A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  All men were now the king’s men. Almost everyone now stood in the same relationship to the state for tax and military service. In parallel, they were also reinvented as members of the same race.

  Making Thai

  The return of the westerners in the early 19th century, and the involvement of Siam in a network of treaties, began a debate about the nature of the people inhabiting Siam and their relations to others. The conventional yardstick used to differentiate peoples was language. Foreigners as a category were called the people of the ‘12 languages’ or ‘40 languages’. In the 1830s, these were partially catalogued in a display at Bangkok’s Wat Pho, with 27 different peoples each portrayed on a door panel and described in an accompanying poem. These pictures and poems brought in the idea that different peoples not only spoke different languages but also looked distinctive – both in physical features and dress. The poems also occasionally mentioned that some peoples had special character traits. The Thai were portrayed as part of this catalogue:

  The Siamese, handsome as if shaped by heaven,

  Dwells in the prosperous and glorious city of Ayutthaya.

  Look! He exudes power and inspires awe across the world.

  His upper cloth is woven with silver and gold thread.

  The lower cloth, boldly patterned, is smartly held by a silk sash.

  The effect is gracefully beautiful, gloriously powerful, perfectly resplendent.16

  This description clearly made no attempt to encompass all the people within Siam. The poem described a noble and made a claim for the Thai elite to count among those peoples with power over others.

  The ruling elite might be conceived as ‘Thai’, but at this period the court still celebrated the great ethnic variety of peoples within the country. The king’s rule extended over all those who, in the royal rhetoric, had ‘sought the royal protection’. In dealing with foreigners, the state called itself Siam. Mongkut signed himself as Krung Sayam and Chulalongkorn as Sayamin (Siam + Indra). In keeping with the principle of emboxment, Siam could mean either the capital or the larger unit emboxed by the capital’s influence. The outer areas were defined according to their linguistic–ethnic identity as the ‘eastern Lao’, ‘northwestern Lao’, ‘Khmer’, and ‘Malay’ or ‘Khaek’ states, emphasizing Siam’s imperial reach over other peoples. During his 1872 visit to India, Chulalongkorn described himself as ‘King of Siam and Sovereign of Laos and Malay’.17

  Europe had evolved the idea that a nation was the political expression of a ‘race’. From the 1880s, the French used this idea as part of their aggression against Siam. They argued that the Lao, though related linguistically to the Thai, qualified as a distinct race. Meanwhile, the Siamese were not a proper race because they had become too intermixed with the Chinese. Hence, the true Siamese were a minority within their country, and in fact a ‘Lilliputian oligarchy’ dominating subject peoples.18 In this discourse, the French colonial seizure of Siam would mean liberation of the majority of its people. In the treaty following the 1893 Paknam Incident, France went some way to realizing this idea through the clause allowing former inhabitants of Indochina now in Siam to claim French protection. The French aggressively expanded the range of people who could qualify as protégés, beginning from descendants of peoples moved across the Mekong since 1828, and widening to include all claiming Khmer or Lao descent, and even many Chinese who had sought colonial protection for commercial advantage. The Thai court was horrified. Some wondered whether the king might be Khmer enough to qualify for French protégé status. Many people registered themselves as protégés to escape corvée. French entrepreneurs planned enclave businesses using protégé labour.

  The Siamese court learnt how to use this discourse of race. In the late 19th century, it evolved the word chat, which originally meant birth, origin, or a cycle of rebirth, to express ideas corresponding to race. To define the Thai race, two overlapping definitions were used in parallel. First, the old way of defining people by language was adapted so that speakers of other Tai languages could be claimed as Thai. Commissioners sent to the periphery were instructed to persuade the local lords that ‘Thai and Lao are of the same chat and speak the same language within a single kingdom’. Damrong claimed that ‘all these people call themselves by different names…such as chao Sayam, Lao, Shan, Lue, Ho…in fact all are Thai ethnic groups (chon chat Thai). They speak Thai and every one of them hold that they themselves are Thai’.19 Second, all those living within the borders and hence subjects of the king were defined as Thai. As the Bangkok commissioner in Lampang told a public dinner: ‘the distinction between Siamese and Lao no longer exists – we are all subjects of His Majesty’.20 In a border dispute with the British in 1885, Chulalongkorn blended these two definitions together: ‘The Thai, the Lao, and the Shan all consider themselves peoples of the same race. They all respect me as their supreme sovereign, the protector of their well-being’.21

  Similar ideas were written into the first textbooks for the new schools (see below). Nation was a cultural community founded primarily on language: ‘We are of the same nation and speak the same language, so how can we not love each other more than we love other people who belong to other nations and speak other languages?’22 This cultural community was also formed by a common religion (Buddhism) and common history. At the same time, nation was a political concept, demanding its members’ loyalty and self-sacrifice.

  At the turn of the century, Bangkok changed the geographical vocabulary to reflect this new idea. The new territorial provinces formed from 1899 were no longer named as Lao, Malay, or whatever, but given Sanskritic names, some of which identified provinces as the northern, eastern, and so on, parts of the kingdom. Damrong explained this was because their inhabitants ‘were really of the Thai race’, and the new names reflected the existence of ‘a united Thai kingdom’.23

  In Thai versions of treaties from 1902, the country was no longer called Siam but Prathet Thai or Ratcha-anajak Thai, the country or kingdom of the Thai. All people within the kingdom were defined as sanchat Thai, translated in the English versions of the treaties as ‘of Thai nationality’. To bring the legal position into line with this new match between territory and nationality, Siam insisted the colonial powers give up the extraterritorial rights of the protégés as part of the border treaties. To achieve this, the government ceded considerable territory in recompense. In 1907, Siam abandoned its claims to the northwestern Khmer provinces (Siam Reap, Battambang, and Sisophon) in return for French agreement to give up extraterritoriality. In 1909, the four Malay states of Kedah, Kelantan, Trengganu, and Perlis were ceded to Britain in return for the same concession (see Map 4 on page 59).

  The Siamese court had adopted a new term, prathetchat or chatprathet, which matched the compound form of ‘nation-state’ and had some of its strength and confusion. On the one hand, Thai was now simply the definition of all those who lived within the Thai kingdom; this idea was codified in the Nationality Act of 1913, under which all born inside the borders could claim the nationality. On the other hand, this definition also laid claim to represent a social reality of people unified by language and perhaps by ethnic origin.

  While this unified Thai-ness was presented to foreigners, internally the court retained some subtle differentiation. Commissioners sent to the periphery were told to emphasize the common identity of Lao and Siamese when talking to foreigners, but to retain some of the old Thai–Lao difference in private. The description of Siam sent to the international exhibition at St Louis in 1904 catalogued the ‘great Thai race’ into three parts: the original and more sophisticated ‘Siamese or Thai’; then the Shan or Lao ‘neighbouring races’; and finally others, such as Khmer, Malay, and Burmese who were ‘originally…prisoners of war’ but had ‘intermarried with the Siamese and all speak the Siamese language’.24 School textbooks distinguished between those who spoke ‘proper’ cultivated Thai and others who were encouraged to improve themselves in order to qualify fully as members of the nation.

/>   The elite began to define a more complex sociology of those who were now defined as the Thai nation. Mongkut had travelled upcountry both while a monk and later when king. Chulalongkorn travelled much more, pretending to be incognito and revelling in being recognized. Damrong, and other officials engaged in mapping the new administration onto the territory, travelled even more. Like the farang travellers earlier, Damrong and others took notes on what they saw. From the 1880s, they began to write studies describing and classifying the variety of peoples found in the new nation-state.

  These studies stratified people into three broad bands. At the bottom were the hill peoples. An army general engaged on mapping and protecting the new borders described them as living in the jungle; strange, wild, dirty, and half-naked; and beyond civilization or any hope of progress. Next came the agricultural people of the lowland. Damrong described them as more familiar, more docile, and clearly engaged in production that was useful for the economy, yet still simple in their ways and superstitious in their beliefs. At the top were the princes and senior officials of the elite. They aspired to be siwilai, a Thai-ification of ‘civilized’, which expressed the desire to ‘progress’ on the model of the west, and thus qualify to dominate other peoples within and beyond the country’s borders. The ‘Thai race’ was both united and divided.

  Making better citizens

  The new nation-state assumed the authority to discipline the peoples of such different backgrounds and mentalities enclosed within the borders. The new army was used almost totally to impose order inside the country; Chulalongkorn called the detachments sent against the northern rebels ‘an army of occupation’.25 A new police force was also formed, originally to control the Chinese ‘secret societies’ when the government resolved to close down the gambling dens in the early years of the 20th century. A jail was a standard part of each province’s headquarters.

  Prince Ratchaburi, another of Chulalongkorn’s sons, returned from Oxford with a law degree and was assigned to create a judicial system. He favoured a common-law approach but was overruled on grounds that foreigners would be more impressed by a codified Roman law. A criminal code was completed in 1908. Ratchaburi also wanted the judiciary to be truly separate from the bureaucracy. Again he was overruled. Chulalongkorn had seen colonial systems that combined judiciary and bureaucracy for tighter control.

  The nation-state was thus equipped with instruments of coercion. For the longer term, however, people had to be moulded into good citizens of the nation.

  The aspiration, evident since early Bangkok, to draw on Buddhism to educate and discipline society was adapted for the framework of the nation-state. Mongkut and Chulalongkorn appointed a series of royal family members as the supreme patriarch of the Sangha. From 1874, these were members of Mongkut’s reformed Thammayut sect. In 1893, Chulalongkorn entrusted Vachirayan – another half-brother, Thammayut monk, and future supreme patriarch – to head a new Buddhist Academy to improve the training of monks. Then in 1898, Chulalongkorn moved Vachirayan to develop primary education by expanding the traditional system of schooling in the wat. Vachirayan began by sending out Thammayut monks to survey the provinces. Their reports showed how varied were the peoples and religious practices in the regions now enclosed within the borders of Siam. Local wat had their own texts and traditions. Provincial monks worked in the fields, participated in village festivals, preached using homely folk tales, and had limited knowledge of canonical texts. On receiving these reports, Chulalongkorn diverted Vachirayan to the task of unifying and disciplining the monkhood. The resulting Sangha Act of 1902 arrayed all monks in a hierarchy stretching down from the king and supreme patriarch. Monks learnt from a standard syllabus, qualified by centrally administered examinations, and preached from approved texts. New wat were encouraged to conform to a standard design. Vachirayan gently coaxed Lanna monks to abandon their very established local traditions, and gathered well-known monks from the truculent northeast and distant south into the Thammayut order. Vachirayan hoped that Buddhism would be ‘a tight binding between the government and the people’.26

  Vachirayan then returned to training monks and producing standard textbooks for the new primary education. All children were to be taught the Central Thai language, Buddhism, and arithmetic. In 1921, primary education was made compulsory. Funds were sparse but by the mid-1920s 40 per cent of children aged 7–14 attended the schools.

  One of the subjects of the standard curriculum was proper behaviour. In the 1900s, Chao Phraya Phrasadet composed a textbook for this discipline. He had been one of the early descendants of noble families to enter the new schools, had undergone ordination in the Thammayut order at Wat Boworniwet, and then served as Damrong’s secretary. His Sombat Phu Di (The Qualities of Gentlefolk) instructed a generation of the newly educated to be neat, well-mannered, respectful, likeable, dignified, pleasing to the eye, good-natured, selfless, trustworthy, and free of vice – the code of behaviour of an ideal bureaucrat. Phrasadet rose to head the Civil Service School. His text began a tradition of state manuals for the instruction of children and citizens.

  Progress required a large and healthy population, and thus the new state became concerned about the health of its citizens. The first hospital was founded in 1888 (Sirirat) and a medical school in 1890. After a succession of plague outbreaks between 1904 and 1906, the government issued public health regulations designed to prevent and contain both plague and cholera. It also began to designate sukhaphiban, sanitary districts, charged with maintaining public hygiene. To gather the information base for these policies, an Act in 1917 mandated regular population censuses, and registration of births, deaths, and residence.

  Modern, magnificent monarchy

  In parallel with this remaking of the polity and the people, the monarchy was transformed.

  First, it acquired a new financial base. The Privy Purse was originally established to use the profits of royal trading to pay the royal household. It was expanded to finance overseas education for royal and noble scions, and then expanded again as the Privy Purse Bureau (PPB) in 1890 as the palace’s investment arm. Between 5 and 20 per cent of government revenues was channelled to the PPB. Some was used to enter the expanding rice economy by investing in rice mills. Some went to property development, building shophouses along new roads in the expanding city, and markets in the upcountry centres; by 1910, the PPB was the country’s largest property holder. Some went into company investments, often in joint ventures with foreign partners, in railways, tramways, electricity, banking, cement, coalmining, and steam navigation.

  Next, royalty expanded its role in the government. Previously, royal relatives had been excluded from senior official posts. Now they dominated them. When Chulalongkorn formed a council of 12 ministers in 1892, nine were his brothers and half-brothers. He sent his four eldest sons overseas for education in 1885, and drafted them and other royal cousins into senior military and official posts when they returned from the mid-1890s onwards.

  Royalty had a privileged place in the new schools founded to train people for official careers. In 1881, Damrong founded Suan Kulap School specifically to educate civil servants. It admitted ‘only the sons of princes and the highest nobles’. After several commoners enrolled, the fees were raised ‘to prevent common people from attending the school’. The King’s School, founded in 1897 to prepare students to study overseas, was similarly restrictive. Damrong hoped to limit recruitment to the upper ranks of the expanding bureaucracy to ‘those who are high born (phu di) or who are acceptable because of wealth’.27 The Civil Service School founded in 1899 initially attracted few from the nobility, so it was renamed the Royal Pages School to increase its cachet. The Military Academy founded in 1897 was officially restricted to those of royal or noble birth. In 1906 the birth restrictions were tightened, and in 1909 an elite stream was created for sons of the highest families. In 1910, every military officer ranked lieutenant general or above was a member of the royal family.

  For other senior
posts, foreign advisers were favoured. From 1860, a handful were hired for technical skills. After the 1893 Paknam crisis, the numbers increased within four years to 58 British, 22 Germans, 22 Danes, 9 Belgians, 8 Italians, and 20 others. These advisers not only brought expertise, particularly in international finance, but also helped in dealing with the threats from the colonial powers. Chulalongkorn noted that ‘to employ foreigners is like having ready-made textbooks’.28

  In broader ways, the court associated itself more and more with Europe as the source of power and knowledge. In the 1870s, male fashion in the court began to copy western fashions of longer hair, moustaches, hose, and shoes. By the 1890s this had extended to trousers, tailored suits, hats, and dress uniforms for ceremonial occasions. When the king visited Europe, Tailor and Cutter magazine declared that he ‘looks just like an English gentleman’.29 In the 1870s, Chulalongkorn built a new throne hall with an Italianate design, but topped it with a Siamese roof to please traditionalists. In 1907, this compromise was surpassed by the stridently classical Ananta Samakhom throne hall built with Carrera marble, Milan granite, German copper, and Viennese ceramics. The building dominated the entrance to a new royal quarter to the north of the old city, housing a European-style palace complex and other mansions built for other members of the royal clan. King and nobles imported European bric-a-brac to embellish these new homes.

  In 1897, Chulalongkorn travelled to Europe. In part, this was shrewd diplomacy following the Paknam Incident of 1893. The French colonial minister immediately understood the significance: ‘it will give the impression that the kingdom of Siam, whose sovereign has been received in the manner due to a European head of state, is a civilized country which should be treated like a European power’.30 In part, it was a way for the king to see siwilai for himself. In part, it portrayed the king to his subjects as a new kind of sovereign who moved among the world’s royal elite.