by Baker Chris
On accession, Chulalongkorn was aged 15. During his minority, he travelled to see ‘progress’ at first hand in the colonial territories of Singapore, Java, Malaya, Burma, and India for ‘selecting what may be safe models for the future prosperity of this country’.5 He sent 20 minor royals for education in Singapore. He had several European constitutions translated into Thai and was most impressed by the French Code Napoleon. On reaching his majority, he pledged to rule ‘so that the royal family, officials and people may continually develop’.6 Within a month, he set up a new central treasury, and appointed a Council of State and Privy Council packed with royal relatives. Soon after, he announced a reform programme, ‘What the Council should do and what it should abolish’. Among the practices earmarked for abolition were corvée, slavery, and gambling. Among the innovations were reform of the law courts; creation of a salaried bureaucracy, police, and army; and development of agriculture and education.
For the reformers, ending labour controls was the priority. Partly this was to thwart colonial criticism; Anna Leonowens made herself famous by portraying the Siamese elite cloaked in ‘the darkness of error, superstition, slavery, and death’.7 And in part it was to increase the availability of labour for the market economy. While regent during Chulalongkorn’s minority, the Bunnag patriarch, Chuang, had drawn up proposals for ending slavery either by taxing it out of existence or by outright abolition. The traditionalists blocked these proposals, which threatened the foundations of their economic and social status. To soothe this group, the king proposed to abolish only certain kinds of slavery and in a gradual way. By an order passed in August 1874, anyone born a hereditary slave from 1868 onwards would gain liberty on reaching 21, and anyone else born after 1868 could not sell himself or be sold into slavery after reaching 21. This still left existing debt slaves, war captives, the sale of children into slavery, and the corvée system untouched. Reformers such as Chuang had hoped for something more decisive but probably accepted the necessary political compro-mise.
The labour reforms found the king and the trader nobles in the same camp. But financial and judicial reforms drove a rift between the king on one side, and Chuang and other senior nobles on the other. Chulalongkorn announced the establishment of a Finance Office to take control of all the tax-farms, currently scattered across 17 treasuries. He also announced a new court to take over some of the cases similarly scattered across courts under various ministries. Such centralization would undercut the income and authority of the great nobles, and augment the power of the crown. Chuang and other patriarchs objected strongly. They engineered a coup threat (the ‘Front Palace Crisis’ of December 1874), which persuaded the king to back down and proceed more slowly.
As a result of royal polygamy, Chulalongkorn had many brothers and half-brothers. He gathered together a group of them along with younger members of some great households, including Bunnag, Saeng-Xuto, and Amatyakun. They called themselves ‘Young Siam’, implicitly defining their opponents as ‘Old Siam’ and part of the past. They debated ‘progress’ and ‘reform’. Chulalongkorn absorbed them into experiments in western-style bureaucratic and military organization inside the royal household.
Over the next decade, as each noble patriarch died or retired, Chulalongkorn moved that patriarch’s tax-farms under the Finance Office and inserted an ally into the vacant post. In 1885, he placed his brother Narathip in charge of the office, and over the next three years gained the main liquor, opium, and gambling revenues from Bunnag hands. Revenue flow under royal command rose from 1.6 million baht in 1874 to 57 million baht in 1906–07. This was the seed capital of absolutism.
One of the first investments made with this money was in military power. During the regency, Chulalongkorn created inside the palace a new royal guard of 500 men, organized and trained on the model of an English infantry regiment, equipped with the latest western arms, recruited mainly from the nobility, and paid regular salaries – the first officials to enjoy this privilege. In the late 1870s, the learning from this experiment was transferred to the thahan na, a regiment guarding the capital. The old levies were released. New men were recruited for a five-year tour of duty with pay. Europeans helped with training. Modern rifles were purchased. An impressive barracks was built beside the palace (later converted into the Ministry of Defence). The force was small – around 4400 men – but enough to chase after bandits, intimidate the secret societies, and police the capital at important times.
This force was critical for Young Siam’s major project – a new centralized pyramid of bureaucratic administration, replacing the local lords. On Chulalongkorn’s accession, Bangkok’s political hinterland was a patchwork of mueang tied to different ministries by varying systems (Map 3).8 ‘Inner’ mueang supposedly had Bangkok-style tax systems, conscription, and appointed officials, though in practice many governors were effectively hereditary. ‘Intermediate’ mueang were ruled by local lords sending dues of forest goods, while tributaries sent only symbolic tribute.
The pioneer case for centralization was the former tributary state of Lanna (Chiang Mai). The inroads of British timber companies into the northern forests threatened to become a spearhead of colonial intrusion. They also entangled the Lanna rulers in court cases and debts that gave Chulalongkorn his opportunity. He bailed out the debts, took charge of negotiating an Anglo-Siamese treaty in 1874 to constrain the colonial loggers, and sent a commissioner to oversee the tributary state’s government. The commissioner arrived in Chiang Mai at the head of a column of troops from the new paid and permanent force. The king instructed the commissioner (a half-brother) as follows: ‘We have no thought of removing the court and tributary status, but we want to seize the real power…you must achieve this by wisdom more than by force, without letting the Lao9 feel they are being squeezed’.10 The commissioner gradually introduced Bangkok-style taxes, appointed local officials, and took charge of the timber concessions. The local nobles complained that Lanna was being ‘picked to the bone’ and some officials raised a revolt. The commissioner soothed the nobles with fancy titles and large allowances, but gradually distanced them from the administration, diverted the tax revenues to the Bangkok treasury, and established a pyramidal bureaucracy down to the local level.
The resulting structure looked uncannily like the colonial government of a British Indian district. It became the model. Commissioners were sent to other frontier states – Luang Prabang, Nong Khai, Khorat, Ubon, and Phuket – backed up with troop columns that remained to serve as garrisons. Local rulers were left as figureheads, but on death were replaced by a Bangkok appointee, often a royal relative. In 1893, Chulalongkorn appointed perhaps his favourite half-brother, Damrong Rajanuphap, to head a new Ministry of Interior, which adapted this system for use in the inner provinces. The old semi-hereditary governing families of these provinces were superseded by central appointees in the same way. In 1899, the new structure was formalized in legislation. By 1914, the Ministry of Interior had appointed 3000 officials to the provinces. Many of the old people and old practices were still in place, but they were now technically part of a single bureaucratic pyramid extending down from the ministry. From 1902, officials were paid salaries from the centre, rather than living off the local profits of their office. Previously, provincial governors had administered from their house or compound. Now new official enclaves were built in the provincial centres, rather on the model of a colonial cantonment, with offices, a jail, and housing for officials, all intended to impress through scale and standard design. Damrong christened the new system thesaphiban, control over territory.
Map 3: Political geography on the eve of reform.
Judicial reform followed a similar centralizing pattern. In 1892, all cases in the capital were transferred from courts under various ministries to a new unified structure. Beginning in 1902, commissioners were sent to the provinces to reorganize their courts under a single hierarchy. A decree of 1908 formally brought all courts under the Justice Ministry. Court procedure wa
s changed to resemble western practice, formalized in a code in 1908.
In the inner areas, there was little reaction. Many old nobles resented the loss of revenue and power, but usually they were not dislodged but allowed to retire gracefully. Their sons were encouraged to enter the schools, which were the portal into the new bureaucracy. This new generation of the old central elite seems to have embraced Chulalongkorn’s interpretation of ‘progress’ as a way to retain their status in a changing world. But at the periphery, there were revolts.
In 1895, villages in Khon Kaen revolted and excluded officials for three years. In 1889–90, some 3000 opposed the new administration in Chiang Mai. In 1901, 2500 rebels joined a millenarian revolt in the Ubon area of the northeast. In 1902, the southern border states threatened to revolt, rebels took over the northern state of Phrae, and smaller incidents occurred in Lampang and Lamphun. Many of these outbursts were directed against the new taxes. Some were led by displaced local officials and abetted by the old rulers. In Lanna, rebels attacked the new government offices and vowed to drive out the Siamese officials and Chinese tax-farmers. In both Lanna and Isan, these revolts drew on a tradition of uprisings by phumibun, men of merit, who could overthrow the social order and usher in a better world. The northeastern rebels sacked the town of Khemmarat on the Mekong, and then set off towards the provincial capital of Ubon. Their stated aim was ‘to establish a kingdom which was not under either the Siamese or the French’.11
Initially, these revolts caught the government off guard. But rebels armed with local weapons and trusting in the power of sacred water to guarantee invulnerability were no match for Gatling guns and cannon. In the northeast, troops claimed to kill 200 rebels without incurring a single casualty. In Lanna, 13 leaders were captured, pilloried for three days, and then executed. In the south, the ruler of the Malay Muslim state of Pattani was thrown into jail for two years. The revolts petered away in the face of these shows of force, but they had delivered a shock to Chulalongkorn and his court. Especially in Lanna, the implementation of the new administration ground to a halt for three years.
Figure 3: Siamese nobility on the eve of the west. Mom Rachotai, early student of the missionaries, envoy to London, and author, c. 1860s. His dress and props are of various Asian origins – Thai, Chinese, Persian, Indian, Arab – only the books are western.
Scrambling boundaries
In parallel with this transition to a new form of administration, the old political geography based on mueang, emboxment, and personal relations between rulers was replaced by a model based on territory and borders. In Thongchai Winichakul’s famous coining, Siam gained a ‘geo-body’.12
In the old political system, there were no boundaries as lines on maps or along the ground. Two mueang occasionally marked their frontier by a cairn, chedi, or customs post along the route connecting the two centres. Most mueang were separated by large and mostly empty tracts of forest, such as the hill ranges dividing Siam from Burma, and these tracts ‘belonged to no-one’. Rulers liked to see frontiers not as barriers but, rather, as ‘silver and gold roads of trade and friendship’, channels for possible expansion of their trade and influence. In peripheral areas, local rulers might be tributary to two or more overlords, and these arrangements could shift with circumstance.
Once Britain became a neighbour to the south and west in the 1820s, it asked Siam to define their mutual borders. At first the Siamese court found this perplexing and rather irritating, and only reluctantly complied.
From the 1860s, colonial pressure became more complex. The British nibbled away at the southern border, and in 1852–53 grabbed another chunk of Burma. The French pressed inwards from the east, taking Saigon and then imposing a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863. Siam rushed to sign a treaty agreeing the protectorate was shared, and rationalized that this was simply an extension of Cambodia’s former tributary submission jointly to Vietnam and Siam. But the French wanted more. French colonial dreams alternated between hopes of finding a northward route from Indochina into China and consolation of forging westwards across mainland Southeast Asia. After the Garnier-Lagrée expedition of 1866–67 showed the Mekong River was not navigable up to China, one of the French men-on-the-spot declared: ‘Our desire is to bring into being that French empire dreamed of by some of us, which must extend from Kwang Tung and Yunnan all the way to the vicinity of Bangkok’.13 The French also introduced another western concept – the idea of historical claims to sovereignty over territory. They began looking for documents that showed that Vietnam (and hence its successor, France) had better claims to many of the peripheral territories lying between Hanoi–Saigon and Bangkok.
At the same time, western business interests began to arrive in Siam. British timber companies cut their way through Burmese forests and arrived in Lanna. Tin-mining firms overflowed northwards from British Malaya. Both gained concessions from Siam’s local tributaries. At Bangkok, western speculators floated schemes for cutting a canal across the peninsula, mining various metals, and building far-flung networks of railways reflecting grand imperial ambitions. For Siam, defined borders had become a good defensive idea. In 1880, Siam hired a British surveyor, James McCarthy, from India, and sent him off to map the frontiers, especially in the far northeast. Along with McCarthy went columns of troops, supposedly tasked to suppress ‘Ho’ bands, probably refugees from the Taiping rebellion in southwestern China. The troops’ real job was to strengthen claims to the territory behind the mapped line by planting Siamese white-elephant flags, handing out Siamese titles to local chiefs, building stockades, and sometimes tattooing men for corvée. McCarthy’s map, published in 1887, showed a border running southwards from Sipsongpanna along the Annamite hills into Cambodia (Map 4). In Thongchai’s phrase, this map was ‘the encoding of desire’.14
Map 4: Drawing Siam’s borders, 1892–1909.
The southern and western borders with British territory were agreed relatively easily in 1894 and 1909 by sharing out local polities, which had previously been tributary to both sides. France was more difficult. It responded with its own maps, historical claims based on local documents, and troop columns sent to occupy the peripheral areas. The issue was settled not by maps or historical precedent but by force. In 1893, France annexed the east bank of the Mekong southwards from the Chinese border. To oppose them, Siam attempted to raise 180 000 troops, the biggest military mobilization for over a century, but could find only a fraction of this number. Units clashed with the French near the Mekong River. In response, the French sailed two gunboats up the Chao Phraya River and anchored off the French embassy. They demanded an indemnity and Siamese evacuation from the east bank of the Mekong. When the government demurred, the French blockaded the port, demanding a 25-kilometre demilitarized zone on the west bank of the river, and protégé status for Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer in Siam. This Paknam Incident resulted in a treaty that drew the boundary between Siam and French Indochina along the Mekong River, subtracting the Lao states of Luang Prabang and Vientiane, the northern Khmer territories, and much of Sipsongpanna and Sipsongchuthai from the ambitions coded on the McCarthy map. The British blocked the idea of a French protectorate over Siam. But the two countries informally and secretly agreed that Siam should eventually be reduced to the Chao Phraya basin, ceding the eastward territories to France and the peninsula southward to Britain. The French and British men-on-the-spot began manoeuvres to achieve this result. But after 1900, the home governments quashed these colonial ambitions and rivalries for the sake of alliance in Europe against the growing threat of Germany. Treaties concluded between 1902 and 1909 fixed the borders at their present positions. Siam had become a defined, bounded country. Many states along the peripheral areas had disappeared. According to the western theory that Siam was embracing, the capital of Bangkok enjoyed unique and undivided sovereignty across the territory inside this new boundary.
Making citizens
In parallel, all the various categories of slaves and bondsmen with personal
ties to a patron or overseer were transformed into citizens with a theoretically direct relationship to the state.
In 1897, Chulalongkorn took another step to end forced labour by ruling that nobody born from then onwards could sell himself or be sold into slavery. Only a few ageing debt slaves and war captives now remained (until final abolition in 1912). Abolishing corvée was more complicated because it affected the army, which was needed to protect the mapping parties, skirmish with the French, hunt down bandits, guard against Chinese riots, and suppress the peripheral rebels. Through the late 1870s and early 1880s, Chulalongkorn found ways to convert some people from noble to royal service. Then in 1887, another half-brother was placed in charge of a new Defence Ministry and instructed to plan a conscript standing army.
Many in the court disagreed with this project. They argued that Siam could not hope to compete with a European army and should not provoke the Europeans by trying. But Chulalongkorn insisted that a standing army was one of the attributes of a modern nation. Besides, the real need was not external, against the colonialists, but internal – imposing Bangkok authority on the area inside the new borders, and bringing all people under the king.
Several of Chulalongkorn’s sons had been sent to military academies in Europe. When the first of these returned in 1897, he was entrusted with planning a new army. The difficulty of suppressing the provincial revolts over 1899–1902 further convinced Chulalongkorn and dispersed most of the opposition: ‘Conscription is a necessity. If we fail to introduce it, that would be tantamount to throwing Phayap [Lanna] away.’15 Conscription was hurriedly implemented in three provinces to complete the suppression of revolts, and then introduced universally by 1905. Commutation dues were replaced by a universal poll tax (extended to include the Chinese and other foreigners in 1909). Military expenditure rose from 1 million baht in 1898 to 13 million in 1909–10, when Siam had a standing army of 20 000 and a navy of 5000, with over 50 000 in their combined reserves.