Search Results (3)

This paper investigates how hybrid temples are created and transformed into tourist attractions, focusing on Wat Phothikyan Phutthathum—a Thai–Chinese temple located in Kelantan, close to Malaysia’s border with Thailand. This study aims to understand how both the local Thai minority and Chinese majority contribute to temple hybridisation, examine the influence of such temples on community identity, and explore their growing importance as tourist attractions. It highlights the negotiation and cultural exchange that shape new heritage spaces for borderland communities. Using visual analysis and interviews, the research shows that, since there are no Chinese temples nearby, Chinese Buddhists and Taoists adapt Thai temples by incorporating their own rituals and art. This results in blended iconography and practices, guided by an open-minded Thai monk. Features like large Buddha statues, staircases featuring naga-dragon designs, and murals combining different traditions reveal this fusion. The temple’s unique artwork and spiritual environment attract visitors from Muslim-majority areas and various countries like Thailand, Taiwan, and Singapore. As tourism becomes central to the temple’s role, the local authorities emphasise its religious significance and multicultural symbolism, aligning with economic interests and daily interactions among minority groups. This study offers valuable empirical and theoretical perspectives on the blending of religious heritage sites in border regions. Full article

Trust in Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM) among Thai people has been reduced due to a lack of objective standards and the susceptibility of the general population to false information. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has significantly impacted various industries, including traditional medicine. However, previous Gen AI models have primarily focused on prescription generation based on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), leaving TTM unexplored. To address this gap, we propose a novel fast-learning fine-tuned language model fortified with TTM knowledge. We utilized textual data from two TTM textbooks, Wat Ratcha-orasaram Ratchaworawihan (WRO), and Tamra Osot Phra Narai (NR), to fine-tune Unsloth’s Gemma-2 with 9 billion parameters. We developed two specialized TTM tasks: treatment prediction (TrP) and herbal recipe generation (HRG). The TrP and HRG models achieved precision, recall, and F1 scores of 26.54%, 28.14%, and 24.00%, and 32.51%, 24.42%, and 24.84%, respectively. Performance evaluation against TCM-based generative models showed comparable precision, recall, and F1 results with a smaller knowledge corpus. We further addressed the challenges of utilizing Thai, a low-resource and linguistically complex language. Unlike English or Chinese, Thai lacks explicit sentence boundary markers and employs an abugida writing system without spaces between words, complicating text segmentation and generation. These characteristics pose significant difficulties for machine understanding and limit model accuracy. Despite these obstacles, our work establishes a foundation for further development of AI-assisted TTM applications and highlights both the opportunities and challenges in applying language models to traditional medicine knowledge systems in Thai language contexts. Full article

Cultural diplomacy is often regarded as a potent method to enhance the bond between nations by facilitating the interchange of cultural values and practices. Previous studies have focused chiefly on political and economic elements, neglecting the role of religious institutions in cultural diplomacy. This paper investigates the function of Wat Chaozhou Kaiyuan si in Guangdong as a means of cultural diplomacy between China and Thailand. This temple is a significant platform for cultural and religious exchanges, fostering enhanced understanding and collaboration between the two nations. Using a case study methodology, this research employed five semi-structured interviews with several individuals, including a head monk from Wat, a monk from Thailand, a monk from China, a diplomat from Thailand, and a diplomat from China. Additionally, field observations were conducted. The data were examined using NVivo through a three-step process consisting of data collection, data coding, and data interpretation. The study produced four noteworthy findings: (1) Buddhism plays a vital role in cultural diplomacy by advancing national objectives through cultural engagement. (2) Cultural diplomacy involves the act of advancing a country’s interests by means of engaging in cultural exchanges. (3) We identified the key actors involved in formal cultural diplomacy. (4) Wat Chaozhou Kaiyuan acts as both a platform for cultural diplomacy and a facilitator of foreign cultural interactions, which is discussed in this study. Full article