Blowin’ in the wind
The Bangkok Post April 3 1988
The ideal kite-flying age must be ten or thereabouts. The ideal country must be back of the north wind with acres of rolling uplands and not a car, telephone line or hedge in sight. Preferably you should have made your kite yourself, from ‘sally rods’ – thin, supple willow switches cut from roadside hedges – and covered with drum-tight papier mâché, the glue made from flour and water. This type of kite is called the tuppence ha’penny do-it-yourself designer model and is not marketed much anymore.
Looking with adult eyes at the array of kites, big and small, ferocious and tame, flying above Sanam Luang, my childhood kite pales in comparison. Since February the air has been full of fluttering above craning necks.
For kite flying is a serious sport, though imbued with a light-spiritedness and a character uniquely Thai. It has a long and colourful history. Along with boxing and that curious foot-wielding game, takraw, it is classified as a national sport, with its own rules, season and competitions.
The months of March and April are traditional kite-flying months. The hot wind, lom tapao or trade wind, comes sweeping up the Gulf of Thailand. In any child's or adult's eyes it is regarded as lom wao, the kite wind.
Out on the oval at Sanam Luang, surrounded by green space and th soaring wonders of the Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew, come kites of all sizes, shapes and colours. Sanam Luang has one of those rare open vistas where kite flying becomes truly a sport of the gods.
The weekend is the best time to catch the atmosphere, around 4 p.m. when the air is cooler and there’s less glare from the sky. And, of course, March and April are school holiday months in Thailand, so hordes of youngsters take to the wind to try and get their kites airborne.
Kite flying is a premier Asian sport, enjoyed from Japan to Burma. It originated, as far as we can tell, in China. It is thought to have entered Thailand during the Sukothai period, and enjoyed great popularity under King Chulalongkorn’s reign. He designated Sanam Luang specifically for kite flying during the summer months and did much to promote the sport in a competitive direction. He presented a ‘King’s Trophy’ to the winner of an annual matching of wits and skills between the Royal family and Government ministers at Dusit Park. This colourful event assured continued popular interest in the pastime, as well as elevating it to the status of a serious sport in its own right.
It doesn’t do any harm to have a basic knowledge and vocabulary in kite flying at your fingertips, as it were. At Sanam Luang you will be in better shape to understand the reasons for all that cheering when a kite goes plummeting, or why there is such to-ing and fro-ing with pulleys and ropes. The large kite with the humanoid form – two legs, two arms and a pointed head – is called the chula, or male kite. It is constructed with proper reverence for tradition – in proportions and materials – from bamboo and sa, rice paper which is very light and strong. The chula kite is usually seven feet long. The joins of the various taut threads used to maintain the tension are decorated with golden discs. The five pointed extremities are no accident either. The number five in Buddhist and Thai thinking has special properties. Twenty-five and sixty are auspicious and much celebrated ages. Our senses number five, and so on. An airborne creature, in a country where elevation has great significance, must be correctly proportioned and elegant to boot.
The female kite, or pakpao, is much smaller, perhaps unfairly, and resembles the four-sided Western-style kite. But she makes up for size with wiliness and manoeuvrability. The male is sometimes lugubrious or ungainly, difficult to get off the ground. But once airborne, he has the verve of an eagle. The female has a tail so she can play around with the male, blocking his wind, and can eventually bring him down. The strings attached to the kite are sometimes coated with abrasive resin to give them a cutting edge. So the war of the sexes takes to the air, and like the grass-roots one, is a mixture of frivolity, teasing, winners and losers.
Beautiful kites are on sale at Sanam Luang for as little as five baht and as much as 500 baht for the big chulas. They represent owls, fish, frogs and humans, harking back to pre-Buddhist, animistic roots. Sometimes private companies launch massive box kites as large as a house. Everybody joins in: grandfather and tots, teams from the various banks competing, with supporters and managers bawling out elaborate tugging procedures.
What better way to catch up on that childhood feel of taut string and high flying, as if one were up there with it – ‘the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull’, as the Irish poet Seamus Heaney puts it. In English the word ‘kite’ comes from firmly Celtic roots, the Welsh ‘cud’ and the Breton ‘kidel’, meaning a hawk. Like the hawk, the sport is rapacious, speedy, competitive and beautiful to watch. So pack a flask of coffee and a sandwich and get out there in the wind and hold your own.