A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  To staff the port, rice mills, factories, and new public utilities, Bangkok acquired a large working population. By the 1910s, the rice mills alone employed 10 000–20 000 people, and altogether the ‘coolie’ workforce approached 100 000, around a quarter of the city’s population. The vast majority was still Chinese, though more Thai were recruited after the decline of labour bondage and the appearance of government enterprises, such as the railways. Working and living conditions were poor. Many took refuge in opium, though they had never taken the drug before coming to Siam. Occasionally, workers protested against their conditions. In 1888, dock workers paralysed the port. Rice-mill workers struck in 1889 and 1892. The government sent troops to disperse the strikers with gunfire and deported the leaders. In 1897, it passed a law to register the angyi secret societies believed to be involved in labour organization, and in 1905 formed a special police unit that gained a reputation for heavy-handed policing of Chinese working-class districts. In 1910, the city’s Chinese workers went on a mass strike, partly in protest at the rise in taxation after the Chinese were assimilated into the poll tax system.

  With the accumulated immigration over the previous half-century, Bangkok’s Chinese community in the inter-war period was large and complex. Over time, some chose to merge into Thai society. Earlier, Chinese were legally differentiated: they were excused corvée, were paid a triennial tax, and were expected to wear a pigtail. But corvée ended in 1905 and the triennial tax was abolished in 1909. After the 1911 revolution in China, the pigtail became a symbol of backwardness and most Chinese cut them off. Western-style clothing provided an ethnically neutral alternative to Thai or Chinese traditional styles. The poet Nai But observed Sampheng in the early 20th century:

  The small road is crowded with Jek15 and Thai

  Walking so mixed together they cannot avoid colliding.

  Jek mixed up with Thai beyond recognition,

  Who is who, it’s confused and uncertain.

  In modern times the place is messed up.

  Chinese cut off their pigtails and become Thai, beyond detection

  Resulting in the abnormality

  That people can chop and change chat. Amazing.16

  But others valued their Chinese identity. With more women joining the migration stream (one-fifth by the 1920s), more married within the Chinese community. Many business families sent their sons back to China for education, partly to imbue them with the culture, but mostly to equip them with Chinese literacy. In Siam and around the region, Chinese was the language of business, especially for documents. When after 1913 they had to adopt a Thai surname, several took a form that deliberately preserved their Chinese clan (sae) name.17

  From the early years of the 20th century, the merchant community began to build an infrastructure of institutions to support urban life and business. The Cantonese formed a speech-group association in 1877, and were followed by the other dialect groups in the early 1900s. In 1908, a Chinese Chamber of Commerce was formed that soon became the official mouthpiece of Chinese business. The first Chinese school was founded in the early years of the century, and the number had expanded to 271 by 1933. The first Chinese newspaper was published in 1905. Hospitals, funerary associations, and other self-help societies appeared from the 1910s. The leading entrepreneurs were the main sponsors and office-holders.

  The court’s increasing infatuation with the west on the one hand, and the growing wealth, independence, and organization among the Bangkok Chinese on the other, changed old relations of patronage. A member of the ruling elite commented on these changes in 1916:

  In the old days, the Chinese…always visited princes and nobles, or high officials, and were very close to the Thais…Now they are different…they see no need to visit or please anyone. They come in to pursue large businesses, investing in rice mills and trading firms with thousands or millions of baht, without having to have connections with anyone.18

  The society of a national capital

  From the start of the 20th century, the city and its society were reshaped by its new role as capital of a nation-state. Under the new centralized structure, revenues flowed into the ministries located in the capital, and power flowed outwards. The number of salaried officials grew from 12 000 in 1890 to 80 000 in 1919. In 1916, the Civil Service School was combined with other institutions into Chulalongkorn University, which became the main avenue into the senior bureaucracy. New government offices were built around the fringes of the old city centre. Units of the new standing army were stationed farther out. Areas close to these offices and camps developed into new residential colonies for middle-ranked officials, and for a large ancillary trading and service community.

  The senior bureaucracy was the elite of this new government city. At its core were members of the royal and noble families who were cajoled by Chulalongkorn into adopting official careers. In effect, official salaries became the solution to the problem of supporting the rapidly spreading pyramid of the royal clan. In this era, senior official salaries were enough to support a whole household, while old habits of living off the profits of office also lingered. Provincial rulers and great families were also urged to send their sons to the new schools and colleges, as part of cementing their loyalty to the new nation-state.

  Several of the great jao sua households escaped decline by clambering onto this new ladder of success. Some sent their sons to English-language schools in British Singapore or Penang. Some entered new mission schools. Others used cash and connections to gain their sons’ places in the schools established to educate the high born. A descendant of the Luang Aphaiwanit family became the only commoner at one of the palace schools and then studied with American missionaries. His English skill gained him a job at the Borneo Company and then an interpreter’s post in the new Police Department. He rose to head the department, and his descendants in the Chatikavanich family followed illustrious careers in the modern bureaucracy and professions.

  Recruitment and promotion within the traditional bureaucracy had depended on personal patronage. This pattern remained in the reformed structure. Junior officials attached themselves to great figures in the ministries, and ascended by a mixture of talent, personal services, and politicking. Titles and ranks continued to define and publicize hierarchy. Members of the royal family prefixed their names with distinctive titles showing their distance from the throne. All officials above clerical level received an official title and rank (Chao Phraya, Phraya, and so on) modelled on Ayutthayan practice. An Act in 1913 ordered everyone to have a surname. Members of the royal family were reserved names with the suffix na Krungthep (later changed to na Ayutthaya), which resembled Lord Such of Somewhere in European noble titles. Provincial ruling families petitioned for a similar form identifying their place of origin (na Ranong, na Songkhla, na Chiangmai). Other great families, including ennobled Chinese tax-farmers, converted the traditional title of the current or former household head into their surname. King Vajiravudh delighted in inventing elegant Sanskritic surnames for other petitioners from the great households. These titles and special surnames publicized the hierarchical structure of the new bureaucracy as effectively as the royal-bestowed betel boxes that nobles had carried as marks of their rank in the past.

  Beyond these great lineages, the city began to develop an embryonic middle class of lesser bureaucrats, teachers, lawyers, managers, and other functionaries of the nation-state and commercial economy. Very few were able to rise upwards from the peasantry. Mostly this new commoner middle class developed from the minor officialdom and market society of the provincial centres.

  A few succeeded as compradores, agents who liaised between a European firm and its local customers or partners. The first compradores came from the colonial ports where they had already equipped themselves with the English language. Later, members of Bangkok-settled families got the needed education. Saeng Vejjajiva came from a family operating junks along the eastern gulf. When steamers put the junks out of business, the family placed Saeng in a
missionary school, from where he was employed by the leading European firm, East Asiatic.

  Others found an upward route through companies formed by the royal family in association with westerners. Thian Hee Sarasin was the son of a traditional Chinese doctor and pharmacist who immigrated early in the 19th century. His talent gained him patronage of a leading aristocrat and American missionaries who sent him to study medicine in New York. On return, he was employed to introduce hygiene and medical care to the army. He rose to a high official rank and also served as a director of several royal-invested companies. His sons pursued careers in commerce and the bureaucracy.

  Others found a place in the expanding bureaucracy. Three men who later rose to political prominence illustrate the pattern. Pridi Banomyong came from a mixed Thai–Chinese family in Ayutthaya. The family was well connected in the local nobility, but Pridi’s particular branch were market traders, and his father had (rather unsuccessfully) ventured into the rice economy by taking up land on the northern edge of the Rangsit project. Pridi went to wat schools in Ayutthaya and Bangkok, and then, through the influence of an uncle, progressed to the prestigious Suan Kulap School and the Justice Ministry’s Law School. He was a brilliant student, won a ministry scholarship to study in France, and returned with a doctorate to teach in the Law School and work in the law drafting department. Wichit Wathakan’s early career was similar. He was born in Uthai Thani to a family of petty traders who were Chinese by origin but now Thai by practice. He studied at local wat schools and then, through the help of a distant relative in the monkhood, at Wat Mahathat school in Bangkok, where his talent gained him an appointment as a teacher. He taught himself English and French, gained a menial clerk’s post in the Foreign Ministry, then performed well in the foreign service exams and was appointed to the legation in Paris. Army recruits came from similar origins. Plaek Phibunsongkhram’s family had an orchard to the north of Bangkok. He went to wat schools and found a family connection to gain admission to the infantry cadet school. From there he progressed to the Military Staff College where he graduated top and won a scholarship to the French Military Academy.

  Others stepped onto the same education ladder, but then diverged to other new careers. Kulap Saipradit was the son of a railway clerk. He studied in the wat and at the army cadet school, before gaining admission to the prestigious Thepsirin School. He entered the bureaucracy, but found it difficult to rise without the right family connections. He turned to English teaching and translation before making his name as a journalist and creative writer.

  These new men came from a mix of backgrounds – urban and rural, Chinese and Thai, mercantile and official. They rose on new educational opportunities provided by foreigners and the government. They tended to identify themselves as part of a new society, defined by their talent and education, rather than by reference to their origins. In their passage through the elite schools, and their work in government offices, they rubbed shoulders with the privileged nobility and were sometimes acutely aware of the role of hierarchy. They were few in number, yet a powerful new element in urban society.

  Bangkok in the early 20th century

  As the capital of the new centralized government and as the funnel for rice and teak exports, Bangkok totally dominated the nation’s urban population. Bangkok grew from maybe 100 000 people in 1850 to around 360 000 in the 1910s, 12 times the size of the next largest city.19 The city also moved from water to land. In the 1850s, most people still lived on or over the water, and almost all traffic was water-borne as the land routes were generally too muddy to be passable. The first road was built in 1857, but in 1890 there was still only 14 kilometres. By 1900, however, a rapidly expanding road network was lined by the palaces and mansions of the bureaucracy, and the shophouses of the mercantile Chinese.

  Over the same period, urban dress also changed. In the early 19th century, the Chinese usually wore loose-fitting pyjamas, but most Thai and others wore only a wrap-around lower cloth, with some women adding a second cloth loosely draped over their upper body. Early European envoys were shocked to meet even royalty attired thus, and confessed their frank surprise to find that people attired in such a ‘semi-barbarous’ fashion were intelligent. The elite responded to the link between clothing and civilization implied in such farang attitudes. Mongkut ordered people attending court to wear an upper cloth in order to be more siwilai. By the Fifth Reign, both men and women in the court clothed their full body with mainly tailored garments. The new bureaucrats, often working with European advisers, affected a colonial style of cotton shirt and trousers. So did employees of farang companies. These elite styles were quickly adapted by other levels of urban society. Male labourers remained bare-chested, but others wore a tied upper cloth, tailored shirt, or jacket in public (Figure 8). By the early 20th century, urban Siam was fully clothed.

  Figure 8: Late 19th-century photo of streetside gambling. Girls still keep their hair short. Clothing is still loose wraps, not tailoring.

  The city had changed from a rather traditional ‘fort and port’ into the capital of a new nation-state, and the centre of a booming rice and teak export trade. The landscape of the city reflected these two sides of its divided character.

  The areas to the north and west were the headquarters of the royal-focused nation-state. As the central state’s revenues increased from the 1880s, new roads were cut leading north and west from the traditional royal centre on Rattanakosin Island. These roads were lined with the palaces of the expanding royal clan and the mansions of other great households that dominated the new bureaucracy. At Dusit on the outer rim of this northeastern corner of the city, the royal family developed a modern palace complex, including both traditional teak buildings and European suburban villas. Around this complex spread the offices housing the expanding bureaucracy, camps for the garrisons of the standing army, wat, and schools.

  The mercantile part of the city clustered on the river to the south. The river frontage itself was lined with monuments to colonial commerce: western embassies; the Oriental Hotel; and the mills, godowns, and offices of western firms, such as East Asiatic, Louis Leonowens, and the Borneo Company. Behind this riverfront to the east was Bangrak, the main European quarter, centred on New Road, built in the 1860s for westerners to reside, stroll, and drive their carriages. Here were the ‘foreign legations and the majority of the banks and offices of the Western business people’.20 Here too were emporiums; dispensaries; the racecourse; Bangrak market, which sold beef, lamb, and European vegetables; and Bangkok United Club, ‘the hub around which social foreign Bangkok gyrates’.21

  Equally prominent along the waterfront were the distinctive mansions of the Chinese merchant princes, often built in a large compound to house different branches of the joint family, and often with a mill or warehouse on one side and a Chinese shrine on the other. Even more prominent were the rice mills, with their distinctive large warehouses and tall chimneys belching black smoke from burning rice husk. The early mills were situated on the city outskirts. But, by the First World War, they had spread through the centre of the city on the western bank, and their chimneys vied with wat towers and palace spires in dominating the central city’s skyline.

  Back from the river on both sides stretched the settlements of the expanding Chinese community, with Hokkien favouring the western Thonburi side and Teochiu more on the east. The early market area of Sampheng had sprawled south and east in a cluster of streets and markets with different specializations, all marked by the characteristic two-storey shophouse in which the family lived above and worked below. These areas were dotted not only with Chinese shrines but also with Buddhist wat, as these communities honoured the traditions of their places both of origin and adoption.

  Visitors to Bangkok celebrated its cosmopolitan population: ‘The crowds which throng the streets are composed of Siamese, Chinese, Malays, Tamils, Bengalis, Madrassis, Pathans…Burmese, Ceylonese, Javanese, Cambodians, Annamites, Laos, Shans, and Mohns’.22 But the first city census
of any detail and reliability, conducted in 1883, showed that Siamese and Chinese together contributed 97 per cent of the total, and other populations were tiny. This census counted Chinese as a quarter of the population, rather less than the half that many visitors estimated. Partly this was because the census incorporated the still agricultural outskirts, but partly because many lukjin – and many descendants of Malay, Lao, and Khmer war prisoners – by now considered themselves ‘Thai’. Occupations were clearly divided. The Chinese dominated commerce (three-fifths of all in this occupation), and commerce dominated the Chinese (three-fifths of all Chinese households). Most of the city population of Siamese was engaged in agriculture or general labour, or earmarked as on corvée duty. The Siamese absolutely dominated official posts, but again this was an ethnic simplification induced by the new idea of nationality; the middle and lower officials of the tax department in the 1900s in fact included ‘people of many races and tongues. There were Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Europeans, Indians, Sinhalese, Malays, Malay-Chinese and half castes’.23