They don't make British Ambassadors like Sir Anthony Rumbold any longer. The last part of his very insightful leaving letter in 1967. When he first came to Bangkok in 1955 he said it was all klongs and temples. He was wrong about the music of course.
https://secretsiam.news/p/gazelles-and-butterflies
I have very much enjoyed living for a while in Thailand. One would have to be very insensitive or puritanical to take the view that the Thais had nothing to offer. It is true that they have no literature, no painting and only a very odd kind of music, that their sculpture, their ceramics and their dancing are borrowed from others and that their architecture is monotonous and their interior decoration hideous. Nobody can deny that gambling and golf are the chief pleasures of the rich and that licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all. But it does a faded European good to spend some time among such a jolly, extrovert and anti- intellectual people. And if anybody wants to know what their culture consists of the answer is that it consists of themselves, their excellent manners, their fastidious habits, their graceful gestures and their elegant persons. If we are elephants and oxen they are gazelles and butterflies. On the other hand I am glad not to be staying here longer because I am certain that the deterioration in my mental processes is due not only to the onset of old age but more particularly to the enervating effects of the climate which no amount of exercise and airconditioning can nullify.