THERE'S A THAI expression, 'to travel with just a mat and a pot', that is often applied to describe the waves of Chinese who have migrated to the Land of Smiles over the years.
Take my wife's family, for example.
More than 130 years ago, my wife Sawitree's great-grandmother, then a seven-year-old named Bua, left her village in Xishuangbanna, home to the Dai ethnic group, to walk hundreds of kilometres with her parents to begin a new life in the promised land of Siam.
The family settled in Chiang Rai, in northern Thailand. Bua grew up and had a daughter, who in turn married a Chinese man from northern Guangdong province who had just migrated with little more than a mat and a pot himself. Their son grew up, married a Thai woman, and the result, among other offspring, was my wife.
Wave after wave of migration followed. By the end of the second world war, Chinese business dynasties had begun to emerge. From their beginnings as middlemen financing mainly agriculture, they became bankers and industrial and commercial entrepreneurs, with a big say in political decisions through their connections to the Thai military and bureaucrats.
These days the Thai-Chinese make up about 14 per cent of Thailand's population, totalling about 8.5 million.
The Thai-Chinese community constitutes a powerful and prominent minority, with an iron grip on the banking and commercial sectors. Perhaps the best known Thai-Chinese was, until recently, the most powerful politician of all, deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.