A year count beginning from the Buddha's death — 543 years ahead of the Gregorian.
The Buddhist Era counts from the parinirvana of the Buddha. In the reckoning used across mainland Southeast Asia it runs 543 years ahead of the Gregorian year, so 2027 CE is 2570 BE.
It is a year count rather than a full calendar: Thailand uses Buddhist Era numbering on an otherwise Gregorian civil calendar, so a Thai official date has a familiar day and month and an unfamiliar year.
That combination is a common source of quiet error. A date parsed without noticing the era is off by more than five centuries, and a system that silently accepts it will produce a plausible-looking result on the wrong side of history.
The epoch is the point counted from. The era is the named count itself, and one calendar's day-and-month structure can carry more than one era.
See also epoch · thai solar calendar · gregorian calendar
We hold this as not stored — the corpus publishes Gregorian dates, so era numbering does not survive into the output. See what we hold.