Out of curiousity
@AndyMaBobs or any other knowledgable poster when did the influence of western boxing reach Thai fighters? I know Al Silvani the famous cutman went to Thailand for 7 monthes in 1954 to teach boxing there but I'm guessing theres has been much more influence considering how well Thai Golden Age Thai fighters did in pro boxing.
Sure, so this is a bit of what I know:
It was in 1919 when Sulap College added it as part of their sport curriculum in Muay Thai along with influence from Judo. Muay Thai was formalised by the king a decade before, but this made it mostly the art we know today, although obviously individual approaches to training mean old muay thai does 'look different' in the same way 1940s boxers looked different.
We often hear rubbish about Boran or Saenchai doing Muay Boran and shit like that - but broadly what we see from Muay Boran today is a new martial art that has been adapted from Muay Thai with a modern twist. The styles of Muay Chaiya, Muay Lopburi, Muay Khorat (this is where Lerdrit, the style I made a thread about before has its roots) and a few other small styles were boxing practises named after the regions they came from, but a lot like Muay Laos, Lethwei etc. they all seem to be spins on a similar, ancient tradition that we know nothing about. Which is probably why Lethwei, Kun Khmer etc, all end up looking for the most part the same, with a few changes coming from scoring.
Unfortunately, history from South East Asia, particularly when it comes to martial arts can be quite hard to pin down, because much of S-E-Asia was illiterate, not keeping records, and those records that did exist, were destroyed during the various communist revolutions that happened in the area. Cambodia is a pretty good example of this, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rogue not only burned records, but they also specifically targetted and murdered people with martial arts and combat sports backgrounds - because they feared revolution (I used to think this was silly until I learned more about how the Boxer Revolution was a revolution of essentially kung fu warriors, although it probably wasn't as Crouching Tiger as it sounds)
I think the reason the boxing of Golden Age fighters was better is because (to my best knowledge right now) the scoring of Golden Age Muay Thai didn't heavily favour kicks in the same way. There are still plenty of fighters with great boxing, but its fair to say we don't see as many Lahkin's who had a pretty sneaky boxing 'system' so to speak.