History of New Siam (Thailand)
   by Charles Kimball
Siam was the strongest nation in Southeast  Asia from 1767 to 1893. One of its secrets was keeping good relations with  China, something the Thais had succeeded in doing since the Nan Zhao era. After  1767 Siam's rulers were part Chinese themselves, which also encouraged this  trend. Large numbers of Chinese immigrants came into the country; by 1850 there  were 350,000 of them living in Siam. Gradually they gained control of the  economy as bankers, managers of public works, and tax collectors; they were also  the only Siamese citizens allowed to sell opium legally. When the Dutch East  India Company collapsed, the Chinese merchants stepped in to take the Company's  place, dominating Southeast Asia's seaborne trade. Before 1850 there was a  shortage of women among the Chinese immigrants, so many of them intermarried  into Thai families, further blurring ethnic differences.
The first three kings of the Chakri dynasty were mainly interested in  restoration. Law codes, religious texts, and works of literature were rewritten.  New temples and palaces were built using the patterns, and even the very bricks,  of old Ayutthaya. Chakri Rama I (1782-1809) defeated five Burmese invasions,  annexed two Cambodian provinces (Battambang and Siem Reap) and reestablished the  court rituals of the Ayutthayan era. The next king, Phendin-Klang Rama II  (1809-24), was an outstanding poet, producing Thai translations of the Hindu Ramayana and other classical Asian works with a team of court poets. P'ra  Nang Klao Rama III (1824-51) put down a rebellion in Laos and made protectorates  of four northern Malay states (Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu). In  Cambodia he fought several inconclusive campaigns to stop Vietnamese expansion  (1833-45); an 1846 treaty made Cambodia a tributary state of both Siam and  Vietnam.
Officially Siam had been an isolationist state since the Phaulkon episode in  the late 17th century, and the Chinese merchants encouraged this policy to keep  competition out. But eventually the West was able to pry open the closed doors  of Siam anyway. Treaties signed with Britain in 1826 and the United States in  1833 allowed Protestant missionaries and a small amount of trade into the  country. More important was a treaty signed with Britain in 1855, which gave the  following to the UK: extraterritoriality, most-favored-nation status, a  consulate in Bangkok, and a maximum tariff of 3% on British goods. It also gave  Britons the right to sell Siamese goods, lease land, build homes, and travel one  day's distance from Bangkok. Before long France and the other Western powers  stepped in and demanded similar trade agreements; the king, Mongkut Rama IV  (1851-68), agreed to them all, seeing rivalry between foreign powers as the best  way to keep one of them from gaining too much influence over his country.
Nobody supported the opening up of Siam with more enthusiasm than the king  himself. He had been eligible for the throne as early as 1824, but his father,  Rama II, placed him in a monastery, presumably to keep him safe from supporters  of his elder, more popular brother, the future king Rama III. The old king died  only three weeks later, and Rama III was crowned without opposition.
Mongkut was not idle during his brother's 27-year reign. He tried to be a  good monk, but the more he learned about Buddhism, the more he was bothered by  the current state of Buddhism in Siam. Monks and lay people alike, he concluded,  had blindly followed traditions without thorough knowledge of the original  texts. On careful study of texts regarding ordinations of monks, Mongkut was  upset to find that modern Siamese ordinations were invalid. He responded by  creating his own order of monks, reforming their daily practices, rituals,  preaching and even their pronunciation of Pali, the ancient language of  Therevada Buddhist texts. Mongkut named his followers the "Order Adhering to the  Teachings of the Buddha," and called the order he had once belonged to the "Order of Longstanding Habit." Mongkut's attempts to reform Buddhism found  little support, but they showed he was a dedicated reformer. When Rama III was  on his deathbed, the Thai nobility concluded that Mongkut was the best man for  the throne, whether they liked him or not. In a show of unity, they passed over  Rama III's sons and elected Mongkut to be the next king.
In his free time Mongkut learned everything he could about the West. After  becoming king he employed about 80 foreign advisors to help him modernize the  country. Before long, river steamships and new roads, canals, and bridges were  built. Bangkok was linked to Singapore by telegraph. Western furniture and dress  were introduced into the palace of the uparat, Mongkut's younger brother, who  also set up a modern machine shop to experiment with Western science. An  American headed the customs service and a British financial advisor directed the  economy. Another foreigner, Anna Leonowens (made famous in the musical The  King and I), became the royal tutor. But most of these changes were only  felt in the Bangkok area; elsewhere life went on as before, though the Chinese  monopoly over trade was broken.
Because Mongkut Rama IV had been a monk until the last 17 years of his life,  his son Chulalongkorn Rama V (1868-1910) was only 15 years old when he was  crowned. Thanks to trips abroad and Anna's teaching, Chulalongkorn was even more  of a xenophile than his father, and he pushed for progressive reforms  vigorously. The institution of slavery, which had previously held up to one  third of the population in bondage, was gradually phased out (1874-1905). In  1878 a modern secular school was set up in the palace as an example of the kind  of education the king wanted. The government subsidized the college educations  of about 300 students in Europe and America every year. A government printing  press turned out textbooks and a weekly newspaper, The Royal Gazette, and  freedom of the press and religion were guaranteed by law to encourage the  development of other periodicals. Modern buildings were erected in Bangkok, and  an arsenal and drydock were built to modernize the military. The first railroad  was built, extending 200 miles into the interior by 1900. In 1897 Siam began to  overhaul the entire law code to satisfy Western ideas of justice, which the West  demanded before the unequal treaties could be renegotiated.
To pay for all of this, rice exports were increased, reaching half a million  tons per year when they leveled off in 1893. Only one fourth of the potential  farmland in the Menam valley was being cultivated, but the government could not  get the people to produce any more than this. The reason was a shortage of  labor, caused by the termination of slavery. Other hindrances to modernization  came from the upper class, which saw reforms as a threat to their status, and  from the Buddhist clergy, which was offended by the open toleration of Christian  missionaries. And Chulalongkorn's policy of giving out free vaccinations and  modern medicines alienated the traditional "spirit doctors" who enjoyed great  influence among the people. All in all, the modernization of 19th century Siam  was a singlehanded effort by two enlightened kings, who succeeded only because  they enjoyed absolute power over their subjects.
Despite the best efforts of the kings, Siam suffered at the hands of the  West. An early example was the loss of Cambodia to the French in 1863. After the  French conquered Vietnam, they made an issue over the Siamese troops stationed  in Laos, which had been used to keep order in that region since 1829. The French  announced that any troops on the east bank of the Mekong River constituted an  unacceptable threat to their new colony. In 1893 a French fleet sailed into the  mouth of the Menam River and blockaded Bangkok. The Siamese offered to  negotiate, but the French were not in a negotiating mood; before the French  withdrew Siam was forced to give up all of Laos to them. In 1904 and 1907 the  French demanded, and got, further territorial concessions on the Mekong's west  bank. The British got a concession of their own in 1909, taking away Siam's four  vassal states in northern Malaya in exchange for revoking the 1855 treaty. Siam  was saved from total conquest, however, by Anglo-French rivalry; Britain and  France could not agree to a partitioning of the country, and both preferred an  independent Siam to one dominated by the other side. Siam entered the twentieth  century clipped, but was able to keep its freedom, an accomplishment no other  Southeast Asian state could match.
Chulalongkorn's policies were continued by his sons Vajiravudh Rama VI  (1910-25) and Prajadhipok Rama VII (1925-35). Vajiravudh opened Siam's first  university and made primary education compulsorily. In 1917 he brought Siam into  World War I on the side of the Allies, and the Western powers rewarded him by  revoking the last of the unequal treaties. Prajadhipok, however, was a weak  monarch, who turned over many affairs of state to his relatives and cut back  government spending, believing that the projects of his predecessors cost too  much. When the Great Depression hit Siam in 1930, the price of rice dropped by  two thirds, land values fell 85%, and the king got all the blame for the misery  that caused. A group of 114 Western-educated middle-level officials plotted a  coup, convinced that absolute monarchy could no longer meet the challenges of  the modern world. On June 24, 1932, while the king was vacationing, they acted  with lightning speed, seizing power before the military could react. The rebels  proclaimed themselves the People's Party, set up a parliamentary body called the  National Assembly, and declared Siam a constitutional monarchy, a political  system that the king seems to have wanted all the time.
The new government, despite its proclamations, was hardly democratic, and  soon quarrels broke out between its civilian, military, and royalist factions.  When it appeared that the National Assembly would accept a socialist economic  plan presented by the civilian leader, Pridi Phanomyong, the king dissolved it.  Fearing that the king was regaining control over the government, the military  ordered the Assembly to remain in session. This was followed in 1933 by an  unsuccessful royalist countercoup; two years later the king abdicated, when he  could not do anything about the Assembly's undemocratic behavior. After that the  military took control of the government completely, and has stayed in power for  most of the time since.
In 1939 Field Marshall Phibun Songgram became premier and launched a policy  that favored irredentism and Japanese-style militarism. At home he invented a  code of personal conduct that borrowed much from Japanese bushido. One of  his first acts was to change the name of Siam to Muang Thai, meaning the "Land of the Free" we call the country Thailand.
  ©Copyright 2000 - 2003 Charles Kimball
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