How did foreign cuisine become Thailand’s national dish?

The Non-Thai Origins of Pad Thai – How did foreign cuisine become Thailand’s national dish? – The Atlantic, April 17, 2014
…The popularization of the noodle dish, as it turns out, was but one of several measures taken by Thai authorities in the 1930s and 1940s to both Westernize and modernize the country. The others, as The New York Times noted over the weekend, included changing the country’s name from Siam to Thailand, banning local languages and dialects from the nation’s schools, and promoting the word sawasdee as a means of greeting…