Unrecorded 1958 Wall Map of Thailand Compiled from Royal Thai Army, Government, and French Indochinese Sources, Published in the Year of the Coup.
แผนที่ประเทศไทย / MAP OF THAILAND
$3,000
1 in stock
Description
No Other Examples Traced.
This map was published in 1958, in the immediate aftermath of the military coup of September 1957 that ended the long and turbulent rule of Field Marshal Phibunsongkhram and brought Sarit Thanarat to power. Whether it was formally distributed, who commissioned it, or how many copies were made is unknown — no other example has been traced.
What survives is a large wall map on linen, mounted on original wooden rollers, rendered in sepia and brown tones on a cream ground in the manner of a working cartographic master: visually restrained, precise, and quietly authoritative.The overall effect recalls the French tradition of the carte dressée — a manuscript-compiled map subsequently reproduced and enhanced by hand, likely through diazo or ozalid processes common in Southeast Asia before offset lithography became standard.
It is the kind of map that would have hung in a ministry or a general’s office — not made to be sold, but made to be used. That it has survived at all is remarkable. That it survives in this condition, with its sources documented, its compiler named, and its moment in Thai history so precisely recoverable, makes it something rarer still.
The Map in Detail
The map depicts the full territorial extent of Thailand at a moment of rapid administrative and infrastructural development. Roads are classified into national highways, provincial routes, and roads under construction, radiating outward from Bangkok across the central plains, the Khorat Plateau, and the southern peninsula. Railway networks and major river systems add further layers of strategic information. Bilingual Thai-English nomenclature throughout the sheet — แผนที่ประเทศไทย / MAP OF THAILAND and Gulf of Thailand among them — reflects both domestic administrative utility and the growing international orientation of Thai cartography during the Cold War era.
Particularly notable is the compiler’s explicit acknowledgment of the diverse source material underlying the map’s construction. The mapmaker synthesized data from the Royal Thai Army Survey Department, the Department of Highways, the Ministry of the Interior, the Department of Meteorology, and, significantly, the Générale de l’Indochine Française. The combination of indigenous governmental surveys and French colonial cartography demonstrates an unusually sophisticated and historically layered approach to mapmaking, and confirms the map as an original Thai cartographic production rather than a derivative foreign publication.
Historical Context
Completed only months before the coup d’état of September 1957, this map emerged during one of the most politically volatile periods in modern Thai history. Under Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, Thailand was undergoing profound ideological and territorial consolidation while simultaneously establishing itself as a strategic Cold War ally of the United States. In this context, national cartography carried considerable symbolic weight: maps functioned not merely as practical tools but as instruments of statecraft, territorial definition, and modern national identity.
The reference to French Indochinese cartography is especially revealing. For decades, Siam and France had contested borders across Laos and Cambodia, and the continued reliance on French colonial surveys in a Thai national map reflects both the technical superiority of those datasets and the stabilization of postwar frontiers after the territorial upheavals of the Second World War. The map captures a convergence of indigenous Thai surveying traditions, colonial geographical knowledge, and Cold War geopolitical realities that is unlikely to be found documented in quite this form anywhere else.
Publication History and Census
We have been unable to trace another example of this map. Large-format Thai wall maps of the 1950s were often produced in limited quantities — in some documented cases in editions of fewer than ten copies — and survival rates were correspondingly low. The present example is therefore not only visually striking but an exceptionally rare witness to the evolution of modern Thai national cartography.
Cartographer(s):
Condition Description
Very good.
References
