I’ve been in Thailand for about two weeks now, and one of the things I’ve come to understand is that every day of the week (or at least the first three so far) have a color. This means, on Mondays, a noticeably amount of people wear yellow shirts. On Tuesdays, pink. I’ve been told that tomorrow, Wednesday, it’ll be blue.
What is this about? Where does it come from? Our taxi driver coming in told us about the yellow on Mondays, saying it was to pay hommage to the king…
IIRC, the color for each day of the week is a lucky color, kinda like there being a Buddha for every day of the week (plus 2 more for a total of 9…something about one for those born late on a Wednesday and one more, I think for if you don’t know what day you were born on).
But as for the actual origin of this, I have no clue, sorry.
Paging Siam Sam…
…But until he gets here, this is something that’s apparently started in the past five years or so. Yellow is for the King, blue for Queen Sirikit: those are the two most commonly observed colors. I’ve seen pink and green as well, don’t know which royal personage they are supposed to honor.
I’m not sure of the exact basis of the color schemes, but it’s deep-rooted. For instance, pink is Chulalongkorn University’s school color because it was King Chulalongkorn’s color, since he was born on a Tuesday (September 20, 1853). So it’s not that a certain king had pink as a color, it’s that he was born on the day that has pink as it’s color. The current king was born on a Monday (December 5, 1927), so yellow is his color. Each day has its own color.
I asked the wife, and she does not know the origins of the color code. She did confirm, though, that it is not part of Buddhism (which I already knew), but rather a holdover from ancient times. The origin has been lost. Why a specific day has one specific color and not another one, know one seems to know.
The yellow shirts on the Monday to support the king is indeed a recent development. Only in maybe the last three years or so. Except for that, the whole color scheme seems to be going by the wayside for the most part. Those who still pay attention to it – except for the yellow shirts for the king on Monday, and that’s really more a show of support for the king than it is paying attention to the color code – are generally considered hicks, especially by the suave, urbane Bangkokians.
Many of the old superstitions are dropping away. It used to be considered unlucky to get a haircut on Wednesdays, and I can remember when many barber shops were closed on that day as a result, especially upcountry. But now, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen a barber shop closed on a Wednesday.