Thailand's largest Catholic community marks Christmas with three-day procession in Tha Rae, known as 'Land of Stars'

The story of how Thailand's largest Catholic community came to be in one of the country's poorest provinces is an unlikely one.

Tha Rae village in the rice-growing province of Sakon Nakhon, not far from the Laos border in northeastern Thailand, is home to around 15,000 Roman Catholics - the estimated 380,000-strong religious group's largest settlement in the country.

Locals call the area the 'Land of Stars' for the Christmas celebrations that are held there, which see houses compete to display the best decorations, while a three-day star procession - symbolising the sign signifying the birth of Jesus, seen by the three Wise Men in the Bible - runs up to December 25, drawing thousands to the banks of a vast lake where the community is now rooted.

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Descendants of uprooted Vietnamese, Chinese and Lao ethnic groups who settled in and around Sakon Nakhon province from the 1800s onwards, the Tha Rae community moved to a spot on lake Nong Han 137 years ago.

"Since then, Catholicism has been our anchor, it's what holds everyone's spirits together," said Jaruwan Manomaiyakit, a 62-year-old local historian who is better known as Mary.

"We're a proud, close-knit community," she said, speaking in a French-designed building with Chinese script on the walls, steaming bowls of Vietnamese pork noodles on the table and Christmas music piped in overhead.

The Catholics of Tha Rae were led to their village in 1884 by a French priest called Father Xavier Grego, who helped them cross the lake on a giant raft made from bamboo.

The founding families established their own religious commune, built on a European-style grid, with modern sewers, schools and a large Cathedral at its heart.

Their European forefathers left the community with systems of health care and education - English is spoken by many in the area of rice fields and high poverty rates - and established links between it and the outside world.

Students from Tha Rae still travel to Catholic schools in Bangkok and abroad, and the village can claim a Thai television host and prominent businesspeople among its most famous residents - having vaulted over the economic traps faced by many in Sakon Nakhon.

Many of the original buildings are in European revival style, with large wooden shutters and colonnades, while the food is pick and mix of Vietnam, Lao, Chinese and Thai.

Catholics make up less than 2 per cent of Thailand's almost 70 million people, which is overwhelmingly Buddhist.

Catholic missionaries from Portugal first arrived in the late 1500s and many faced suspicion, violence and sporadic attempts to drive them out. Still, they established missions and communities grew with trading links to the outside world.

Persecution of the Catholic minority peaked in the 1940s under an ultranationalist government determined to cement Buddhism as the national religion in the border areas, far from the reach of Bangkok.

But since then tolerance has gradually replaced repression, as seen with the Pope's visit to Thailand shortly before the pandemic.

Locals in Tha Rae say their minority status has helped create a strong culture and identity, which is on full display every Christmastime.

"The star procession on Christmas Eve started over 100 years ago," Tha Rae's Mayor Phongsak Srivorakul told This Week In Asia.

"Back then we made our stars out of locally sourced bamboo and we walked in circles around the church." said the 70-year-old descendant of Vietnamese emigres who were among the village's founding families.

Now the ceremony has morphed into a large event leading up to Christmas Day, with huge illuminated stars set on boats on the lake and on floats processed around the roads of Sakon Nakhon. The event has become a wider celebration of local cultures, with music and elaborate dance from the founding tribes of Tha Rae, as the banks of lake Nong Han are lit up with fireworks and laser shows.

"The star procession has become bigger and better every year," said Sister Teresa Upapong, 48, a Catholic nun who this week travelled back to Tha Rae from a seminary in Thailand's east to spend Christmas in her hometown. "I'm so proud to be from here."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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