailand

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Posted by sim100 240 days ago (http://www.twip.org)
Category: Thailand | Tags: democracy monument bangkok

3 soldiers are standing in front of the Democracy Monument, in Bangkok, Thailand, after the September 19th 2006 "Coup d'Etat".

The Democracy Monument is located in the centre of Bangkok, on a traffic circle on the wide east-west boulevard Thanon Ratchadamnoen Klang. The monument was commissioned in 1939 by the military ruler of Thailand, Field Marshal Plaek Pibulsonggram (known as Phibun), to commemorate the June 1932 military coup which led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in what was then the Kingdom of Siam. Phibun saw the monument as the centre of what he envisaged as a new, westernised Bangkok, "making Thanon Ratchadamnoen the Champs-Élysées and the Democracy Monument the Arc de Triomphe." (source Ka F. Wong, Visions of a Nation: Public Monuments in Twentieth-Century Thailand, White Lotus, Bangkok 2006, 65).
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