A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Gender roles differed sharply by social status. Within all the elite cultures of the city, males were dominant. The traditional bureaucracy, shaped by its warrior role, had been exclusively male, and this principle was carried over into its modern reincarnation. Chinese migration into Siam was almost exclusively male until the 1910s, and the typical entrepreneurial family was a pure patriarchy. Equally, there was not a single woman among the western business leaders photographed for the early commercial gazetteers.

  For both the bureaucrat and Chinese commercial families, women were an instrument of dynasty building and diplomacy. They produced the sons needed to sustain the family’s next generation, and they bridged connections to patrons and partners. Chinese patriarchs often had several wives – in Siam, in their Chinese place of origin, and perhaps also in other regional ports where they traded.

  Within these patriarchal structures, women were far from powerless. Inside the palace, some women had substantive roles, including looking after treasuries. Chulalongkorn’s correspondence shows how much he valued the opinions of his favourite queen, Saowapha, whom he designated as regent on his second departure for Europe. The most famous fictional account of an aristocratic dynasty, Kukrit Pramoj’s Si phaendin (Four Reigns, 1950), makes a woman the axis around which the household and the plot revolve. Under law, money and property gifted to a bride at marriage remained hers alone, and some wives used this capital for their own business. Among the Chinese, female poker and mahjong circles often brokered the marriage alliances, which cemented commercial ties. Moreover, despite polygamy, families sometimes failed to maintain a continuous male line. Cholera took its toll – the hot months were known as the ‘cholera season’ – and recently arrived Chinese who had perhaps not developed any resistance seemed especially vulnerable. Some Chinese patriarchs chose to will at least some property to daughters, partly in honour of local Thai custom, and partly because the sons might move elsewhere within the family’s regional network, while daughters were likely to stay put. In one of the greatest jao sua households of the 19th century, the family property passed down the female line. Several Chinese matriarchs became property developers and owners of pawnshops.

  But among the working population, the female role was much different. They worked. They dominated the street and canal markets to the extent that the government appointed women as market overseers. They planted rice and vegetables on the city outskirts. They laboured in the factories and public utilities. As Smyth noted, ‘the energy and capacity so conspicuous in the women of Siam…makes them the workers and the business people of the country’.24

  This combination of elite male dominance and a culture of female labour was the setting for a thriving sex industry. The port and the Sampheng market area, home to many single immigrant males, housed many brothels and tea houses. The government included them among the services subject to tax-farms. In the late 19th century, women were imported from Japan to supplement the local supply. Aristocratic men, who once acquired women through the system of personal slavery, turned to commercial sources. The expansion in higher education, bureaucracy, and professions in Bangkok created another concentration of males and new techniques of trading sex. In the early 20th century, street prostitution flourished. ‘No matter where you go in Bangkok’, wrote a newspaper correspondent, ‘you cannot avoid coming across these women’.25 In 1908, the government passed an Act to regulate brothels as part of its growing interest in public health, but the illegal trade far outweighed the regulated segment. The new cinemas served a secondary function as pick-up sites. By the 1920s Bangkok had both exclusive clubs and street shows with erotic entertainment. In the early Thai talkie film, Long thang (Gone Astray, 1932), a man abandons his wife and wallows in the city’s demi-monde until penury forces him back to home and morality. An observer warned that ‘Bangkok will become like Paris’.26

  Conclusion

  The release of forced labour and the integration of the economy with colonial enterprise accelerated changes in the economy, society, and landscape.

  Between the mid-19th century and the early 20th, Siam became a nation of smallholder peasants. The Chao Phraya delta was converted from ‘wilderness’ into a patchwork of paddyfields. Unfree labour became frontier smallholders. But while the rice frontier supported the majority of the population and drove the national economy, it also drew the peasantry away into the villages, remote from the political life of the nation.

  Over the second half of the 19th century, the conversion of the traditional ‘fort and port’ city into a colonial port and national capital brought into being new social forces. The great families of the service bureaucracy, and the great families of the junk-trading and tax-farming jao sua, were converted into the new bureaucratic elite of the royalist nation-state. A new entrepreneurial elite of Chinese origins emerged in the late 19th century and consolidated in the early 20th. Often the families were part of regional networks. They retained links back to their birthplace, especially for education. They increasingly brought their wives from China. Their businesses were not dependent on royal favour, and they were not tied by titles and patronage to the court and Siamese elite. With growing wealth and numbers, they built a new community infrastructure of associations, schools, and welfare groups.

  The freeing of labour and the economic transformation of the city created a new working class. As education, bureaucracy, and modern business expanded, a small but important commoner middle class began to form. Its members were often drawn from the mixed Thai–Chinese society of the provincial towns. They were remote from the traditions of the old court and were self-consciously pioneers of a new urban life and culture.

  In the early decades of the 20th century, these new urban social forces challenged the absolutist conceptions of the nation and nation-state.

  5 Nationalisms, 1910s to 1940s

  In the latter part of his reign, Chulalongkorn and his supporters repeatedly justified the creation of a strong state and its absolutist management on grounds of the need for Siam to progress and be a significant country in the world. This formulation marks the start of one of the two recurring visions in modern Thai politics. The same idea, adapted to changing international and local contexts, would reappear over decades to come. The Chulalongkorn era had also created the key vocabulary of this theme, particularly the notion of samakkhi, unity, and its highly masculine and militaristic imagery exemplified by Chulalongkorn’s equestrian statue, and Damrong’s account of Thai history as a series of wars.

  An opposing vision took shape in the early 20th century, in the new urban society created by colonial commerce and by the nation-state itself. Old relationships of patronage were replaced by contracts in the marketplace. People evolved new ideas on human society by reflecting on their own status as independent merchants and professionals, and by grabbing the increasing opportunities to compare Siam to an outside world undergoing tumultuous change. The new men and women of early 20th-century Siam took up the ideas of nation, state, and progress, and recast them. They challenged the definition of the nation as those loyal to the king. They demanded that ‘progress’ be more widely shared. They redefined the purpose of the nation-state as the well-being of the nation’s mem-bers.

  In 1932, absolute monarchy was overthrown in a revolution whose inspiration came from these ideas and whose force came from the standing army created in Chulalongkorn’s reforms. But attempts to redefine the nation were complicated by the status of Siam’s large Chinese population, and attempts to reorient the state were complicated by Siam’s gradual absorption into a clash of nationalisms on a world scale.

  Absolutism defiant

  Despite his own opposition to any qualification of royal power, Chulalongkorn told ministers shortly before his death in 1910, ‘I entrust onto my son Vajiravudh…that upon his accession to the throne he will give to them a parliament and constitution’.1

  From ages 12 to 22, Vajiravudh had been educated in England. He was an aesthete with interests in liter
ature, history, and especially drama. He translated Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan, built a playhouse, and wrote 180 plays and countless essays. He was homosexual and brought favourites first into the palace entourage and later into official positions. He continued Chulalongkorn’s enthusiasm for royal display by holding a glorious coronation and building three pleasure palaces on the seashore. He also continued the enthusiasm for military pursuits by forming the Sua pa (Wild Tiger) Corps as a royal guard and as a vehicle to display loyalty to the throne. He fell deeply into debt, forcing the ministers reluctantly to allow him to raise a foreign loan to prevent bankruptcy proceedings. His actions deeply upset many conservative courtiers. His reign saw at least two attempts at a military coup and possibly one projected palace revolution.

  Vajiravudh rejected his father’s suggestion about parliament and constitution. On accession he noted that ‘things of benefit to Europeans might be evil to us’.2 His first list of ministers included 10 royal relatives and only one other. But several were later replaced by noble and commoner favourites, angering the court conservatives.

  Vajiravudh was aware that some nobles wanted to reverse the extreme royal centralization of the previous reign. He was also aware that others beyond these privileged circles were critical of absolutism (see below). He gave lectures to bureaucrats and contributed articles to the press, presenting his view of the nation and nationalism. He theorized that humans who came together in society chose a king to overcome their mutual disagreements. From that point forward, the power of the king was absolute and unchallengeable. Succession continued in one lineage for stability. A state was like a body in which all the parts had a certain role. The king was the brain. The other parts should not question the orders of the brain, but obey them:

  We are all in one boat. The duty of all is to help paddle. If we don’t paddle and only sit back all the time, the dead weight in the boat will slow us down. Each person must decide whether to paddle and not argue with the helmsman.3

  Nationalism and royalism were identical: ‘loyalty to the king is identical with loving the nation because the king is the representative of the nation’. The duty of the ordinary people was only to be unified, obedient, and grateful, to the point of self-sacrifice: ‘When our country faces danger, anyone not prepared to sacrifice his life for the country should cease to be a Thai’.4 He urged the Siamese to unite in the defence of ‘Nation, Religion and King’. The phrase was adapted from ‘God, King, and Country’, with the difference that the three parts were the same rather than different. The king was the political embodiment of a nation of Buddhists, and the protector of both nation and religion. The phrase wrapped a very traditional concept of royal power in the modern language of the nation. In 1917, a new tricolour national flag was designed for a Thai contingent sent to fight on the Allied side in Europe. Vajiravudh noted that the blue, white, and red not only matched the colours used in flags of the other allies, but also represented the elements of his nationalist trinity: white for Buddhism, blue for the monarch, and red for the blood Thai people should be prepared to sacrifice in defence of the nation.

  Creating a public sphere

  This duty of passive acceptance held scant appeal for men and women making new lives by personal achievement. The world outside Siam was changing rapidly. Many of the dynasties with whom the Chakri hobnobbed during the fin de siècle went into oblivion or retreat after the First World War. More Thai had a chance to view other societies and compare them to Siam. Small but growing numbers travelled abroad. Others could observe Bangkok’s foreign enclave. Rather more became literate and created a growing readership for books and journals. Newspapers were brought from Singapore and Penang. Translations of western novels and romances became popular from the 1880s onwards. Cinema extended this opportunity to eavesdrop on other cultures and ways of life beyond the literate. The first commercial film was screened in 1897, and screenings became regular and popular by 1910.

  Local production of newspapers and magazines proliferated from the 1890s. The first journals circulated only a few hundred copies. By 1901–06 Thianwan’s journal had a print run of a thousand. In the mid-1920s popular journals had a circulation of 5000. By 1927 there were 127 printing presses and 14 publishers. Bookshops were ‘filled with so many strange new publications’.5 Original Thai short stories appeared in the early 1920s and then a flood of pioneer novels emerged at the end of the decade. The first full-length commercial Thai silent film was produced in 1927 and commanded an audience of 12 000 in its first four days.

  The recurrent themes that attracted both authors and audiences were about the ability of people to make their own lives, and about the corruption and unfairness of absolutist society.

  Several writers took up the new enthusiasm for history but challenged the royalist claim that kings alone were the prime movers of history. Some great families compiled their own histories. K. S. R. Kulap made a living for a time as a jobbing genealogist. Monks wrote spiritual autobiographies. Some of the new entrepreneurs, such as Nai Boonrawd and Koson Huntrakun, wrote accounts of their commercial success. Sometimes these works explicitly challenged the royal monopoly on making history. The author of a military history pointed out that kings had been able to defend the country in the past only ‘because of the ordinary people who belonged to the same nation as the king and were patriotic’. One author compiled histories of all the ministers of the Bangkok period to show that ‘the kings could not have delivered protection and progress without ministers’ help’.6 All these works showed how their subjects contributed to national ‘progress’.

  Many stories vaunted talent over birth. One of the first full-length novels, Kulap Saipradit’s Luk phu chai (A Real Man, 1928), told the story of a carpenter’s son who rose through his own talent to become a leading judge. Kulap’s subsequent novel, Songkhram chiwit (The War of Life, 1932), contained a tirade against inequalities of wealth and privilege: ‘Siam doesn’t encourage people to have faith in opportunity. Siam only curses people who do wrong’.7 The first hit novel, Akat Damkoeng’s Lakhon haeng chiwit (Circus of Life, 1929), introduced a theme, later repeated many times, of a new man venturing overseas and thus gaining the perspective to criticize Siam and become committed to social change.

  Both male and female authors focused on the practice of polygamy as something unfair to women, symbolic of Siam’s backwardness from an international perspective, and contributory to the culture of prostitution. Essayists and writers idealized a society in which talent was rewarded, and gender relations were made more equal through female education, monogamy, romantic love, and sexual reciprocity. Elite women rebelled against and campaigned against Mongkut’s law under which families of high sakdina could legally dictate their daughters’ marriage partner. The pioneer silent film Nangsao suwan (Miss Golden) in 1923 dealt with the issue of marriage across class barriers. In Romaen son rueang jing (Romance Concealed in a True Story), Dokmaisot, a leading female story writer, showed women how they could turn a self-indulgent, old-style man into both a good husband and an ideal citizen by abandoning the traditionally passive feminine role.

  Kulap Saipradit popularized the term manutsayatham, meaning humanitarianism or a belief in people, which summed up the sentiments of the new commoner writers and readers.

  Journalism developed in this same milieu. From the 1890s onwards, a new press carried a discourse in opposition to the royal view of the nation and nationalism. In 1917, one publication described itself for the first time as a ‘political newspaper’. The first political daily appeared in 1922.

  Some of these papers criticized Vajiravudh’s profligacy and idiosyncrasies. Vajiravudh engaged them in literary debate, and in 1912 purchased one of the papers (Phim Thai) as a mouthpiece. He argued that khon samai mai (modern people) or khon sot (shortened from ‘sophisticated’) with their overseas education had become ‘half-Thai’ and ‘clap traps’, and that the import of western ideas (especially democracy) would not work. In 1916, the king withdrew from the p
ublic debate and chose repression. He had a tough press law drafted in 1917, but hesitated for fear of foreign reactions and instead used security laws to close several papers. In 1923, he finally passed a stringent press law and prosecuted scores of Bangkok publishers for libel, sedition, and lèse majesté. Eight printing presses were seized and 17 papers closed. But by this time a public sphere was well established.

  Rejecting absolutism

  Through the 1920s, journalists moved beyond personal criticism to a broader rejection of absolutism and the royal interpretation of nationalism on various grounds.

  First, they captured the discourse of progress and siwilai. They redefined progress as a situation in which ‘human beings have a better and happier life…as a result of their own efforts’. They redefined siwilai as people ‘who behave nobly…and contribute to the country’s progress’.8

  If such national progress was the goal of the nation-state, asked the new political journalists, why then was Siam so poor in comparison not only to Europe but also to an Asian country, Japan. Some attributed this to the strict division into rulers and ruled, which allowed a privileged minority to ‘farm on the backs of the people’ (Figure 9). The elite was reluctant to develop education, particularly for women or the poor, because it believed ‘education creates unrest’ and wanted to protect the economic advantages of ‘less than half a percent of the population’.9 An open society profited from the talents of all its members, but absolutism condemned Siam to rule by a few, selected by birth rather than talent: ‘There are both clever men and stupid men among the royalty…People have become more conscious that birth does not indicate human goodness’.10 According to Kulap Saipradit: