Britain’s ambassador to Thailand has defended the kingdom after revelations that a 1960s predecessor believed that Thais have no culture and are driven by sex.
“My own views differ from my predecessor of 42 years ago,” said Ambassador Quinton Quayle, who speaks Thai and has served in his current post for two years.
“Ever since I was first posted to Thailand 30 years ago, I have been impressed by the richness of Thai culture, be it art, sculpture, dance, music or literature,” Quayle said in a statement.
“All this is embellished by the natural beauty of the landscape and the charm and warmth of the Thai people,” he said.
Thai Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Vimon Kidchob said the government would not react to the scathing comments of previous ambassador Sir Anthony Rumbold, which were revealed in a BBC radio program on Tuesday.
“This is only his personal opinion based on his own prejudices, not an official one,” Vimon said.
The BBC program revealed the assessment by Rumbold, who served in Bangkok from 1965 to 1967, delivered in a final dispatch to the foreign office in London before leaving his post.
“They have no literature, no painting and only a very odd kind of music; their sculpture, ceramics and dancing are borrowed from others, and their architecture is monotonous and interior decoration hideous,” Rumbold wrote.
“Nobody can deny that gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich, and that licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all,” he wrote.
“The general level of intelligence of the Thais is rather low, a good deal lower than ours and much lower than that of the Chinese,” he wrote.
Until the foreign office ended the tradition in 2006, departing British ambassadors would give valedictory summaries of their host nation upon leaving the post. The missives were meant to stay confidential.
But the BBC used Freedom of Information legislation to obtain brutally frank dispatches from ambassadors for its radio series Parting Shots.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
RSS