Lan Pho, the Bodhi Tree of Thammasat University

A single tree on a university lawn became the starting point for the protest that ended a Thai dictatorship. On 6 October 1973, students gathered under this Bodhi tree at Thammasat University to demand the release of activists arrested for distributing leaflets calling for a new constitution, a protest that grew within days into the mass uprising of 14 October 1973, which brought down the government of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn. Three years later, the same tree stood over one of the darkest days in modern Thai history, the 6 October 1976 massacre, when paramilitary and police forces killed student protesters occupying the same grounds. The plaza around the tree, still called Lan Pho, the Bodhi Court, has carried that weight ever since, a birthplace of Thai democracy and the site of a massacre within three years of each other, under the same branches. The tree itself predates all of it. Thammasat was founded on this former Front Palace site in 1934, and the tree was already established ground the university simply inherited, mature enough that nobody has ever recorded when it was planted. At well over ninety years old, and probably far older, it is a tree that Thai political history simply happened around rather than the other way round.