A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  In the north and east, the campaigns to drive back the Burmese also extended Siamese influence further than before. Chiang Mai had fallen under Burmese influence since the 16th century. Between the 1770s and 1804, Taksin and then Yotfa helped a local lord, Kavila, drive out the Burmese and re-establish Chiang Mai. Kavila’s successors remained querulous tributaries to Bangkok. Next, Taksin took the Lao capital of Vientiane, hauling away its prince as a hostage. He also burnt the Cambodian capital to the ground and installed a puppet ruler. Old systems of tribute collection were reimposed on these outlying areas to supply Bangkok with export goods for the China trade.

  Although the Burmese threat was contained by 1804, Bangkok’s military expansion continued over following decades. In the 1820s, Bangkok began to tap the resources of the Khorat Plateau, which was still largely unpopulated and open for exploitation. In 1827–28, Bangkok went to war with the Lao ruler of Vientiane, Jao Anu, who competed to control this frontier region. Bangkok’s armies destroyed Jao Anu’s capital and dynasty much as the Burmese had set on Ayutthaya 60 years earlier. People were then resettled from across the Mekong River onto the Khorat Plateau to increase its value as a source of trade goods.

  Similarly, Bangkok first extended informal control into western Cambodia, and then in 1833 the king dispatched an army to take the territory or else ‘turn Cambodia into forest, only the land, the mountains, the rivers and the canals are to be left. You are to carry off Khmer families to be resettled in Thai territory, do not leave any behind. It would be good to treat Cambodia as we did Vientiane.’2 Trade was redirected to Bangkok. Cardamom and other forest goods were requisitioned for export to China. People were hauled away for resettlement. Elite families were taken to Bangkok for future use as tributary rulers.

  Only in the west did the Siamese armies fail. Two attempts to take Tavoy and re-establish control of the portage across the peninsula were thwarted by the Burmese. Bangkok had emboxed a new outer ring of tributary states in the south, north, and east. The chronicler of King Yotfa boasted: ‘His kingdom was far more extensive than that of the former Kings of Ayutthaya’.3

  This age of disorder also transformed the human geography of the Chao Phraya basin. Large numbers of the former population were carried away to Burma in 1767. Many more fled during this and subsequent campaigns. One purpose of Bangkok’s military expansion was to restock the population by forced resettlement. In the 1770s and 1780s, Taksin’s armies captured many thousands of Lanna Yuan, Lao Wiang, Lao Phuan, Black Tai, and Khmer. The southern expeditions brought back several thousand Malays. Possibly 30 000–40 000 Mons voluntarily migrated to Siam. In the early 1800s, the Bangkok and Lanna troops went further north to seize Khoen, Lu, and Shan. After the 1827 war against Vientiane, over 150 000 were captured and some 50 000 marched down to the Chao Phraya basin. In the 1830s, the Bangkok armies made six expeditions into the Lao regions, depopulating the left bank of the Mekong and bringing back Lao Phuan from the Plain of Jars, Tai Dam from Sipsongchuthai, Khmer, and Vietnamese.

  Some of these peoples were resettled in the vicinity of Bangkok and employed to build the new capital. Some were resettled around the central plain to increase its capacity for growing rice. Others were placed on the Khorat Plateau to collect the forest produce demanded in trade to China.

  Great households and Buddhist kingship

  The emergence of an aristocracy of great households now came to fruition.

  When Ayutthaya was destroyed in 1767, ‘natural governments’4 mushroomed in the provinces led by traders, adventurers, old nobles, and charismatic monks. Taksin crushed the local leaders who defied him, but confirmed those who gave him support and interfered little in their affairs. With a few exceptions, the early Chakri monarchs did the same. These provincial families soon became hereditary. In Ratchaburi, for example, the Wongsarot family monopolized the governorship and other key posts for all but 10 years from 1812 to 1897. Down the peninsula, two families that helped Yotfa settle the area not only retained their local governorships throughout the 19th century but sent their descendants to govern other towns. On the Khorat Plateau, generals from Bangkok’s armies were rewarded with governorships that similarly became hereditary. Although accepting allegiance to Bangkok, in their locality these rulers acted like little monarchs – building wat, appointing abbots, leading rituals, appropriating manpower, and monopolizing trade. Even in a minor new mueang in the northeast, the ruler was a ‘petty king’.5

  At the centre, too, the great noble households consolidated their power. Both 1767 and 1782 were decisive breaks in the royal line. Yotfa made no pretence of claiming old royal blood. The new dynasty had been created by nobles who over the past century had been seeking ways to constrain the monarchy. In the symbolism of the coronation ceremony for Yotfa and his successors, the ministers had prior rights over the ministries: the king was first made into a king by the magic of the Brahmans, and then each minister presented to him the territories, people, weapons, and other equipment of his ministry.6

  The great families that survived 1767, and especially a handful personally connected to the Chakri family, rose rapidly in the new era. A few new lineages also rose through military achievement and filled the spaces left by those killed or hauled away during the wars. Some dozen great households monopolized the powerful positions in the central administration. They intermarried with one another and the Chakri family. They participated in the revival of the commercial economy. They were not obstructed by royal antagonism. Some became almost as splendid as the ruling family itself, in particular the Bunnag family, whose roots went back to Persian immigrants in the 17th century, and whose leading light had been Yotfa’s personal retainer in the Taksin era. In a trend that began before 1767, the provincial areas were divided under three ministries (Kalahom, Mahatthai, and Krom Tha), which became virtual sub-states with their own treasuries. The Bunnag controlled at least one and sometimes two of these across four generations. By mid-century, the two Bunnag patriarchs were popularly known by an honorific (ong) formerly applied to royalty.

  To a new extent, the king was primus inter pares. Some of the features that had marked the specialness of the monarchy were now less exclusive. Great noble households patronized their own drama troupes, once a royal monopoly. Forms of dress and sumptuary display spread from royalty to a wider nobility. Popular dramas even imitated royal costumes and regalia before a ban was imposed. While Yotfa was very active in Bangkok’s revival, his successor Loetla (Rama II) withdrew into a ritual role and left administration to the great nobles. Nangklao (Rama III) was active as both king and merchant, but Mongkut (Rama IV) again ceded power to the nobles, complaining occasionally how few attended either his council sessions or major royal rituals. Every succession in the 19th century was tense to a greater or lesser degree because of the possibility of another dynastic shift as had occurred in 1767 and 1782. Approaching the last of these transitions, Mongkut worried that ‘general people both native and foreigners here seem to have less pleasure on me and my descendants than their pleasure and hope on another amiable family’.7

  The great households expanded by accumulating wives in order to produce enough talented sons to sustain the family’s standing in the senior official ranks, and enough daughters to build marriage networks within the elite. The royal clan showed the way: Rama I had 42 children of 28 mothers; Rama II, 73 children of 40 mothers; Rama III, 51 children of 37 mothers; Rama IV, 82 children of 35 mothers; and Rama V, 77 children of 36 mothers. Other great families followed suit. According to Pallegoix, a French bishop resident in Bangkok in the 1830s and 1840s, ‘Several rich people have two wives: the mandarins have up to twelve, thirty, forty or more’.8 Numbers of children were equally impressive. The founder of the Krairiksh clan had 50. The two Bunnag brothers who dominated officialdom during the Third Reign had 43 sons between them. Only the great households were permitted to build on land around the royal centre, and these settlements became like small towns. The Bunnag clan, for example, was granted
a large plot across the river from Sampheng. They built three wat, a canal, and residences for the ramifying clan. Traders and artisans settled in the area to be close to a source of power and patronage. The capital was a collection of such townships.

  The pre-1767 trend towards Buddhist kingship was now realized. Brahmanism was not rejected; court ceremonies were retained and the site of the new capital was dubbed Rattanakosin, Indra’s jewel, or Krungthep, city of angels (only foreigners used the old village name, Bangkok). The monarchy was again hidden and mystified. But royal legitimacy did not appeal to any identity between king and god. Rather, the king claimed to be a Bodhisatta, a spiritually superhuman being who had accumulated great merit over previous lives, been reincarnated in order to rule with righteousness, and would become a Buddha in the future. The king’s legitimacy depended not on blood or dynastic line (which had been broken) but on ‘ties of incarnation’9 to the great lineage of Buddhas through history. Yotfa had the Singhalese Mahavamsa chronicle that encapsulated this philosophy translated into Thai.

  In the chronicles written in this era, Borommakot was idealized as the model king, and other late Ayutthayan monarchs condemned as poor rulers, poor Buddhists, and poor warriors. The new Bangkok monarchy was celebrated as defenders of Buddhism against the destructive (though Buddhist) Burmese. The conquests of Lao and Khmer territories were justified as saving these peoples from less perfectly Buddhist governance.

  Under this theory, the main purpose of kingship was to assist the people to ascend the spiritual ladder towards the ultimate goal of nirvana, the release from worldly suffering. The king thus had not only to build wat and protect Buddhism from enemies, but also to undertake other ‘royal duties’. Most of all, he had to prevent the decline and eventual eclipse of Buddhism as foretold in the texts, especially by periodically purifying the Sangha and making corrected recensions of the texts. Yotfa passed laws to rectify the lapses in monastic discipline during Taksin’s reign. He assembled a council of senior monks to compile a recension of the Tripitaka, the fundamental texts of Buddhism, and commissioned two new versions of the Traiphum cosmology.

  So that people should not practise Buddhism ritualistically but ‘understand the Thai meaning of each precept’, Yotfa founded a school to re-educate monks and had several Pali texts translated into Thai. Edicts banned cock-fighting and other ‘sinful’ pursuits because, as the law’s preamble explained, ‘the king is intent on promoting Buddhism for the happiness and well-being of the people’. Officials were ordered to live according to a moral code modelled on monastic discipline. The walls of wat were painted with murals teaching Buddhist lessons, often based on the jataka tales, which showed how the Buddha achieved spiritual perfection over his 500 incarnations before achieving enlightenment. Most popular was the Vessantara Jataka about the last of these incarnations, a tale teaching the virtue of selflessness. The king sponsored annual chanting of this story – first, in the wat housing the kingdom’s Palladian image, the Emerald Buddha, and later all over the kingdom. This ceremony taught moral values while also dramatizing the king’s authority as a Bodhisatta.

  Expanding market economy

  Taksin encouraged Chinese immigration to revive the economy. Yotfa, whose mother was ‘a beautiful daughter of a very rich Chinese family’ in Ayutthaya, continued the policy. Through the early 19th century, the inflow of Chinese migrants increased. Because Bangkok never recovered control of the portage route over the neck of the peninsula, trade was mainly to the east, and especially with China. By the time Europeans visited the new capital in the 1820s, they found the river crammed with junks. They estimated that the Chinese formed the majority of the city population, which may have reflected their prominence if not their true proportion. By 1835, the Chinese settlement at Sampheng had become a thriving market stretching 3 kilometres along a brick-paved road:

  It includes dry-good shops, hard-ware shops, black-smiths shops, carpenter shops, coopers shops, gamblers shops, groceries and houses of ill fame, fruit stalls, vegetable stalls, fish stalls, fowl stalls, pork stalls, druggist store and dram shops.10

  The early arrivals were mostly entrepreneurs associated with the growing rice trade from Siam to China. In their wake came larger numbers escaping poverty and social disorder in southern China. Around 7000 arrived each year in the 1820s, rising to 14 000 by 1870. About half returned home after a few years, but those remaining to settle accumulated to around 300 000 by the 1850s. Many worked initially as ‘coolie’ labour in the port and elsewhere in the city. Some took up land on the fringes of the delta to grow vegetables for supplying the city. Around 1810, some began planting sugarcane, which by mid-century had become a boom crop and Bangkok’s biggest export. Some filtered up the waterways to towns where they became shopkeepers, traders moving local produce to Bangkok, and owners of sugar factories, distilleries, brick kilns, boatyards, tobacco factories, sawmills, and metalworks. Around the gulf and down the peninsula, the port towns were dominated by Chinese, some of whom spread inland to plant rubber, grow pepper, and mine tin. The Chinese were the pioneers of a market economy. In Sawankhalok, the pottery gambling chips brought by the Hokkien Chinese became the first local currency.

  In 1830, the British envoy John Crawfurd called migrants ‘the most valuable importation from China into Siam’.11 Government appreciated their value. It excused them from corvée, which would disrupt their trading activity, and instead levied a triennial head tax. It imposed taxes on their enterprises, and over time found this a better way to raise government revenues than royal trading monopolies. It gradually abandoned trade monopolies, and hired more and more of the Chinese entrepreneurs as tax-farmers.

  While exports included the forest goods that had always been the staple of the eastern trade, by the 1820s they had expanded to rice, sugar, dried fish and meats, tin utensils, cloth, oils, and dyes – things that had to be grown or made, often by the immigrant Chinese, but increasingly by others as well. Over time, more people lived more of their lives in the market economy rather than within the old structure of labour indenture and royal service. In Nidhi Eoseewong’s description, the society became more ‘bourgeois’,12 especially at the capital.

  Jao Sua

  A handful of Chinese families prospered on royal patronage. In the early 19th century, these jao sua or merchant lords acted as traders on behalf of the king and senior courtiers. From the 1830s onwards, they secured the most valuable tax-farms levied on birds’ nests from the coastal islands, and on liquor, opium, and gambling in the towns. The kings gave them official posts and noble titles, which added to their status. The most brilliant became choduek, the titular head of the capital’s Chinese community. A few of these outstanding families had arrived during the Ayutthaya period. The forebears of the Krairiksh family had come as junk traders in the mid-18th century, served as King Taksin’s envoys to China, and become royal traders in the early 19th century. Many others arrived in the period of expanding Siam–China trade in the early 19th century. Several of the most prominent families were Hokkien, while others were Teochiu or Hakka.

  Some established dynasties. They built connections by presenting daughters to courtiers, to their peer families in Bangkok, and to their trading partners in China and elsewhere. In the early 19th century, some were able to pass not only their business but also their official title onto their heirs. The head of the Chotikapukkana family rose from the royal junk trade to become choduek in the 1850s, and was followed by two of his descendants over the next half-century. The jao sua served the king in various ways other than trade. The Chotikapukkana family imported items like purpose-made porcelain for the palace and acted as judges in the special court established to settle disputes involving the Chinese. Some went farther into the traditional bureaucracy. The founder of the Kalyanamit family became minister in charge of the corvée registers and rose to the highest rank of chaophraya in the 1850s. Two of his descendants secured the same title and prominence later in the century. Thian Chotikasathian, another ro
yal junk trader and choduek, was drafted to help King Chulalongkorn establish his modern finance office, and his son accompanied the king on his 1872 trip to India (see next chapter).

  These established Chinese families levered themselves up the social ladder by connections at court. Even the greatest jao sua still sought a formal patronage bond with senior members of the royal family. They propitiated these patrons with presents and were rewarded with titles of progressively higher rank. Several daughters of jao sua were among the 242 wives and consorts in Nangklao’s palace. King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) was specially struck by a daughter of the leading Phisolyabut family and asked to take her into the royal household. With this precedent established, over the next few years two of the king’s close relatives also took Phisolyabut consorts. Other jao sua families made equally splendid alli-ances.

  These families became fabulously wealthy. The Chotikapukkana residence nestled in a 100-rai park on the riverbank. The kings drew on this wealth to embellish the capital. Under royal encouragement, leading merchants funded the construction and repair of Thai Buddhist temples as well as Chinese shrines. They were coaxed into digging canals to serve as highways for trade. In the later era of enthusiasm for ‘progress’, their patronage was diverted to hospitals and schools.