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Bangkok bustles with evidences of the pursuit of sanouk, or pleasure, the mainspring of Thai life. Busy asphalt boulevards are supplanting the ancient, lettuce-clogged klongs—the canals where Thais still fish, drink, bathe and eat the lettuce. Venerable Siamese villas with cupolas like bowler hats squat cheek by jowl with neon-lit bars, cinemas and boxing pits. The jet age has made Bangkok the air hub of southern Asia, the halfway house for round-the-world trippers from the U.S. It is also rest and recreation for a carefully regulated 500 G.I.s at a time, on leave from Viet Nam. Some float down the Chao Phraya to visit Bangkok's Floating Market. A few are interested in watching the Thais fly their fighting kites—the national sport—or catching a Thai boxing match, where flailing feet are used as much as hands. Most make a beeline for Bangkok's myriad bars and massage parlors, carefully supplied by U.S. authorities with such useful mimeographed social guidance as "Never point your foot or your finger at a Thai."
A skyline once pierced only by the golden spires of the city's 300 Buddhist temples is now saw-toothed with multistory apartment blocks, but there is still a housing shortage in the $250-$500-per-month rental range. Flashing signs proclaim the virtues of Honda cycles, Philips TV sets, Coca-Cola and the Suzie Wong nightclub. For the gourmet, the Two Vikings offers Russian caviar in avocado pears for $5. Any jewelry store on Oriental Avenue has star rubies for the asking—plus $3,250. And instant antique Buddha heads are everywhere available to the unwary tourist, the corrosion of centuries being achieved by burying the newly minted statue in urine-soaked ground for three months. Equally abundant are instantly available women.
The Craft of Kingship. Rarer and more precious than rubies in Southeast Asia, however, is political stability and its sine qua non: a sense of belonging to a nation. The Thais have both. Though various ruling officers have come and gone since a 1932 coup gently displaced the King as absolute ruler, Kings and soldiers have combined, in a typical Thai equilibrium of accommodation, to provide a smooth chain linkage of government. The Thai sense of nationhood is partly the result of never having felt the trauma of colonial conquest. Even more, it resides in the charisma of the throne, reinforced by the nation's pervasive Buddhism. In Buddhist theology, the King is one of the highest of reincarnations, rich in his person in past accumulated virtue. Even in remote parts where spirit-worshiping peasants may never have heard of Thailand, they are likely to know—and revere—the King.
In an age when kings have gone out of style and the craft of kingship is all but forgotten, it is the good fortune of Thailand—and of the free world—that the present occupant of the nine-tiered umbrella throne, ninth monarch of the 184-year-old Chakri dynasty, not only takes the business of being a king seriously but has taken it upon himself to mold his emerging nation's character. In the musical five-tone Thai tongue, his full name rings like the roll of monsoon thunder on the