The History of Muay Thai

In Bangkok in the early 1920s, a round of Siamese boxing lasted exactly as long as a coconut shell could float. Someone pierced the shell with a small hole and set it on the water, and the two men in the ring, fists wrapped in hemp rope, fought until it went under. Then they rested, the shell came up, and it started again. Within a decade the rope was gone, the coconut had given way to the clock, and the sport Thailand calls its own had taken the shape it still has tonight.

The short answer: Muay Thai is old in its bones and young in its rules. The unarmed fighting it grew from trained Siamese soldiers for the moment they lost the sword or the spear, and it lived for centuries as festival fighting. The ring sport was rebuilt in one hurried generation: roped rings and timed rounds in the 1920s, gloves around 1929, Rajadamnern Stadium in 1945, Lumpinee in 1956, an international federation in 1993 and full Olympic recognition in 2021. What follows keeps that path in order, and keeps the legends, of which Muay Thai has more than most, on their own side of the line.

Key facts

Origin

Kingdom of Siam (Thailand); military close combat, Ayutthaya period or earlier

Older form

Muay Boran – regional styles fought with rope-bound fists

Modern rules

Gloves c. 1929; five rounds of three minutes; weight classes

Home stadiums

Rajadamnern (1945) and Lumpinee (1956), Bangkok

Governing body (amateur)

IFMA, founded 1993; full IOC recognition 2021

Nickname

“Art of eight limbs” – fists, elbows, knees, shins

Before the ring: what the fire at Ayutthaya took

The kingdoms that became Thailand were at war more often than not, with Burma above all, and an army that fights that often learns what to do when the sword or the spear is gone. That is where muay comes from. The Thai word means boxing and nothing more; Muay Thai is “Thai boxing”, and the older, broader styles it grew out of go today under the name Muay Boran, “ancient boxing”.

How old is it? Nobody can tell you, and anyone who offers a founding date is guessing. The reason is a single event. In 1767 Burmese forces captured Ayutthaya, the capital of Siam since 1350, and burned it, and most of the kingdom's written records burned with it. What survives from before the 19th century comes from the royal chronicles, reconstructed after the fire, from what was passed on by mouth, and from the styles themselves.

The styles are eloquent. Muay Korat from the north-east: a wide stance and a straight, powerful punch. Muay Chaiya from the south: a compact guard, elbows, a low and defensive posture. Muay Lopburi from the centre: feints and clever, technical punching. Muay Thasao from the north: speed. Fighters wound hemp rope around their hands and forearms, the kaad chueak, to protect the knuckles, and tradition says the rope could be dipped in resin or starch to harden it. The fights were held at temple fairs and festivals with the whole village at the edge of the ground. There were no weight classes, no rounds and no time limit, beyond the one set by how long two men could stand.

The chronicles keep one royal fighter in particular. Phra Chao Suea, the “Tiger King”, reigned from 1703 to 1709 and is remembered as a keen boxer who went to village festivals in disguise to take on the local champions. Whether every detail is true hardly matters. A king who wanted to be seen as good at muay tells you what muay was worth in the early 18th century.

A king brings the villages to court

The 19th century pressed European powers against Siam from every side, and its kings modernised the country to keep it out of their hands. Sport was part of the programme. King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, reigned 1868–1910) took muay under his patronage, had fighters brought up from the provinces to Bangkok and made their fights part of royal ceremonies. Under him muay stopped being the business of one village or one province and became something the whole kingdom could follow.

The moment Thai histories single out came in 1910, at a royal ceremony in Bangkok, when fighters from the leading regional schools competed before the court. Three of them, from Korat, Lopburi and Chaiya, walked away with official titles that carried the name of their style, and the honour fixed those names in the national memory. The best known is Muen Muay Mee Chue, “the boxer with a reputation”, from Chaiya. A fighter could now be a public figure, and the styles they stood for had a rank order.

Chulalongkorn's successor, King Vajiravudh (Rama VI, reigned 1910–1925), had studied in England, and Western sport left its mark on what he sponsored. Fights moved inside fenced or roped rings, referees took charge, and bouts were cut into rounds. The rounds were timed the traditional way: a coconut shell pierced with a small hole and floated in water, and when it sank, the round was over. The Suan Kulap venue in Bangkok, active from the early 1920s, is usually named as the first permanent stage of the new sport, and Suan Sanuk and other Bangkok venues followed later in the decade. The coconut would not last much longer. Neither would the rope.

The year the rope came off

The biggest single change came at the end of the 1920s, and it came from a death. Fighting with rope-bound fists was brutal, and in a bout in Bangkok in 1929, by most accounts, a fighter died of his injuries. The government stopped competition with kaad chueak and required boxing gloves, which Western boxing had brought to Siam only a few years before. Sources put the year anywhere between 1928 and 1930; on the effect they agree. From then on Muay Thai was a gloved sport.

Gloves changed how the sport was fought. Rope had favoured the open hand and the forearm; a glove makes the closed fist the main weapon of the hands, and it pushed the art towards the boxing-plus-kicks-and-knees form it has today. The same years brought weight classes, a fixed number of rounds with a rest between them, and a referee with the authority to stop a fight. Groin protection became standard, first the krajab of tree bark or seashell and later the modern cup.

The rules that settled in the 1930s and were refined after the Second World War are, in essence, the ones in force tonight: five rounds of three minutes with two minutes' rest, judges scoring the fight as a whole rather than round by round, and a repertoire of punches, kicks, elbows, knees and clinch work. What was lost were the throws, headbutts and ground strikes of the older styles. They survive in Muay Boran demonstrations, and nowhere else.

Two buildings that decide what a career is worth

Every sport needs a home, and Muay Thai got two. Rajadamnern Stadium, on the avenue of the same name in Bangkok, opened on 23 December 1945, after the war had interrupted its construction. It was the first stadium built for Muay Thai, and it set the pattern: a professional promotion, ranked fighters, a title in each weight class. Lumpinee Stadium, run by the Royal Thai Army, opened on 8 December 1956 and moved to a new building on Ram Intra Road in 2014.

For a Thai fighter those two buildings still define what a career is. A Rajadamnern or Lumpinee title counts for more in Thailand than most belts from the international organisations, because the fields are deep and the road to a title fight runs through years of matches against the best in the country. The stadium circuit also fixed the economics of the sport. Fighters from the provinces, many of them children when they start, move to Bangkok camps, fight for purses in front of gambling-driven crowds, and retire young.

The part that is older than the rules

Western spectators usually notice the ceremony before they notice the fighting. Before the first round each fighter performs the Wai Khru Ram Muay: the wai khru, a kneeling bow to teacher, parents and the art, and the ram muay, a slow dance around the ring that tells the crowd which camp the fighter comes from and, tradition says, seals the ring against bad luck. It is respect, concentration and warm-up in a single movement. On the fighter's head sits the mongkhon, a headband the trainer puts on and takes off again before the fight begins, and on the arms, usually, the pra jiad, armbands that were once made from a piece of a mother's sarong.

Then the music starts, and it does not stop. The sarama is played live: a Javanese-style oboe, the pi chawa, two drums and a pair of small cymbals, and its tempo follows the fight and climbs through the final rounds. All of this predates the modern sport, and when the rules were written down, nobody wrote it out. That is why a bout in Bangkok looks and sounds like nothing in a kickboxing ring anywhere else.

Muay Thai leaves Thailand

The export began in the 1960s and went two ways at once. In Japan, promoters who had seen Thai fights built kickboxing in the mid-1960s as a home-grown answer, keeping the kicks and knees and dropping the elbows; Japanese kickboxing later fed into K-1, founded in 1993. In Europe, Dutch fighters and trainers built the strongest scene outside Thailand from the 1970s, in camps such as Thom Harinck's Chakuriki in Amsterdam, and the “Dutch style”, heavy on boxing combinations and low kicks, became the main rival school.

The man who did most to make the name global was Buakaw Por. Pramuk. He won the K-1 World MAX tournament in Japan in 2004 and again in 2006, beating the best kickboxers in the world under rules that did not even allow him his elbows. In the 2000s and 2010s Muay Thai also became the striking base of choice for mixed martial arts, and the camps of Phuket and Bangkok filled with foreign fighters.

The amateur side organised itself in 1993 with the founding of the International Federation of Muaythai Associations (IFMA), which runs world championships with protective equipment, points scoring and age groups. IFMA's work carried the sport into the World Games in 2017, to provisional recognition by the International Olympic Committee in December 2016 and to full recognition in 2021. Recognition is not a place on the Olympic programme, which each host city's organising committee proposes and the IOC approves. It is the precondition for one, which is not nothing.

Muay Thai today

The sport now runs on several tracks at once. In Thailand the stadium circuit goes on, joined by television and streaming promotions such as ONE Championship, which stages Muay Thai bouts in small gloves, and by a government that promotes the art as cultural heritage and as a reason to visit. Internationally, professional world titles come from several organisations, the amateur sport follows IFMA rules, and Muay Thai technique is trained in almost every MMA gym in the world.

For a beginner, this history has a practical use. The clinch, the elbow, the low kick and the knee are not extras bolted on to a kickboxing frame; they are the oldest parts of the system, and the ritual before the fight is not decoration but the thread that connects a gym in Berlin or Boston to a camp in Isan. If you want to see what the rope-bound era looked like, watch a Muay Boran demonstration. If you want to know why Thai fighters are so calm under pressure, count how many fights they have had by the age of twenty.

Where to go next

• The Muay Thai discipline hub collects training articles, workouts and gear for the sport.
• Heavy Bag Intervals is a 20-minute conditioning session built around Thai-style kicks and knees.
• The Last Week Before Competition explains how fighters prepare for a stadium bout.
• Compare the birth of another ring sport in Boxing: From Bare Knuckles to the Queensberry Rules.