History
The area around Khorat was already an important center in the times of the Khmer empire in the 11th century, as can be seen by the temple ruins in the Phimai historical park. Still, Nakhon Ratchasima Province is one of the provinces where there is a sizable Northern Khmer population.
A new walled-city with a surrounding moat, designated as Nakhon Ratchasima, was built in the seventeenth century by order of the King Narai, as the easternmost 'command post', guarding the Kingdom's border and supervising its Lao and Cambodian 'vassals'. It continued this duty during the Bangkok Period, although it was seized by deceit during Chao Anuwong of Vientiane's 1826 revolt against the King Rama III of Siam.
Nakhon Ratchasima has long been the most important political and economic center in the northeastern region. In the late nineteenth century, the railroad reached Khorat became the junction of two main rail lines in the Northeastern, Isan, region.
In 1933 it was the stronghold of the royalist troops in the Boworadej Revolt, against the new ostensibly democratic government in Bangkok.
In the 1970s, the province was the site of United States military bases supporting the Vietnam War.
Read more about this topic: Nakhon Ratchasima Province
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)