A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

Through the first half of the century, and particularly in the Third Reign (1824–51), the enormous role of the Chinese in the new capital was reflected in fashion and style. Chinese crockery and stone images, used as ballast on junks, decorated many of the city’s new temples. Chinese slippers and jackets were common items of court dress. Chinese furniture was imported to embellish wat and great homes. Translations of Chinese classics were fashionable reading, especially Sam kok, the Three Kingdoms. The trader-king Nangklao built Buddhist wat using Chinese designs, artisans, and materials; dragons replaced Thai naga on the roofline, while cranes, chrysanthemums, and scenes from Chinese legends replaced the usual Thai iconography inside. This style was dubbed the ‘royal model’. As the junk trade dwindled after 1840 in the face of European competition, Nangklao constructed a riverside wat in the shape of a junk as a memorial to the junk’s role in building the new capital. His successor, Mongkut, had his portrait painted in the robes of a Chinese mandarin, and built a Chinese-style pleasure garden at the royal retreat of Bang Pa-in.

  Established jao sua also took enthusiastically to Thai culture. Most took a Thai wife, and often several, although they might also have other households back in China. They patronized Thai Buddhist wat and appropriated the traditional marks of high status. Luang Aphaiwanit, who made his fortune from a birds’ nest tax-farm and property development, lavished money on a traditional Thai orchestra and drama troupe, which he apparently treated with aristocratic presumption; the gossips said he ‘had a whole drama troupe of wives’.13

  The jao sua were a small and glittering elite, but their trading success and their social adjustments were reproduced in more modest ways among the tens of thousands of Chinese who settled in Bangkok and provincial towns. By long residence, marriage, royal recognition, and cultural adjustments, the lukjin or descendants of Chinese immigrants could easily blend into Siamese society. In 1884, a Frenchman described the phases of this process:

  The Chinese of pure blood is everywhere recognizable by his narrow eyes, high cheek-bones, his generally slender features, his traditional costume. Speaking the language with difficulty, he lets the soft letters of the Siamese alphabets slip away. In a group nearby, dressed in wide pants, with their slim figures, white skin, and pleasant physical features are the sons and grandsons of the first settlers. They are the first fruits of mixed-marriages with indigenous women. They are still more like their father than mother, above all from the moral point of view. They have inherited the difficulty of pronouncing the ‘r’. They have made only one concession to the country in which they were born, that of swapping the blue smock for the pha hom, a piece of cotton with which the indigenous people cover their shoulders and busts…Even more numerous are the descendents of the third and fourth generations…They have finally rejected the wide floating pants to take up the loincloth, and if they still preserve the pig-tail…it is now their maternal upbringing that predominates. The soil that has witnessed their birth will count them as its own children. From now on it will be their homeland.14

  Progress

  The growth of the market economy and the emergence of new social groups threw up new ideas and mentalities. Since late Ayutthaya, the few involved in the economy of international commerce had been open to new ideas coming from east or west. In early Bangkok, both commerce and this new mentality spread to a wider group. More people came to value literacy and learning. A new popular literature, which flourished as the city began to prosper in the 1820s, reflected new values. Heroes included ordinary people, not just the princes and gods that dominated Ayutthayan works. They were not so constricted by birth and fate, but had the ability to make their own lives. Romantic love was portrayed as more personal and less constrained by family, tradition, and status. High birth and martial talent were not the only routes to glory; money was also a means of mobility. The defining genre of the era was the nirat, poems relating a journey, which allowed authors to describe the widening horizons and fascinating changes of their own society rather than an imaginary world of gods and kings. Sunthon Phu and Nai Mi, the outstanding poets of the era, were fascinated by ports with ‘boats coming and going, Chinese goods, tea crockery’, by the new urban cacophony of ‘so many people, so many languages’, and by the new social landscape where traders ‘have more and more money, and many happy minor wives’. Sunthon Phu also noted rather ruefully how the power of money was changing the social order:

  At Bang Luang on the small canal, many Chinese are selling pigs.

  Their wives are so young, fair, pretty, and rich it makes me feel shy and small.

  Thai men like me who asked for their hand would be blocked as if by iron bars.

  But if you have money like these Chinese, the bars just melt.15

  Sunthon Phu also wrote picaresque epics that mischievously mocked the old order by inverting its literary conventions, and that became highly popular.

  The murals of the capital’s wat increasingly portrayed the city itself, capturing the busyness of daily life as the background of scenes from the Buddha’s life, and occasionally including views of the city; landmarks, such as the river; characteristic architecture, such as the Chinese shophouse; and even records of historic events (Figure 1).

  Figure 1: Everyday realism enters wat murals. Painted at Wat Phra Kaeo, Bangkok, in the early 19th century.

  This new urban society was open to new ideas brought by the farang (foreigners, westerners) who reappeared in Bangkok in the 1810s – first, a Portuguese consul, then some official envoys, missionaries, and a resident merchant, Robert Hunter, from 1824. The leaders of commercial Bangkok, who clustered around the court, welcomed western innovations that had direct importance for their business. They adopted new methods of accounting and navigation. They built themselves copies of the more efficient western sloops. In 1824, the future King Mongkut withdrew into a wat, perhaps to avoid a succession battle with his brother, King Nangklao (Rama III). Along with another brother, Chuthamani, and a handful of young courtiers, Mongkut cultivated relations with westerners, especially the more reasonable of the missionaries. Through these contacts, members of Mongkut’s group were coached in English and other western languages, learnt printing, and imported books. They became fascinated by gadgets, by the technology of steam power, and by the mathematical precision of astronomy.

  The Bunnag were similarly fascinated. When the palace governess, Anna Leonowens, visited their mansion in 1862, she was struck by its westernized sophistication:

  His Excellency’s residence abounded within in carvings and gildings, elegant in design and color, that blended and harmonized in pleasing effects with the luxurious draperies that hung in rich folds from the windows. We moved softly, as the interpreter led us through a suite of spacious saloons, disposed in ascending tiers, and all carpeted, candelabraed, and appointed in the most costly European fashion…On every side my eyes were delighted with rare vases, jewelled cups and boxes, burnished chalices, dainty statuettes, – objets de virtu, Oriental and European, antique and modern, blending the old barbaric splendors with the graces of the younger arts.16

  But the westerners represented not only new opportunities but also new threats. In the early 19th century, the momentum of British expansion in India began to spill out towards Southeast Asia. Britain established bases in Penang and Singapore, and began to develop the tin industry and its diplomatic influence up the peninsula. By 1820, Britain had collided with Siam’s influence in the peninsula and begun negotiating a border agreement. Separately, British Indian forces intruded into Burma and fought a bitter war in 1826 which gave them control of Arakan and the Mon coastline. Siam initially welcomed the defeat of its old nemesis and considered allying with the British to regain control of the neck of the peninsula. But ultimately the Siamese court understood that the British defeat of Burma was a momentous change. In particular, it signalled a military revolution, consisting of lightweight repeating guns; metal gunboats that could threaten a riverside city with impunity; and a huge supply of Indian s
epoys for sacrifice in combat. None of these innovations could be replicated by Siam.

  The defeat of Burma also confirmed the westerners’ appetite for territory. A Siamese official accused the first British visitor in 1823 of coming ‘to view the Empire of Siam, previous to the English fitting out an expedition of ships of war to come and conquer’.17 On his deathbed in 1851, Nangklao predicted: ‘There will be no more wars with Vietnam and Burma. We will have them only with the West.’18 When later a first Prussian ship arrived in Bangkok, King Mongkut asked its captain point-blank whether Prussia was seeking colonies, as ‘The foreigners keep extending their influence until entire empires belong to them’.19

  Another threat was opium. Following their success selling the drug in China, British traders sought markets among Chinese populations elsewhere. The first western trader to visit Bangkok in 1821 was carrying opium. Missionaries in the 1830s travelled from Singapore on vessels stuffed with it. In 1839, the government passed an edict banning opium import and sale, but the profit outweighed the risk. The government was concerned not only because of the human impact and the fear the habit would spread into the Thai population, but also because opium made some people hugely wealthy, and because many social disorders began from gang wars over this valuable trade.

  From the viewpoint of the Siamese elite, the attractions of ‘progress’ and the threat of colonialism were unhappily intertwined. They understood that the new westerners had a sense of their own superiority, and believed this superiority justified them in seizing territory in order to confer ‘progress’ and bring ‘benighted’ peoples into the modern world. By their own accounts, the early British official visitors acted towards Siamese officials with as much arrogance as they could muster. Crawfurd wrote in 1822 that two gun-brigs ‘would destroy the capital, without possibility of resistance from this vain but weak people’.20 Missionaries such as David Abeel, who arrived in the 1830s, wrote accounts of Siam as a land benighted by slavery, opium, gambling, idolatry, despotism, and ‘shameless indecency of language and dress’. He described slaves ‘toiling in fetters, as though the clank of their chains was music to the ears of their cruel lords’, and summed up: ‘The picture of the condition, moral and political, of Siam is a dark one’.21 Only a little more moderately, the first popular account of Siam by F. A. Neale, published in 1852, described the Siamese as ‘at best semi-barbarous…an oppressed and cringing people…wrapped in the grossest ignorance and superstition, and lost to all sentiment of moral virtue’. Neale also drew the obvious colonialist conclusion:

  Under a better sway, what country in the East would rival Siam: rich in its soil and productions, possessed of valuable mines and gums, spices and pepper, the best and cheapest rice and sugars, and the land absolutely encumbered with the most luscious fruits in the world…Few countries are richer than Siam as regards produce suited for and sought after in European markets, and few countries afford a wider field for the acquisition of wealth…it would be much lamented that any other European power should forestall us in seizing such an advantageous opportunity.22

  The westerners were also inquisitive. All the official missions collected information on history, trade goods, military capability, and political conditions. In 1824, James Low of the Madras Light Infantry presented his superiors with a map of ‘Siam Camboja & Laos’, which gained him a reward of 2000 Spanish dollars. In 1833, a trader, D. E. Malloch, sent to the British authorities in Bengal a list of Siamese places with population numbers, probably copied somehow from the official rolls. In the mid-1830s, British officers trekked from British Burma up through Lanna and the Shan States to Sipsongpanna. They presented themselves as commercial agents, but they also mapped the routes, took notes on the local economy, counted the cannon around the palaces, and enquired everywhere about local politics. The subjects of all this inquisitiveness were apprehensive about its purpose. The expeditions into the interior set off a bush telegraph of rumours about British colonial ambitions. In 1858, Mongkut remarked: ‘A great number of Englishmen have been and are now residing in this country. They seem to have an accurate knowledge of everything that is to be known here.’23

  The Siamese court’s first response to the westerners was to keep them at arm’s length. From the 1820s, it signed trade agreements that changed nothing of significance. Robert Hunter was the only trader to set up shop in Bangkok. He soon fell into the traditional role of supplying the court with weapons and luxuries, and acting as a go-between with other foreigners. Like similar predecessors, he was thrown out in 1844 when he had become too powerful.

  Mongkut’s entourage and other groups in the elite were fascinated by the westerners’ idea of material ‘progress’, but appalled by Christianity, and irritated by the westerners’ claim that their material and moral progress were interrelated. The strategy of Mongkut’s group was to split the material from the moral. One of the group, Chao Phraya Thiphakorawong, wrote articles in the fledgling Thai press, collected in 1867 as Sadaeng Kitjanukit (A Miscellany), one of the first printed Thai books. He explicitly rejected the traditional Buddhist cosmology and urged children to learn modern science and accept a scientific view of the physical world. This group also understood they had to abandon the Buddhist conception of time as repeated cycles of decay. Mongkut embraced the idea that people were not bound by fate but were capable of improving the world, and thus history was possible. He began to research and write Siam’s history. Thiphakorawong penned a new version of the royal chronicles, which described kings making history rather than reacting to omens and fate.

  This group also debated fiercely with their missionary friends, and put their conclusions in print. The second half of Thiphakorawong’s book for children advised readers to reject Christianity. He argued that every religion, including Christianity and Buddhism, tended to incorporate miracles and magic from folk beliefs. But, once these were removed, Buddhism’s reasoned precepts were more in line with a rational, scientific mentality than the will of Christianity’s god (‘a foolish religion’24).

  While in the monkhood between 1824 and 1851, Mongkut formed the Thammayut sect, and partly to cleanse Buddhism of the elements that attracted farang criticism, partly as an extension of Rama I’s ambition to create a Buddhism with more moral authority to order society. The new sect adopted a stricter code of conduct based on a Mon text, rejected the use of jataka tales for teaching and preaching, down-played the significance of texts based on traditional cosmology (especially the Traiphum), and avoided practices adopted from Brahmanism or spirit worship. The sect was small – 150 monks when Mongkut ascended the throne in 1851 – but influential owing to its royal origins.

  Servitude and free labour

  By the early 19th century, two societies based on different principles had come to coexist in Bangkok and its hinterland.

  On the one hand, the old Ayutthayan society of personal bonds, formal hierarchies, and unfree labour had been substantially revived. During 40 years of war and disorder, old systems of labour control had been reimposed. Every phrai freeman was legally bound to a munnai overseer. Through to the 1840s, conscripted armies were used on the eastern expeditions. The largest armies sent to Cambodia possibly conscripted one-tenth of able-bodied male labour from the lower Chao Phraya basin and Khorat Plateau. Conscript labour was also used for the upkeep of royalty and nobility, the construction and maintenance of the capital, and collection of goods for the export trade. At the capital, much of the official nobility was engaged in marshalling and directing these resources of unfree labour.

  In provincial areas, servitude was even more marked. The first European observers in these areas reported that 50 to 90 per cent of people were in some form of ‘slavery’. Many were originally war captives, or people hauled away during military campaigns in the south and east. Some were imported: the law had a special category for unfree labour purchased ‘on board a junk’.25 In the outer regions, some people made a living by raiding hill villages and other remote settlements to kidnap people fo
r sale in the towns and lowlands. Others fell into servitude as punishment for crime, or as a result of debt. Some sold themselves into servitude or, more often, sold their children, other kin, or other subordinates. An 1805 law prevented anyone selling their siblings or grandchildren, but other transactions were legal. The law codes laid down a price scale based on age, gender, and other conditions. Slave status was hereditary.

  Many war captives were settled as farmers. The less fortunate were used for hard manual labour on public works. Those kidnapped from the hills were often sold to officials as personal retainers. Some were hired out by their masters, especially as porters, caravan drovers, and mahouts. Others were used to work the land of their patrons. Both slaves and freemen were vulnerable to various forms of coercion. In the south, peasants complained that the local nobles imposed arbitrary taxes, seized their produce, and dragooned them for forced labour. Those who resisted were bound in shackles and ‘squeezed to death’,26 or sometimes left in the sun to die.

  On the other hand, a new market society was emerging in parallel. Initially, most of the labour and entrepreneurship was supplied by the immigrant Chinese. But as market society gathered momentum, it involved others too. Farmers in the central plain grew some rice for export or for supplying the growing non-agricultural population. Some also grew sugarcane for the Chinese mills, felled timber for the boatyards, or made craft products for a rising market. More nobles became involved as entrepreneurs, some independently and some as partners or patrons of the Chinese. Some great households, especially those clustered around the phrakhlang, and pre-eminently the Bunnag, acquired a wide range of commercial interests, including export, import, and plantations.

  Increasingly these different economies and their respective elites became rivals for resources, especially supplies of labour. By the 1820s, the price of slaves had begun to rise far above the official scales. The king and traditional nobles strove to maintain labour supplies in traditional ways. The court poured out a stream of laws to enforce old obligations, but the repetitive nature of this legislation suggests it was ineffective. King and nobles also competed among themselves over diminishing supplies. The king reduced the annual corvée requirement. Nobles offered competitive inducements. Laws laid down punishments for poaching labour. Mongkut ordered a registration of royal phrai in 1855 and was dismayed by the low number. Bangkok’s military expansion faltered from the late 1840s in part because the armies fielded were much smaller than earlier.