Thailand: Pad Thai and Protest

Thailand is an old nation full of rice fields, monsoon-drenched skies, crowded night markets filled with lemongrass and frying garlic, and a political history far more turbulent than its tourist-brochure serenity suggests. The only nation in Southeast Asia never colonized by a European power, Thailand instead navigated the 19th and early 20th centuries through careful diplomacy, modernization, and centralization under the absolute monarchy. But this veneer of stability masked deep social fractures. By the early 1900s, peasants in the northern and northeastern provinces faced crushing taxation, urban workers toiled in unsafe factories, and students returning from Europe brought home new ideas about democracy, socialism, and people’s rights.

Those tensions erupted in 1932, when the People’s Party staged a near-bloodless revolution that ended 700 years of absolute rule and ushered in a constitutional government. Yet the decades that followed were anything but calm. Thailand cycled through military dictatorships (Both those who were controlled by the monarchy and those who controlled the monarchy), popular uprisings, purges, mass protests, and brief democratic openings. World War II brought Japanese occupation and the clandestine Free Thai Movement. The 1970s saw students and workers build a nationwide pro-democracy front, only to be met with gunfire and state terror. The 1990s brought new clashes between civilians and soldiers, and the 2010s saw Thailand polarized between Red Shirts and royalist elites, filling Bangkok’s streets with smoke and barricades.

Through it all, the wok never stopped clanging. Because to tell the the true story of Thailand, you need to talk about its food. Simmering in broth pots, folded into wrappers, cooled in sweating metal cups, and pounded in mortar and pestles, Thai food is a perfect balance of spices and deep flavors. It also served its role in history. Street food vendors fed the crowds. Night market cooks whispered news. Cafés became meeting cells. 

Our journey begins in the 1930s, when the nation’s political future cracked open and its modern culinary identity took shape.

Tom Yum Goong, bright with lime and chiles, simmered in the years around the 1932 People’s Party Revolution, its fiery broth mirroring the heat of a country demanding representation after centuries of royal rule.

Creamy, cardamom-laden Massaman curry warmed kitchens during the turmoil of World War II, when the Free Thai Movement resisted Japanese occupation from underground.

The soothing sweetness of Tom Kha Gai accompanied the idealism of the 1973 Student Uprising, when young protestors toppled a dictatorship and briefly tasted democracy.

Crunchy, portable Po Pia Tod circulated among students during the dark days leading up to the 1976 Thammasat University Massacre, a moment of horror that still scars the Thai national memory.

The tangles of Pad Thai, once promoted as a nationalist dish, became a staple for students demonstrating during the 1992 Black May Protests, when civilians again confronted military rule.

Velvety Thai Iced Tea, born in the cafés of Bangkok, fueled the exhausted crowds during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis Protests, when economic collapse sparked anger at elite mismanagement.

And the sharp, pounding intensity of Som Tum kept spirits alive during the 2010 Red Shirt Protests, when rural and urban poor united against entrenched power.

So grab a bowl and a skewer. This is Thailand told through its rebellions, and its cuisine. Lets begin.

Tom Yum Goong: Sour Heat

Tom Yum Goong (goong meaning shrimp) is quite possibly Thailand’s most famous soup, a bowl of organized chaos, a harmony of fire and sourness, the taste of a people on the brink of transformation. Thought to originate in Central Thailand, it reached its recognizable modern form in the early 20th-century streets of Bangkok, where vendors stirred fragrant pots of lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaf, chilies, and the abundant freshwater shrimp from the area. These herbs and spices were not just for flavor. This particular combination had been used since ancient times for medicinal properties to aid the immune system and digestion. Think: a broth full of daily vitamins. Cheap, fast, and bold, Tom Yum was the kind of dish that fueled workers, clerks, soldiers, and students; ordinary people who would soon find themselves swept into an extraordinary moment in history.

In the years leading up to 1932, Siam was a kingdom frozen between eras. While King Rama VII presided over an absolute monarchy, the world around him had changed. Young civil servants studied abroad and returned with radical ideas, constitutional governance, parliamentary debate, socialist and social democratic economics, a government responsible to its people. Bangkok’s growing middle class whispered about reform in cafés, classrooms, and barracks. The scent of change drifted through the city as tangibly as the steam rising from a pot of Tom Yum simmering over a charcoal stove.

By June 24, 1932, those whispers became action. Seventy-something conspirators, military officers, bureaucrats, intellectuals, quietly coordinated the first revolution in Thai history. Before dawn, while street vendors were already setting up carts and lighting burners, the People’s Party seized strategic points across Bangkok. Their coup was stunningly efficient: bloodless, fast, and pointed. Messages were broadcast, troops assembled, and the monarchy was forced to accept a constitution. The absolute monarchy that had existed for centuries dissolved in a single morning.

As crowds gathered to hear speeches and proclamations, Bangkok’s vendors did what they always did, they fed the city. Bowls of Tom Yum were ladled out at breakneck speed, a modernized version of a classic, much like the revolution tried to modernize the monarchy. 

The People’s Party, a coalition of civilians and military men, had no interest in violence. They wanted modernization, representation, and a government reflective of a new generation. Thousands of supporters rallied behind them, many of them the same office clerks and laborers who grabbed quick bowls of Tom Yum on their way to work every morning. The revolutionaries’ demands, no longer absolute monarchy, but constitutional rule, were as sharp and clear as the flavors in the soup itself.

But even in its triumph, the People’s Party carried a bittersweet edge. Their vision was sincere; modernization, equality before the law, a nation governed by its citizens, but the coalition itself was fragile. Civilians and military officers wanted different futures, and the unity that fueled the revolution began to splinter almost immediately. Over the next decades, many of the Party’s ideals would be diluted, co-opted, or overturned by the very forces they had hoped to restrain. The legacy of the People’s Party was both inspiring and unsettling: the taste of progress mixed with the sharp reminder that change is never guaranteed to last.

When King Rama VII agreed to the constitution, Siam officially stepped into the modern world. The revolution wasn’t the end of struggle, far from it, but it was the beginning of a new political identity. And in the background of that turning point was a street food so quintessentially Thai, so intensely flavored, that it became a fitting culinary emblem of the moment.

When you make Tom Yum, you understand why its so iconic. The clash of flavors that is achieved is so unique, and the end product is rewarding. 

 

Tom Yum Goong (Hot & Sour Soup with Shrimp)

Servings: 4

Ingredients:

• 6 cups chicken or vegetable broth

• 1 stalk lemongrass, cut into 3-inch pieces and smashed

• 4 kaffir lime leaves, torn

• 3 slices galangal (or ginger if unavailable)

• 2 Thai bird’s eye chilies, smashed (adjust to taste)

• 7 oz shrimp, peeled and deveined

• 7 oz mushrooms, halved

• 2 tbsp fish sauce

• 2 tbsp lime juice

• 1 tsp chili paste (nam prik pao)

• Fresh cilantro, chopped

Instructions:

1. Bring broth to a simmer with lemongrass, lime leaves, galangal, and chilies. Cook 5–7 minutes.

2. Add mushrooms and shrimp, simmer until shrimp are pink (about 3 minutes).

3. Stir in fish sauce, lime juice, and chili paste.

4. Taste and adjust (more lime for sourness, fish sauce for saltiness).

5. Garnish with cilantro and serve hot.

Massaman Curry: Quiet Curry for Quiet Rebellion

Massaman Curry is often described as gentle. But beneath that softness lies a dish built on centuries of exchange, diplomacy, and adaptation. Its story begins in the 17th century court of Aytthaya, where it was introduced by Persian Muslim traders and merchants sailing the trade routes. They brought with them non-native species like cardamom, cinnamon and cloves from the Middle East and South Asia. These new ingredients were then fused with indigenous Thai staples; chilies, shallots, galangal, and lemongrass, were then mellowed out in coconut milk. The name itself was believed to be a corruption of the old Persian word for Muslim, Mussulman. It is a curry born from negotiation, the way kingdoms once bargained with foreign ships at their shores. And in the 1940s, as the world collapsed into war, Massaman became emblematic of Thailand’s most delicate balancing act: the Free Thai Movement.

When World War II engulfed Southeast Asia, Thailand found itself wedged between collapsing European empires and the rising force of Imperial Japan. Japan’s armies swept across the region with startling speed, and the Thai government, cornered militarily and led by Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, whose authoritarian nationalism bent the People’s Party’s modernist ideals toward fascism, agreed to permit Japanese troops transit through the country. On paper, Thailand became a Japanese ally. In practice, a second, quieter Thailand began to take shape beneath the official one.

This was the Seri Thai, the Free Thai Movement.

They were not soldiers in formation. They were lawyers, diplomats, students, bureaucrats, merchants, monks, and farmers. They carried no banners, only coded letters tucked inside novels, intelligence reports drafted under kerosene lamps, and whispered passwords passed from village to village. Thai students abroad, once studying engineering, medicine, or law, found themselves recruited into the OSS and British SOE, trained in sabotage, radio operation, and clandestine warfare. Diplomats such as Seni Pramoj openly defied Japan’s demand that they declare war on the United States, instead pledging loyalty to the Allies and laying the groundwork for external resistance. Inside the country, Pridi Banomyong, the regent, intellectual, and quiet revolutionary, organized internal cells with a patience that mirrored the slow, careful simmer of Massaman on a household stove.

The movement spread the way all underground networks do: person to person, family to family, kitchen to kitchen. Trust was currency. Many resistance meetings took place in domestic spaces, rooms where shutters could be closed, where the smell of a long-simmering curry could disguise the presence of guests who weren’t supposed to be there. Massaman, unlike the fiery street dishes of Bangkok’s markets, was a dish for the home. It was a dish of low heat and long hours, comfort layered atop secrecy, a curry made where conspirators could speak without ears pressed to the walls.

From 1942 onward, the Seri Thai passed intelligence on troop movements, established secret airfields for the Allies, and smuggled escaped prisoners through rural networks. They were not an army in trenches; they were shadows behind walls, students memorizing ciphers in foreign boarding houses, villagers tuning makeshift radios to static-laced broadcasts from Colombo or Chongqing. Their war was one of patience, subtlety, and quiet rebellion, an entire resistance held together by trust, timing, and the ability to remain unseen.

And when Japan finally surrendered in 1945, Thailand found itself in a uniquely precarious position: an official wartime ally of Tokyo, yet a country with a documented underground resistance that had quietly aligned itself with the Allies. It was this duality that saved it. The Seri Thai gave the United States and Britain the political cover they needed to avoid treating Thailand as a defeated Axis collaborator, and early peace agreements reflected that leniency. But there was more at work than gratitude. As the world shifted almost immediately into Cold War logic, Thailand’s geography, pressed against French Indochina, Burma, and the South China Sea. made it too strategically valuable to punish. A stable, friendly Thailand could serve as a future bulwark against communism in mainland Southeast Asia. So the Allies chose pragmatism: they acknowledged the collaboration of the wartime government, but rewarded the resistance of the Thai people. Thailand emerged from the war bruised, but not occupied, not dismembered, and not disgraced, positioned, by accident and by design, to become an ally to the West in the geopolitical struggles that followed.

Massaman curry is a dish of complex and deep flavors. Those who like the tastes of Thai, Indian, and Middle Eastern food will greatly enjoy. 

Massaman Curry

Servings: 4

Ingredients:

• 1 lb beef, chicken, or lamb (cubed)

• 2 tbsp massaman curry paste

• 1 can coconut milk

• 2 potatoes, cubed

• 1 onion, sliced

• 1 cinnamon stick

• 2–3 cardamom pods

• 2 tbsp fish sauce

• 1 tbsp tamarind paste

• 1 tbsp palm sugar

• 2 tbsp roasted peanuts

Instructions:

1. Heat curry paste in a pot with a little coconut milk until fragrant.

2. Add meat, stir to coat.

3. Pour in remaining coconut milk and 1 cup water, simmer 30 minutes.

4. Add potatoes, onion, cinnamon, and cardamom. Simmer until tender.

5. Stir in fish sauce, tamarind, and sugar.

6. Add peanuts before serving.

7. Serve with jasmine rice.

Tom Kha Gai: Comfort in the Chaos

Tom Kha Gai, which translates literally as "boiled galangal chicken soup," has its roots in 19th-century Thailand. The earliest recorded version of this dish, appearing in an 1890 Thai cookbook, was actually tom kha pet, made with duck. Over time, chicken (gai) became the standard protein, cementing the version known today. It is a fundamental pillar of Thai cuisine, representing a classic balance of classic Thai herbs and creamy coconut milk.

Often juxtaposed with Tom Yum soup which yells in spice, Tom Kha whispers in comfort. It is a sweeter soup, with ingredients that make one think of home. And in the early 70s, its quiet warmth stood in sharp contrast to the tightening grip of a military regime and the growing roar of a democracy movement that would transform Thailand forever.

By 1973, Thailand had lived under military domination for over a decade. Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, prime minister, defense minister, and self-appointed guardian of “order”, presided over a government where power was concentrated among a tight familial triumvirate: Thanom himself, his son Narong, and his cousin Praphas Charusathien. They ruled not simply as military officers but as a dynasty in uniform. Constitutions were suspended, political parties banned, and dissent surveilled or crushed. Economic growth masked rot: corruption flourished, inequality deepened, and foreign policy bent heavily toward Cold War anti-communism. American money flowed in; American troops used Thai bases; the government justified its repression as the price of keeping Thailand from falling to communism like Laos and Cambodia.

But that external justification could not contain internal frustration. The urban middle class, expanding for the first time, bristled at the regime’s opacity and corruption. Students became the loudest conscience of the nation. At Thammasat and Chulalongkorn, dorm rooms turned into incubators of forbidden discussion. They smuggled in banned books on democracy and Southeast Asian politics, passed mimeographed leaflets hand to hand, and questioned why their country needed generals to decide its future. These were young people raised on Cold War propaganda, yet now skeptical of the very authoritarianism marketed as “protection.”

By 1973, the regime’s contradictions had become impossible to ignore. Thanom’s repeated promises of constitutional reform went nowhere. His family’s accumulation of wealth and power had become a national scandal. When the government arrested thirteen student activists in October 1973 for distributing pro-democracy leaflets, it was not merely repression, it was a spark thrown into a decade of accumulating tinder.

The arrests ignited outrage that leapt from campuses into the streets. Within days, students were joined by monks, civil servants, bus drivers, street vendors, and white-collar workers, an unprecedented cross-section of urban Thai society. Protest sites became makeshift encampments. University cafeterias and volunteer kitchens churned out food for the swelling crowds. Amid giant aluminum vats of rice and curry, pots of Tom Kha Gai simmered, its coconut sweetness a small, steady comfort for exhausted bodies huddled on sidewalks, planning routes, writing placards, and bracing for the crackdown everyone knew was coming.

The regime attempted to wait them out, then intimidate them, then slander them as communists. None worked.

On October 14, 1973, Thanom ordered a final show of force. Soldiers and police confronted more than 400,000 demonstrators in the streets surrounding Chulalongkorn University and the Democracy Monument. Tear gas canisters arced into crowds. Soldiers fired live rounds. Protesters erected barricades made of bus benches and burning tires. Workers used their bodies as shields. Monks raised alms bowls against truncheons. Students rushed the wounded into improvised clinics. In the choking gas and chaos, volunteers ran with dented thermoses filled with Tom Kha, pressing warm cups into trembling hands, enough to calm someone and keep them standing.

Seventy-seven people were killed; hundreds more were wounded. But by late afternoon, the dictatorship cracked under the weight of its own violence. The palace intervened. King Bhumibol summoned Thanom, Narong, and Praphas and urged them to leave the country immediately before civil war ignited. Before the day was over, the triumvirate boarded planes into exile. After years of consolidated power, the regime collapsed in a single evening.

In the sudden quiet that followed, Thailand entered its first significant period of open democracy in decades. A new constitution was drafted. Elections were promised. Universities buzzed with possibility. For a brief, brilliant moment, the future seemed to belong to the students who had faced rifles with nothing but conviction, and bowls of soup.

And though Thailand’s democratic experiment would soon face new storms, the events of October 1973 carved themselves into national memory: a reminder that even the most entrenched regimes can fall.

Personally, I prefer Tom Kha to Tom Yum, but that is purely a matter of personal preference. Its up to you to make both and try them. 

Tom Kha Gai (Coconut Chicken Soup)

Servings: 4

Ingredients:

• 4 cups chicken broth

• 1 cup coconut milk

• 2 slices galangal (or ginger)

• 2 kaffir lime leaves, torn

• 1 stalk lemongrass, smashed and cut into pieces

• 7 oz chicken breast, thinly sliced

• 7 oz mushrooms

• 2 tbsp fish sauce

• 2 tbsp lime juice

• 1–2 Thai chilies, sliced

• Fresh cilantro

Instructions:

1. Simmer broth with galangal, lime leaves, and lemongrass for 5 minutes.

2. Add chicken and mushrooms, cook until chicken is done.

3. Stir in coconut milk, fish sauce, lime juice, and chilies.

4. Adjust seasoning to balance salty, sour, and creamy.

5. Garnish with cilantro before serving.

Po Pia Tod: The Crunch That Shattered Silence

Po Pia Tod (Fried Spring Rolls) is a classic example of Thailand's cross-cultural culinary history, tracing its roots back to the Chinese immigrants who settled in the country centuries ago. The name itself, Po Pia, is derived from the Chinese dialect term for "thin pancake." Originally a celebratory dish marking the arrival of spring, this simple concept was adapted in Thailand, transforming into the famous deep-fried, glass noodle-filled snack.

By the 1970s, these blistered golden rolls, piled on metal trays, wrapped in newspaper cones, bought for a few baht at a time, were the unofficial currency of student life. They fueled late-night study sessions, clandestine meetings, and the quiet hunger of a generation that believed it could rebuild its country. Their brittle exterior holding a dense, warm center became an accidental metaphor for the times.

And in the three years between Thailand’s brief democratic opening in 1973 and the October 6, 1976 massacre at Thammasat University, that metaphor was tested to its breaking point.

The ousting of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn in the 1973 Student Uprising opened a political horizon Thailand had not seen in decades. In the streets, people celebrated; in the universities, students became national heroes; in the halls of government, caretaker and coalition administrations attempted, some timidly, some earnestly, to steer a new democratic path.

But Thanom’s fall did not dismantle the system he built. The military remained powerful. Right-wing bureaucrats kept their posts. Cold War politics still framed every policy debate.

Students and workers, emboldened by their success in 1973, organized at a speed that shocked the establishment. Labor unions expanded. Peasant federations spread through the countryside. Newspapers proliferated. Political parties jousted openly for the first time in years. Thailand experienced a cultural and political thaw, messy, vibrant, hopeful.

Yet to conservatives, monarchists, and the military hierarchy, this democratic awakening looked like chaos. And to the United States, fresh from the debacle in Vietnam and terrified of communist gains, Thailand became a frontline state in need of “stability.” That word, stability, would soon become a euphemism for repression. 

By 1975, tensions were sharpening. Three Indochinese neighbors, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, fell to communist forces, shaking Thailand’s ruling class to its core. A paranoid question began circulating among generals, bureaucrats, and right-wing monks: Would Thailand be next?

To answer that fear, an entire ecosystem of reactionary mobilization emerged. The Village Scouts, a royalist mass-mobilization program, trained millions of rural Thais in anti-communist ideology. Nawaphon, a militant Buddhist-nationalist organization, preached that killing communists was karmically justified. The Red Gaur, a paramilitary gang of thugs and vocational students, attacked left-wing gatherings with impunity.

Meanwhile, students continued pushing for reform, land redistribution, transparency, an end to military abuses. They marched alongside farmers striking against debt bondage and workers demanding better conditions. This cross-class alliance terrified the establishment more than any outside threat.

The spark that truly ignited the crisis came with the return of Thanom Kittikachorn in 1976. Slipping back into Thailand under the guise of ordination as a novice monk, he was welcomed at Wat Bowonniwet. To students, this was an outrage: a symbol of unpunished dictatorship being re-sanctified. They rallied, occupied campuses, and demanded accountability.

To the right wing, the protests were proof that students were disrespectful radicals bent on collapsing the nation.

Propaganda intensified. Rumors multiplied. Radio hosts called students “heathens,” “communists,” “enemies of the throne.” Violence drifted ever closer.

In September 1976, two electricity workers, activists pushing for labor rights, were found lynched in Nakhon Pathom. Their corpses hung from a tree. Students at Thammasat staged a play reenacting the killings to draw attention to the growing political violence.

A photographer captured a single moment in the play.

Right-wing newspapers twisted it into a lie: that the students were mocking the crown.

The reaction was immediate and hysterical. Militias mobilized. The government, already leaning right, did nothing to calm the flames. The students, surrounded by venomous media coverage, prepared for a siege.

Thammasat University transformed into a temporary city. Thousands of students, monks, workers, and rural activists camped on the grounds demanding justice; not revolution, not republicanism, but justice.

Vendors came as they always had. Between banners and sleeping mats, charcoal grills smoked. Carts full of frying oil lined the walkways. Women spooned sweetened tea into plastic cups. Men flipped fish balls, grilled pork skewers, and fried endless batches of Po Pia Tod.

The spring rolls were everywhere, pyramids of them stacked by the gates, sold in paper cones near the football field, eaten by tired students sitting cross-legged beneath protest posters. Cheap, portable, sustaining. Something familiar in a moment when everything else felt uncertain.

In those days, people ate quickly, nervously. You could hold a spring roll in one hand and a leaflet in the other. Or a megaphone. Or a friend’s shaking fingers.

Just before dawn, as the Chao Phraya River caught the first traces of sunlight, the forces of the state descended. 

Police.

Border Patrol officers.

Village Scouts.

Red Gaur militias.

Right-wing vigilantes.

They carried rifles, shotguns, grenades, and months of accumulated hatred. The campus gates were breached within minutes. Students were shot as they fled. Some were arrested and then executed. Others were beaten, tortured, lynched, or mutilated. It remains one of the most brutal single-day political massacres in modern Southeast Asian history.

On the grass lay overturned woks, spilled oil still sizzling.

Stacks of Po Pia Tod were crushed under boots.

Half-eaten rolls fell beside dropped textbooks and abandoned shoes.

The fragility of those rolls; crisp shells broken and fillings scattered, mirrored the collapse of Thailand’s brief democratic experiment.

Officially, 46 were killed.

Survivors insist the real number was far higher.

The military seized power that very afternoon, ending the democratic interlude that had begun in 1973. For years afterwards, Thailand lived under a suffocating silence. Many student activists fled to the jungle to join the Communist Party insurgency, trading lecture halls for guerrilla camps. Others went underground, or disappeared.

Po Pia Tod, those spring rolls that so many had nervously ate that day, have gone on to become emblematic of Thai cuisine. 

Make sure to make your own dipping sauce. It is more than worth it. 

Po Pia Tod (Crispy Thai Spring Rolls)

Servings: About 12 rolls

Ingredients:

• 12 spring roll wrappers (wheat-based, not rice paper)

• 3.5 oz glass noodles (bean thread/cellophane noodles), soaked in warm water and cut into short lengths

• 1 cup cabbage, finely shredded

• 1 carrot, julienned

• 3 shiitake or wood ear mushrooms, finely chopped

• 2 green onions, chopped

• 3.5 oz ground pork or shrimp (optional)

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 tbsp soy sauce

• 1 tbsp oyster sauce

• 1 tsp fish sauce

• 1 tsp sugar

• 1/4 tsp white pepper

• Oil for frying Dipping Sauce (Classic Thai Sweet Chili Sauce):

• 1/4 cup rice vinegar

• 1/4 cup sugar

• 2 tbsp water

• 1 tbsp fish sauce

• 1–2 red chilies, minced (or 1 tsp chili flakes)

• 1 tsp cornstarch + 2 tsp water (slurry)

Instructions:

1. Make the filling: Heat a little oil in a wok. Add garlic, pork/shrimp (if using), and stir-fry until cooked. Add cabbage, carrot, mushrooms, and noodles. Stir-fry 2–3 minutes. Season with soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, sugar, and pepper. Remove from heat and let cool completely.

2. Assemble the rolls: Place a wrapper with one corner facing you (like a diamond). Add 2 tbsp of filling near the bottom. Fold the bottom corner over the filling, then fold in both sides, and roll tightly. Brush the top corner with water or beaten egg to seal. Repeat with all wrappers.

3. Fry the rolls: Heat oil (about 175°C / 350°F). Fry spring rolls in batches until golden brown and crispy, 3–5 minutes. Drain on paper towels.

4. Make the dipping sauce: In a small saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, water, fish sauce, and chilies. Simmer until sugar dissolves. Stir in cornstarch slurry and simmer until slightly thickened. Cool before serving.

5. Serve: Enjoy the crispy rolls hot with sweet chili sauce on the side.

Pad Thai: Street Noodles

Pad Thai, glossy rice noodles coated with tamarind, palm sugar, fish sauce, tofu or shrimp, and a scattering of crushed peanuts, might feel ancient, like something that has always existed on Bangkok sidewalks. But in reality, Pad Thai is a dish shaped by 20th-century forces: modernization, nationalism, scarcity, and state-building. In the 1930s and 40s, during the tenure of military strongman Plaek Phibunsongkhram (Phibun), the Thai state sought to reinvent itself as “modern,” “disciplined,” and decisively “Thai.” Phibun issued a series of “Cultural Mandates”: how people should dress, what they should call themselves, even what they should eat. Pad Thai, cheap and adaptable, was promoted as a national noodle, a dish that symbolized the new Thai identity. Vendors took it up because it was affordable; workers took it up because it was filling. Over time, Pad Thai became not a top-down nationalist invention but a bottom-up staple of the working classes.

By the 1990s, Pad Thai stalls were as much a part of Bangkok’s landscape as its temples and traffic jams. The dish fed office workers on lunch breaks, university students between lectures, and migrant laborers ending long shifts. It had become the democratic food of Bangkok; accessible, quick, and woven into the rhythm of street life. Which is precisely why, when Thai democracy shook in 1992, Pad Thai was already in the streets, ready to feed those who rose to defend it.

We last left off with October 6, 1976, the massacre at Thammasat University, the massacre that ended Thailand’s brief democratic experiment and ushered in another era of dictatorship. In the years that followed, dissenters fled into the jungles to join communist insurgents or sought refuge abroad. For those who remained, the memory of 1976 never faded.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were defined by alternating military and semi-civilian governments. General Prem Tinsulanonda, who served as prime minister from 1980 to 1988, presided over a hybrid system: elected politicians operated alongside an entrenched military that could intervene whenever it chose. Prem himself wasn’t a typical dictator, he wasn’t power-hungry in the theatrical sense, but he kept the military close and ensured that ultimate authority rested with those in uniform. Still, the 1980s brought economic growth, an expanding middle class, and a new generation of students who had not lived through the trauma of the 1970s but grew up hearing about it from older siblings and teachers.

Meanwhile, Bangkok transformed. Migrants from rural Isaan arrived in waves, seeking work in the capital’s construction sites and garment factories. Street food culture, already rich, exploded. Pad Thai became one of the most important dishes of this era. Vendors set up shop near bus stations, universities, night markets, and government buildings. For low-wage workers, it was the perfect meal: fast, inexpensive, and energizing. For students, it was midnight study fuel. For office workers, it was lunch between meetings. Pad Thai’s identity as a “people’s dish” solidified just as Thailand’s political future grew increasingly unstable.

By the late 1980s, Prem stepped aside, opening space for more competitive elections. But the military had no intention of giving up control. In February 1991, a faction of officers calling themselves the National Peace Keeping Council (NPKC) launched a coup, accusing the elected government of corruption and inefficiency. They installed Anand Panyarachun, a respected diplomat, as a civilian prime minister, technically. In practice, the generals still wielded the real power.

The coup leaders promised to restore democracy. Instead, they drafted a constitution tailored to military interests. The senate was appointed, not elected. The military retained sweeping authority. And in April 1992, the NPKC broke its most fundamental promise when its leader, General Suchinda Kraprayoon, who had sworn never to enter politics, accepted the premiership without ever standing for election.

For many Thais, especially those who remembered 1976, this was the moment the alarm bells finally became deafening.

Opposition coalesced around retired major general Chamlong Srimuang, a moralistic ascetic associated with the Santi Asoke Buddhist movement. Thin, sober, disciplined, Chamlong was in many ways Suchinda’s opposite. When he declared Suchinda’s appointment illegitimate, people listened.

Protests began small; student groups, NGOs, middle-class professionals. By May, they had grown into waves. Tens of thousands marched to Democracy Monument; then hundreds of thousands. Some estimates put the crowds at over 200,000. The protesters were not just students, but office workers, taxi drivers, civil servants, garment workers, monks, and families. Many came straight from work, still dressed in their office clothes. Others came with backpacks of supplies, prepared to stay the night.

Vendors came too.

Street stalls, especially Pad Thai stalls, gathered at the edges of the crowds. Their woks hissed and clanged. Some brought extra ingredients, knowing they would be cooking deep into the night. Because Pad Thai took less than a minute to cook, vendors could keep hundreds fed. And because it was inexpensive, even the poorest protesters could afford a plate. In those nights, the food became more than sustenance. It became a signal that the movement belonged to everyone, from university intellectuals to taxi drivers to street vendors themselves.

On May 17, the government announced new restrictions on public gatherings. Protesters refused to disperse. That night, police and soldiers began firing into crowds. Tear gas filled the air. Batons smashed into bodies. People fled down streets choked with smoke. Those who couldn’t run were beaten. Some were dragged into trucks and disappeared.

The violence escalated on May 18 and 19. Soldiers used live ammunition. Protesters sheltered behind makeshift barricades, trash bins, wooden pallets, overturned tuk-tuks. Students used megaphones to shout warnings as troops advanced. Ordinary citizens opened their homes to fleeing protesters. Bangkok, normally a chaotic but predictable city, became a labyrinth of danger and refuge, with every alley holding both risk and solidarity.

And through all of this, the Pad Thai vendors stayed.

Some moved their stalls into safer side streets, but many remained near the protest camps, cooking food even as gunshots cracked in the distance. Protesters sprinted in, grabbed a plate, and ran back out. Others gulped down meals before returning to the front lines. Vendors passed out free noodles to those who had lost wallets or bags in the chaos. One stall near Ratchadamnoen Avenue reportedly cooked nonstop for nearly 48 hours, its owners refusing to leave even when soldiers marched past.

By May 20, international attention intensified. Images of soldiers firing at unarmed civilians spread rapidly despite censorship. The king intervened, summoning Suchinda and Chamlong for a televised audience. Suchinda agreed to step down. Civilian government was restored. The violence ended, but the scars remained.

Official counts listed 52 dead, though witnesses insisted the real number was far higher.

Black May did not solve Thailand’s political struggles, far from it. But it marked a watershed. A generation that had grown up after 1976 proved it would not allow another dictatorship to entrench itself. And the working-class backbone of Bangkok, including street vendors, showed that democracy was not only defended by speeches or elections, but also by those who fed the crowds and kept them standing.

Pad Thai, born of state-driven nationalism half a century earlier, was reclaimed by the people. No longer just a symbol of identity engineered from above, it became an emblem of solidarity forged from below.

Personally, I find it best with shrimp. 

Pad Thai

Servings: 2

Ingredients:

• 5 oz rice noodles

• 5 oz shrimp, chicken, or tofu

• 2 eggs, lightly beaten

• 1 cup bean sprouts

• 2 green onions, sliced

• 2 tbsp roasted peanuts, crushed

• 2 tbsp oil 

Sauce:

• 2 tbsp fish sauce

• 1 tbsp tamarind paste

• 1 tbsp palm sugar (or brown sugar)

• 1 tsp chili flakes

Instructions:

1. Soak noodles in warm water until pliable, then drain.

2. Mix sauce ingredients in a bowl.

3. Heat oil in a wok, cook protein until done, then push to side.

4. Add eggs, scramble lightly, then toss in noodles.

5. Pour in sauce, stir-fry until noodles absorb liquid.

6. Add bean sprouts and green onions, toss briefly.

7. Garnish with peanuts and lime wedges.

Thai Iced Tea (Cha Yen): Sweet Relief

Thai Iced Tea, cha yen, is instantly recognizable; deep amber tea darkened with spices, sweetened with condensed milk until it glows sunset-orange, then poured over a mountain of crushed ice. Today it’s a global café favorite, but its story is one of maritime tea routes, Chinese migration, Western tinned milk, and Thailand’s long relationship between street vendors and upheaval.

Chinese immigrants arriving in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought with them hot, clear, robust tea culture. At the time, tea was an elite drink in Siam, something sipped at banquets or used medicinally. Its transformation into an inexpensive, milky, iced street staple only began once Western commercial goods and cooling technologies remade everyday life. Sweetened condensed milk, imported heavily by brands like Nestlé’s Milkmaid in the early 1900s, was a revelation. In a tropical climate with limited refrigeration, condensed milk offered sweetness, creaminess, and shelf stability that fresh dairy could not. Meanwhile, commercial ice factories in Bangkok (first appearing around 1903) made crushed ice widely accessible.

Street vendors fused Chinese-style tea with condensed milk, spices, and ice, creating a drink that was energizing, cheap, and cold, everything a humid, working-class city needed. The signature sunset-orange hue, often achieved with food coloring or aromatic additives like star anise and tamarind, made the drink visually distinct from oliang, its darker iced coffee cousin. By mid-century, cha yen had become the unofficial fuel of the working class: laborers cooling off after shifts, clerks grabbing plastic cups on lunch breaks, students lingering near market stalls between classes.

But in 1997, as Thailand stumbled into its worst crisis since World War II, Thai Iced Tea became more than refreshment. It became comfort, sweet, inexpensive relief in the middle of national collapse.

In the uneasy years that followed Black May 1992, when mass demonstrations against General Suchinda Kraprayoon ended in bloodshed and forced his resignation, Thailand emerged from the massacre chastened but hopeful. Civil society had flexed its muscles. Middle-class Bangkokians believed they had finally ended the cycle of military strongmen. A new constitution, the “People’s Constitution” of 1997, was already being drafted, promising transparency, decentralization, and protections against authoritarian backsliding.

But beneath the optimism lay unresolved fractures. The military had stepped back, but not away. Patronage networks remained entrenched. Political parties splintered into factional alliances led by magnates, generals-turned-politicians, and business elites who treated cabinet seats like investment portfolios. During the early 1990s boom, Bangkok sprouted skyscrapers as fast as rural migrants could pour the concrete. Finance companies handed out loans with reckless abandon. Foreign capital poured in. The middle class expanded. Thailand became the “Fifth Asian Tiger.”

Yet all this growth was built on fragile foundations: overheated real-estate speculation, lightly regulated finance institutions, and a dangerous commitment to an overvalued baht pegged to the U.S. dollar. Economists warned of a bubble. The government dismissed them. The façade of stability held, until it didn’t.

In July 1997, currency speculators launched coordinated attacks on the baht. The government burned billions of dollars of reserves desperately defending the peg. On July 2, the peg broke. The baht collapsed.

The fallout was immediate and brutal: Hundreds of finance companies failed. Unemployment skyrocketed. The middle class saw decades of savings wiped out in a matter of weeks. Migrant workers were sent home as construction halted and factories shuttered. Thailand entered freefall; its miracle suddenly revealed as a mirage.

When the IMF arrived with a bailout, its conditions hit hardest the very people who had least benefited from the boom: wage workers, rural migrants, civil servants, and students. Belt-tightening meant layoffs. Privatization. Higher taxes. Reduced social spending. Strict financial controls. Meanwhile, many of the elites whose speculation fed the bubble quietly shielded their assets abroad.

Thais didn’t accept austerity quietly. By late 1997, protests began gathering around Government House, Victory Monument, and the streets leading to Parliament. Workers marched in blocs, textile unions, industrial laborers, teachers, bus drivers, railway workers, fishermen devastated by fuel price hikes. Migrants who once worked on construction sites now sold street snacks and tea to survive. University students joined in, many with degrees but no job prospects.

The middle class too, those who had felt empowered after Black May, began showing up again, furious at the government’s mismanagement and the IMF’s demands. The movement was varied, messy, and decentralized. The mood alternated between angry and exhausted, hopeful and resigned.

And through it all, vendors followed the crowds.

In the sweltering Bangkok heat, protesters bought cup after cup of cha yen. Before cheap bottled water was everywhere, this was the universal hydrator, cold, sweet, caffeinated. On protest lines, Thai Iced Tea did what it always had: quenched the thirst of the people who built the country, and now protested to save it.

Among the vendors selling it were the newly unemployed, factory workers laid off without severance, taxi drivers who could no longer afford soaring fuel prices, clerical workers cut during austerity. Thai Iced Tea became more than a drink; it became a symbol of economic displacement, sold by those who had been pushed out of the formal economy by forces far beyond their control.

The protests swelled throughout late 1997. By November, public anger forced Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, the man in office during the collapse, to resign. His departure didn’t end the crisis, but it marked a key moment: the people once again toppled a government through mass mobilization, this time not over military dictatorship or political rights, but economic survival.

As Thailand rebuilt over the next years, cha yen remained a constant, an inexpensive luxury when luxuries became rare, a comfort shared across class lines, and a daily ritual that made the heat and hardship bearable.

Personally, when choosing between Boba and Cha yen, cha yen wins for me. 

Thai Iced Tea (Cha Yen)

Servings: 4

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 5 min | Total Time: 15 min (plus chilling)

Ingredients:

• 4 cups water

• 4 tbsp Thai tea mix (Ceylon or Assam blend)

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1 cup evaporated milk or condensed milk

• Ice cubes

Instructions:

1. Boil water in a pot. Add Thai tea mix, steep 5 min.

2. Strain tea through a fine mesh or cloth into a pitcher. Stir in sugar until dissolved.

3. Cool tea to room temperature, then chill in fridge 1 hr.

4. Fill glasses with ice, pour tea 3/4 full, top with evaporated or condensed milk.

5. Serve: Stir well before drinking. Tips: Adjust sugar for desired sweetness. Use condensed milk for creamier texture. Notes: Store tea in fridge for up to 2 days. Shake before serving.

Som Tum: Fiery Salad

Som Tum looks deceptively simple: shredded green papaya pounded with chiles, garlic, tomatoes, lime, fish sauce, and palm sugar. But the dish is older and more rebellious than its bright colors suggest. Its home is not Bangkok, but the Mekong region, Laos and Thailand’s northeast, Isan, where pounding salads (tam) go back centuries. The papaya itself is a 16th-century import from the Americas, brought by Portuguese traders. Once adopted, it slipped seamlessly into the local repertoire of spicy, fermented, deeply rural flavors.

For generations, Som Tum was a working-class Isan food: cheap, portable, pungent, and made with local ingredients, fermented fish sauce, tomatoes from backyard gardens, chiles grown on the edge of rice fields. As waves of Isan migrants moved to the capital from the mid-20th century onward, fleeing drought, debt, and lack of opportunity, they brought their food with them. The pounding of mortars became one of the first sounds of modern Bangkok’s expanding street life. The dish followed them into factory zones, construction sites, and night markets.

By the turn of the 21st century, Som Tum was no longer just food. It had become an unofficial cultural banner for the people the capital depended on but rarely acknowledged.

As we left off, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis shattered the country’s economic miracle. Currency collapse, IMF-mandated austerity, mass layoffs, and evaporating savings transformed Bangkok from a glittering boomtown into a city of shuttered businesses and fearful workers.

In Isan, the pain was worse. Already marginalized by decades of underinvestment, the region saw factories close, remittances shrink, and agricultural prices crash. The rural poor, who had always lived at the edge of survival, now found even that edge narrowing. Austerity protests flared across the country, students, farmers, debtors, and laid-off workers marching against a system that had promised prosperity and delivered ruin.

Though the protests were fragmented, they hardened a political awakening: the growing realization that the rural majority had little power in a political system dominated by generals, Bangkok elites, and revolving-door technocratic governments.

That anger would soon meet an unlikely political lightning rod.

When telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra swept into office in 2001, Bangkok’s establishment saw him as a populist demagogue. But in rural Thailand, in Isan most of all, he was something new: a prime minister who noticed them.

He delivered 30-baht healthcare, microloans, village funds, agricultural price supports. Entire communities that had spent decades treated like background scenery suddenly felt seen.

For many in the capital, Thaksin was dangerous: a threat to elite networks, military privilege, and monarchical influence. For many in the countryside, he was liberation.

The 2006 military coup that ousted him did more than remove a prime minister. It shattered the fragile illusion of democratic progression that had survived the 1990s crisis. The coup told rural voters, clearly, unmistakably, that their ballots were conditional, revocable, and ultimately subordinate to power.

Outrage simmered. And from that outrage, the Red Shirt movement emerged.

The United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, the Red Shirts, began as a loose alliance: rural villagers, urban taxi drivers, democracy activists, leftists, workers from the informal economy, and pro-Thaksin factions.

Between 2006 and 2009, the country entered a cycle of street politics. A rival protest group, the royalist Yellow Shirts, occupied airports and government buildings to force out pro-Thaksin governments. Courts dissolved parties aligned with the rural majority. Prime ministers fell not to elections, but to judges, generals, and backdoor negotiations.

By the end of the decade, Red Shirt anger reached a boil. They had played by the rules, voted, organized, hoped, and each time the system snatched victory from them.

They decided to take their presence, their culture, their voices, and their food straight into the capital’s heart.

In March 2010, more than 100,000 Red Shirts descended on Bangkok. Many came in caravans of pickup trucks from the red-dirt villages of Isan, driving hundreds of miles to demand elections and an end to military influence.

They occupied commercial districts, Ratchaprasong, Phan Fa, the avenues near Victory Monument. They built bamboo barricades, pitched tents, erected stages, and turned the financial core of Bangkok into a sprawling, improvised commune.

And everywhere, there was Som Tum.

Isan aunties set up makeshift kitchens beside the barricades. Vendors lugged mortars and pestles through police lines. The tok-tok-tok of pounding papaya echoed off the luxury malls of central Bangkok. The dish’s heat revived exhausted protesters. Its ingredients, papaya, lime, fermented fish sauce, became the taste of a movement demanding to be heard.

For two months, Som Tum was protest fuel.

On May 13, the crackdown began. Armored vehicles rolled down commercial boulevards. Snipers took positions on rooftops. Live ammunition was used against civilians. Barricades burned. Parts of the city turned to ash.

By the end, more than 90 people were dead, protesters, medics, journalists, bystanders.

One enduring image from that week is not a general or a politician—

but an auntie kneeling over her mortar, pounding papaya as soldiers advanced.

The aftermath of the crackdown reshaped Thai politics for the decade that followed.

Red Shirt activists were arrested, monitored, or forced underground. Elections were postponed, rewritten, and engineered. A new constitution strengthened military influence. Another coup came in 2014, cementing years of army rule.

By the late 2010s, Red Shirt energy had splintered into new movements, youth activists, pro-democracy reformers, labor organizers, but the memory of 2010 haunted everything.

When Red-aligned groups returned to protest in the late 2010s, they did so in a political landscape far more tightly controlled than the chaotic years after 2006. Their gatherings were smaller, more cautious but also symbolically charged, memorials, flash mobs, and commemorations of the dead from 2010. Many brought food, especially Isan food. Som Tum reappeared at vigils and anniversaries, the mortar once again a declaration of identity.

It wasn’t the massive encampment of 2010, those days were gone. But, the pounding of Som Tum in the streets of Bangkok was the sound of insistence: “We remember. We’re still here.” 

Personally, this has become one of my favorite salads, and is super easy to make.  

Som Tum (Green Papaya Salad)

Servings: 4

Ingredients:

• 2 cups shredded green papaya

• 1 carrot, shredded

• 6 cherry tomatoes, halved

• 2 long beans (or green beans), cut into 2-inch pieces

• 2 Thai chilies, smashed

• 2 garlic cloves, smashed

• 2 tbsp fish sauce

• 2 tbsp lime juice

• 1 tbsp palm sugar

• 2 tbsp roasted peanuts

Instructions:

1. In a mortar, pound garlic and chilies into a paste.

2. Add beans and tomatoes, lightly bruise them.

3. Stir in fish sauce, lime juice, and sugar.

4. Add shredded papaya and carrot, toss well.

5. Top with peanuts before serving.