Qualla: Renu Nakhon District

Renu Nakhon District: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the fan store at the King Power Stadium in Leicester, among the replica shirts and the scarves, there has been a rack of blue sportswear that came a very long way. The dye in it was grown, cut and fermented in Ban Na Kham, a village of Renu Nakhon district in northeastern Thailand, where twenty-two artisans spin cotton into yarn by hand and colour it with indigo they harvest themselves. The blue they get, known locally as kram, happens to be very close to Leicester City's blue. The club is owned by King Power, a Thai company, and the Indigo Collection went on sale in May 2018 to considerably more interest than anyone in the village had expected.

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Renu Nakhon District: Green in the Vat, Blue in the Air

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Natural indigo is not a dye you buy and stir in. The plant has to be cut, steeped until it ferments, beaten to aerate the liquor, and kept alive in the vat like a sourdough starter, fed and watched and coaxed back when it sulks. Cotton dipped in it comes out green and turns blue ...

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Renu Nakhon District: Brought Across the River

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. The people of Renu Nakhon are Phu Thai, a Tai group whose homeland lay far to the northeast in the country of the Sip Song Chu Tai, spread across what is now northern Vietnam, Laos and southern China. They did not arrive here by choice. During the reign of Rama III, Siam set abou...

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Renu Nakhon District: A Language That Remembers the Route

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Phu Thai is still spoken here, and it is not simply Isan with an accent. It belongs to the Southwestern Tai family and had roughly 156,000 speakers in Thailand as of the early 1990s, concentrated around Mukdahan and Khamcha-i and scattered through Nakhon Phanom, Kalasin and Sakon...

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Renu Nakhon District: The Name That Was Taken Away

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. Administratively, Renu Nakhon has had an unusual career. The old mueang was converted into a district in 1907 during the thesaphiban reforms that reorganised the whole Siamese provincial system. Ten years later, in 1917, the district was renamed That Phanom after the great stupa ...

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Renu Nakhon District: A Smaller Great Stupa, and a Song

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 3.0. At the centre of the district stands Wat Phra That Renu Nakhon, whose chedi was raised in 1918 and modelled on Phra That Phanom, the enormous original down on the Mekong to the southeast. This one reaches about 35 metres and holds scriptures and gold Buddha images; the temple als...

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Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 3.0