24 February 2020 | Author/Destination: Asia / Asien | Rubric: General, Bon voyage, Theme Weeks
Reading Time: 12 minutes
Yaowarat Road, the centre of Bangkok’s Chinatown © flickr.com – Ninara/cc-by-2.0
Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and formerly known as Siam, is a country at the centre of the
Southeast Asian Indochinese Peninsula composed of 76
provinces. At 513,120 km² (198,120 sq mi) and over 68 million people, Thailand is the world’s
50th-largest country by total area and the
22nd-most-populous country. The capital and largest city is
Bangkok, a special administrative area. 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. It is a
unitary state. Although nominally the country is a
constitutional monarchy and
parliamentary democracy, the most recent
coup, in 2014, established a
de facto military dictatorship under a
junta. Thailand is an
emerging economy and is considered a
newly industrialised country. Thailand functions as an
anchor economy for the neighbouring developing economies of Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia.
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