Maria Guyomar de Pina or Thao Thong Kip Ma (Thai: ท้าวทองกีบม้า) was born in Ayuthuya in 1664 during the reign of King Narai. She came from a family of Japanese-Portuguese-Bengali ancestry and married Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon. Constantine rose to prominence at the Thai royal court first as Minister of Foreign Affairs, then a promotion to the modern equivalent of Prime Minister.

For his great achievements King Narai awarded him a great mansion with a chapel and guesthouses, where Phaulkon frequently entertained the French delegation to Siam. During this period Maria was ennobled as a countess of France.

The origins of rice domestication remains a hot button issue, with many countries wishing to claim to be the 'birthplace of rice" 

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
​
"Rice remains retrieved from early stages of the Shangshan and Hehuashan sites have ages of approximately 9,400 and 9,000 calibrated years before the present, respectively"
​

​"The morphology of rice bulliform phytoliths indicates they are closer to modern domesticated species than to wild species, suggesting that rice domestication may have begun at Shangshan during the beginning of the Holocene**"


*Diagram credit: http://depts.washington.edu/strmbrgl/StrombergLab_website/Phytoliths.html​
**Holocene is roughly defined as approximately 11,700 years ago