Dahb Thai, Japanese swords and hybrids

[Mark]

As it turns out, the entire Smithsonian Museum of American History is closed for renovations until the summer of '08. Hard to believe that they would close the whole thing for that long.

Here is a passage about Thais keris that we have quoted a few times, from the 17th century travel account of de la Loubere, "A New Historical Relations of the Kingdon of Siam" (1693). He defines a Thai word, "krid" as "a dagger which the king give to the mandarins, and then states:

They wear it thrust into a Girdle on the left side, but very much before. The Europeans do corruptly call it Crist

pp. 167-168.

I have several references to the deportation of war captives by the Khmer, Thai, and Burmese, but looking at my notes I do not have complete citations, so I need to go back and confirm in a couple cases which of a particular author's works I was quoting. It takes some time to crawl through the bad handwriting of my notes, unfortunately.