Siamese in Kelantan and Kedah: Thai-speaking Buddhists of the north

Siamese in Kelantan and Kedah: Thai-speaking Buddhists of the north

It is a Friday afternoon in Tumpat, Kelantan. In the grounds of a Buddhist temple, children in matching shirts chant the Thai alphabet. Their teachers are volunteers, some of them university students who have come home for the weekend. These children speak Kelantanese Malay at school and Thai at the temple.

The story

The Siamese of Malaysia, also called Orang Siam ("Siamese people"), are Thai-speaking Buddhists. They live mainly in Kelantan, Kedah, Perlis and Terengganu. These states were tributary states of the old Kingdom of Siam for a long time, and many Siamese families have roots in that kingdom. The Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 drew the modern border between Siam and British Malaya, and the four states became part of what is now Malaysia. The Siamese who lived there stayed where they were. They are Malaysian citizens.

In Kedah, a researcher found two Thai-speaking communities. The Samsam are Malay Muslims who speak Thai at home. The Siamese are Theravada Buddhists. Most Kedah Siamese lived in Pendang district, in the hills and valleys of the Muda River. A list of 1890 to 1892 shows 13 Thai temples there, with the largest, Wat Lamdin, having 22 registered monks. Local tradition says that Wat Lamdin is several hundred years old, though the old papers are lost. Some families came as refugees from Patani in the early 1800s.

In Kelantan, the community is centred on Tumpat. Wat Phikulthong Vararam, in Kampung Terbok, is a prominent temple with a Thai language and culture school. A newspaper report counted about 13,000 people of Thai heritage in the state, and said the temple school teaches more than 160 students. Many of the children speak Thai at home but find the script hard, so the school teaches reading and writing as well as Buddhist lessons.

Where you can still see it today

• Thai Buddhist temples (wat) in Tumpat, Kelantan, and in Pendang, Kedah.
• Weekend Thai classes at temple schools, run by volunteers.
• Buddhist festival days such as Wesak Day and Makha Bucha, when villagers bring offerings and chant with monks.
• Place names and traditional entertainments in Kedah that still carry a Thai flavour.
• Siamese families who speak Thai at home and the local Malay of their state outside it.

What DNA can tell, and what it cannot

DNA cannot say whether a person is Siamese. The community is defined by language, faith and family, and many families have mixed origins. In Kelantan, Siamese people speak the local Malay so well that, as one researcher noted, an outsider may not tell them apart from their Malay neighbours.

A region estimate may show links to mainland Southeast Asia. A father line such as O-M268 ("The line of the rice lands"), whose branch O-M95 spread through the rice lands of mainland Southeast Asia, may appear. A mother line may also point there. These lines are shared by many peoples across the region, so they cannot say who is Thai, Malay, Chinese or anything else.

DNA does not decide race, religion or bumiputera status. A test cannot tell you what language your family speaks, which faith it follows, or which temple it visits. Family, law and culture do that.