proached me from a distance. “IIII II IIII,” he declared, raising one hand.

“Ah, thanks,” I said, when it became clear that he was expecting some response.

“IIII II IIII!” he repeated, his boxing glove still aloft.

Finally, I understood what he was saying: “Give me five!”

Muay Thai is known as the Science of Eight Limbs, because fighters use their fists, feet, elbows, and knees. The basic movements include punches, high and low kicks, elbow strikes, and a wide variety of knee kicks. Of all the “eight limbs,” Thai boxers are most partial to elbows and knees. Elbow strikes, which typically result in deep gashes to the face, are prohibited in most American fights.

Muay Thai was brought to the United States in 1968 by a retired Thai fighter named Surachai Sirisute. He opened a training camp in his back yard in Pomona, California, where his pupils included several Hell’s Angels. Sirisute became a guru in the martial-arts community, worked with members of the Dallas Cowboys, the F.B.I., and the C.I.A., and was instrumental in the rise of Muay Thai in America throughout the seventies and eighties. The first professional American Muay Thai championship was held in Los Angeles in 1974, under the designation of “full-contact karate.” The main American sanctioning organizations—the International Sport Kickboxing Association (I.S.K.A.) and the U.S. Muay Thai Association (U.S.M.T.A.)—were established in the eighties and nineties. Today, there are four or five hundred fighters on the professional Muay Thai circuit in the United States—about ten per cent of them women—and thousands of amateurs.

In Thailand, there are hundreds of thousands of professional boxers and tens of millions of fans, many of them gamblers. Thais love to bet, and will bet on almost anything. (When the former Muay Thai champion Somluck Khamsing won a gold medal in Western—style boxing at the 1996 Olympics, people all over Thailand started buying lottery tickets corresponding to his license-plate number.) At the two most prestigious stadiums in Thailand, Lumpini and Rajadamnern, nearly every audience member has some money on the fights. Bookies and professional “prognosticators” offer odds not just on who will win each match but on the type of win (K.O. or T.K.O., unanimous or split decision), on the outcome of individual rounds, on whether the first blow will be struck by foot or by hand, and even on whether said blow will come from the left or the right. Thai politicians regularly endorse boxers as a means of gaining publicity. The King, the Prime Minister, the Mafia—everyone cares about Muay Thai. Boxing in Thailand is what poetry was in Soviet Russia: an aesthetic form treated as a vital affair of state.

Muay Thai is a ring sport, and low on philosophical rhetoric. The point is not to achieve Zen but to knock out your opponent. In tae kwon do, the motions are choreographed according to dense non-pugilistic narratives: one set of moves, known as Heaven and Earth, is supposed to suggest the creation of the world, while another, Dosan, is a twenty-four-step pantomime of the life and achievements of Changho (Dosan) Ahn, an educational reformer from the Korean independence movement of the nineteen—twenties and thirties. An example of a metaphor used in Muay Thai is “extinguish the lamps,” which means “punch your opponent in the eye.”

Little is known about the history of Muay Thai. Bunkerd says that it has been around as long as the Thai people; the earliest existing reference dates from 1411. Whereas tae kwon do, kung flu, and jujitsu are believed to have been invented by monks in order to defend their temples from marauders, Muay Thai is believed to have been invented by the Thai Army in order to defend the country from invaders. (It was, however, taught in temples until the turn of the twentieth century.) Thailand is the only country in Southeast Asia never to have been colonized by Europeans, and although it hasn’t been established that Muay Thai played a significant role in Thai independence, nearly every Thai king is associated with some legend of boxing prowess. The national mythology holds that to be independent is to be Thai, and to be Thai is to box. In the early days of Muay Thai, rounds were either untimed or timed in only an approximate fashion—for example, by floating a pierced coconut shell in a tank of water. (When the shell sank to the bottom, the round was over.) Biting and eye-gouging were allowed, as was the practice of dipping hand wraps in resin and ground glass. The number of rounds was potentially

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