The Kingdom of Siam

The Kingdom of Siam is a constitutional monarchy of about 75 million people in the basin of the Chao Phraya, bounded by the Raj’s autonomous realm of Burma to the west, Laos and Cambodia to the north-east and east, Malaya to the south, and the Gulf of Siam and the Andaman Sea on its two coasts. Bangkok is its capital and, by a wide margin, its only great city. It is one of the richest countries in Asia, its capital is the most visited city in the world, and it is the seat of the Mainland Association, the forum of the mainland states of south-east Asia, which it founded in 1967.

It is the one state of mainland south-east Asia never ruled by a European power. Burma and Malaya became British and Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam French, and Siam survived between them as a buffer by giving up its edges: the left bank of the Mekong to France in 1893, the western provinces of Cambodia in 1907, and four Malay states to Britain in 1909. It kept the throne, the river basin and the capital, and it has been ruled by the House of Chakri at Bangkok since 1782.

Its modern politics were made by a petition. In 1885 a group of princes and officials asked King Chulalongkon for a constitution, and he answered with half of one: a Council of State of princes with a veto over the budget and the succession. The princes held it for most of half a century, and when commoner officers overthrew it in June 1932, the King signed their constitution willingly. The revolution was made against the princes, and the throne was on its side.

Siam fought France in the First Great War and sat among the victors at Berlin; renamed itself Thailand under a nationalist government in 1939; let Japanese troops through in December 1941 under protest without joining the Axis; and rose against the occupation that followed in May 1945, ending the Second Great War among the Allies. It took its old name back for good in 1945, signed a mutual defence treaty with the United Kingdom of America in 1954, and lent the Realm its airfields for the Indochina war. No coup has succeeded since 1938. For fifty years after the war the palace chose the governments that the Assembly’s coalitions could not, and Siam’s present democracy dates from the people’s constitution of 1997.

Name

Siam, Sayam in Siamese, is the oldest name the outside world has for the kingdom, and it is the name the kingdom gave itself in its treaties from the reign of Mongkut onwards. Its origin is disputed. The usual derivation is from a Sanskrit word for dark or brown, applied by neighbours to the people of the river plains; another connects it with the names of the Shan and the Tai peoples of the north. The kings of Ayutthaya and Bangkok used it of their state in dealings with foreigners and called their people Thai, a word popularly glossed as free.

The state was Thailand from 1939 to 1945. The nationalist government of Luang Sakdi Ronnachai renamed it in 1939 to claim the Tai-speaking peoples beyond its borders, in Laos, the Shan hills and the far south of China, as members of one nation whose state it was. The name went with the government. The provisional government that took power in the rising of May 1945 restored Siam within a week, and no government since has proposed changing it again.

The convention that came out of the change is still observed. Siamese is the official adjective in English: the state, its citizenship, its language and its armed forces are Siamese. Thai is the ordinary word in speech, in Siam and abroad, and it is used without any political meaning for the people, their food, their boxing and their quarter of Los Angeles. The formal style of the state is the Kingdom of Siam, Ratcha-anachak Sayam. The capital is Bangkok in English and Krung Thep at home, the first words of a ceremonial name that is the longest place name in the world.

History

Before Bangkok

The first Tai kingdoms of the Chao Phraya basin grew up in the thirteenth century at the edge of the Khmer empire of Angkor, whose temples, script and court ceremonial they absorbed. Sukhothai, in the north of the plain, is remembered as the first of them and as the source of the Siamese alphabet. Ayutthaya, founded in 1351 on an island in the lower river, absorbed Sukhothai, sacked Angkor in 1431, and for four centuries was one of the great trading cities of Asia, with Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Portuguese and Dutch quarters outside its walls.

Ayutthaya fell to Burma in 1767, and the city was burned. A half-Chinese provincial governor, Taksin, drove the Burmese out within months and ruled from Thonburi, on the west bank of the river opposite the present capital. In 1782 he was deposed and killed, and his leading general was proclaimed king. He was Phutthayotfa Chulalok, the first king of the House of Chakri, known in English by the regnal numbering a later king devised as Rama I. He moved the capital across the river to Bangkok, and every king since has been his descendant.

The opening, 1826 to 1868

The kingdom met the Western powers on terms it could still set. A British envoy, Henry Burney, negotiated a limited commercial treaty in 1826 for the East India Company. In 1833 the Realm’s envoy Edmund Roberts signed a treaty of amity and commerce at Bangkok, the Realm’s first treaty with any Asian state, which gave American shipping the terms the British had and the Realm a consul to send.

The terms changed in the reign of Mongkut, Rama IV, who came to the throne in 1851 after twenty-seven years as a Buddhist monk. He had reformed the monastic order while in the robes, founding the stricter Thammayut order that still divides the monkhood with the older Mahanikai, and he had learned Latin and English from missionaries and astronomy from books. He had also watched the war that opened China, and understood what a refusal would cost.

In April 1855 he signed the treaty brought by Sir John Bowring, governor of Hong Kong, in the name of Ernest II. It fixed import duties at three per cent, ended the royal trade monopolies on which the court’s revenue had rested, allowed British subjects to buy land near the capital, and placed them under the jurisdiction of their own consul’s court rather than Siam’s. The Realm’s envoy concluded a revised treaty on the same terms in 1856, and France, Denmark, Portugal, the Netherlands and Prussia followed within a decade. The opening was the price of independence, and Mongkut paid it on purpose: a kingdom that had treaties with everyone could not easily be taken by any one of them.

The reign brought Siam its first sustained Western audience. Anna Leonowens, a widow from India who taught English to the King’s children from 1862 to 1867, published a memoir of the court in 1870 that was more famous than accurate. In 1861 Mongkut offered the Realm a pair of breeding elephants, addressing the offer to its President, an office the Realm did not have. The ministry of Abraham Lincoln accepted on the Realm’s behalf, and the elephants landed at La Nouvelle-Orléans in 1863, in the last months of the civil war.

Chulalongkon and the Council of State

Chulalongkon, Rama V, succeeded his father in 1868 at fifteen and reigned for forty-two years. He is the king who made the modern state. He abolished prostration before the throne, replaced the old tributary provinces with governors appointed from Bangkok, built the first railways and the first schools outside the monasteries, and abolished slavery in stages, beginning with the children of slaves in 1874 and completing it by the Slave Abolition Act of 1905. The same year a Conscription Act replaced the old labour levies with military service, chosen by lottery.

In January 1885 eleven princes and officials serving in the legations at London and Paris, led by Prince Pritsadang, petitioned the King for a constitution, a cabinet and a legislature. It was the first such request in Siamese history, and the King’s answer to it shaped the next fifty years. He told them that the country was not ready for a parliament, and he gave them a council anyway. The Council of State that he created in 1885 was appointed by the King, and most of its members were princes. Its powers were narrow and real: no budget took effect without its consent, and no heir could be named without its confirmation.

It was the first limit placed on the throne in the history of the kingdom, and it was a limit placed by princes. The Council became their preserve. The commoner officials and officers who staffed the new ministries of 1892, many of them trained abroad, were shut out of it, and the grievance that the Council created, of educated commoners governed by royal uncles, drove almost everything that followed. Prince Pritsadang sat on it for twenty years and is remembered as its founder.

The lost provinces, 1893 to 1909

France built Indochina between 1862 and 1893, and the last stage was taken from Siam. In July 1893 two French gunboats forced their way past the forts at Pak Nam, at the mouth of the Chao Phraya, exchanging fire with the batteries, and anchored off the French legation in Bangkok. France demanded everything east of the Mekong, an indemnity and the punishment of the officers who had fired on its ships. Siam appealed to Britain, and Britain advised it to yield. It ceded the left bank of the river, which became French Laos, paid the indemnity, and left the port of Chanthaburi in French hands as a pledge until 1905.

Siam learned that it had no protector. It learned also that it was useful as a buffer, which was nearly as good. In 1896 Britain and France agreed to leave the Chao Phraya basin to Siam between them, each preferring an independent Siam on its frontier to the other power, and the agreement held.

The edges went in exchange for jurisdiction. By the treaties of 1904 and 1907 Siam ceded Battambang, Siem Reap and Sisophon, the western provinces of Cambodia that it had held since the previous century, to French Cambodia, together with the ruins of Angkor. In return France gave back Trat and brought its Asian subjects in Siam under Siamese courts. By the Anglo-Siamese treaty of 1909 Siam transferred Kedah, Kelantan, Terengganu and Perlis to British Malaya, keeping Pattani and Satun. Britain gave up most of its consular jurisdiction and lent four million pounds for the southern railway. The kingdom that came out of the bargaining was smaller than the one that had entered it and was still its own.

Wachirawut and the Council

Wachirawut, Rama VI, the first Siamese king educated in Europe, succeeded in 1910 and was confirmed by the Council, which then spent two years cutting his estimates. He was unmarried, at odds with the senior princes, a playwright and translator of Shakespeare, and spent heavily on his court and on the Wild Tiger Corps, a uniformed volunteer militia he founded in 1911 and commanded himself.

In March 1912 a group of young army officers was arrested for plotting to replace both the King and the Council with an elected assembly. The King used the plot to break the Council’s hold on him. He suspended its veto over the budget by decree, on the ground that the state’s security could not wait on the consent of princes, and governed without it until his death in 1925. The plotters were imprisoned and released after a few years. They were the first generation of the commoner revolution, and the King had shown them that the Council could be beaten.

Wachirawut also invented official Siamese nationalism. He coined the triad of Nation, Religion, King, required every family to take a surname by the act of 1913, and in 1914, under a pen name, published a pamphlet calling the Chinese of Siam “the Jews of the East”. The pamphlet set the terms on which the Chinese, a large part of the kingdom’s merchants and most of its urban labour, were expected to become Siamese: by taking Thai surnames, marrying in, and giving up a separate identity. Most did, over two generations, and the families they made became the commercial heart of the kingdom.

The First Great War

Siam was neutral in 1914, with a French army on its eastern frontier and a British one on its western. The alliance of Britain, Germany and, from 1916, the Realm against France, Russia and the Ottoman Empire offered it something it had wanted since 1893, and in July 1917, by the King’s decision alone, it declared war on France and its allies. It seized the French ships in the port of Bangkok, interned French residents, and paid towards the alliance’s costs. It sent no troops.

Its purpose was revision rather than land. At the Treaty of Berlin in 1919 Siam sat as a victor, and the privileges of the defeated powers, French and Russian consular courts included, were abolished outright. The victors undertook to revise their own treaties. The Realm went first, surrendering its consular jurisdiction by a treaty of December 1920, and Britain, Germany and Japan followed by the late 1920s. Siam became a founding member of the League of Nations on 10 January 1920.

It did not ask for the provinces it had lost. Wachirawut judged that the answer would be no, since none of the victors would redraw a colonial map in Asia for a power that had sent no soldiers, and asked only for the treaties. The lost provinces were left to a later generation of nationalists, who made them their cause.

The war changed nothing at home except the number of French residents. The flag remained the white elephant on red that Mongkut had adopted in 1855; Siam has never had another.

The Realm between the wars

The Realm was Siam’s most useful friend between the wars. Francis Sayre, a professor of law and the son-in-law of Woodrow Wilson, served as the kingdom’s adviser in foreign affairs from 1923 to 1925 and negotiated the revision of its treaties in the European capitals. The Rockefeller Foundation rebuilt the medical school at Sirirat Hospital in Bangkok, and Prince Mahidon, a son of Chulalongkon, studied public health and medicine at Harvard to staff it.

Mahidon’s younger son, Phumiphon, was born at Cambridge, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, on 5 December 1927, and is the only king of Siam born in the Realm. His elder son, Ananthamahidon, had been born at Heidelberg in 1925. Mahidon died in 1929, and the boys were raised in Lausanne by their mother, a commoner who had trained as a nurse in Boston.

Prachathipok and the princes

Wachirawut died in November 1925 without a son, and the throne passed to his youngest brother, Prachathipok, Rama VII, who had not expected it. The new King restored the Council of State and its veto in the first weeks of his reign, as the senior princes had made the price of their support, and the princes came back stronger than they had been under Chulalongkon. They filled the great ministries, and the deficits of the previous reign gave them the argument for retrenchment.

The Depression reached Siam through the price of rice, which collapsed in 1930. The Council balanced the budget by cutting the pay of the salaried service, dismissing officials and retiring officers, and the cuts fell on the commoners it had always excluded. Prachathipok himself favoured a constitution, and had drafts prepared. The Council would not pass them. By 1932 the grievance of the commoner service was directed at the princes rather than at the throne, and the King knew it.

The People’s Party

The movement that ended the Council was founded in Berlin in 1927 by seven Siamese officers and students. Paris, where the Siamese had studied before 1917, was enemy ground, and Berlin was the capital of the power alongside which Siam had gone to war. Its two leading members were Pridi Phanomyong, a law student of twenty-seven, and Luang Sakdi Ronnachai, a commoner artillery officer then at the war academy. They called themselves the People’s Party, Khana Ratsadon, and their programme of six principles promised independence, security, economic planning, equal rights, liberty and universal education.

Their quarrel was with the Council. Pridi wanted a constitution and Sakdi wanted the army run by soldiers, and both wanted the princes gone from the ministries. Neither wanted the King gone, and the King did not want to go.

The revolution of June 1932

Early on 24 June 1932 troops commanded by members of the People’s Party seized the centre of Bangkok, surrounded the palaces of the senior princes and held the members of the Council of State in the Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall. The plan was Sakdi’s. By mid-morning the Party had declared the Council abolished and the princes’ authority at an end. Not a shot was fired.

The King was at his seaside palace at Hua Hin. He returned to Bangkok by train, received the Party’s leaders, and on 27 June signed their provisional constitution willingly, since it ended the power he had failed to end himself. The permanent constitution followed on 10 December 1932. It created a single Assembly of the People’s Representatives, half elected and half appointed by the revolution’s leaders “until the people are ready”, a provision that was to lapse after ten years and was renewed each time it fell due. Princes above a certain rank were barred from political office.

The revolution was made against the princes, and the throne was on its side. It is the fact that distinguishes Siam’s constitutional history from that of most of its neighbours, and it gave the Chakri house a standing with the new state that the princes never recovered. It also taught a lesson the Party had not meant to teach. The army had made a government in a morning, and it had noticed.

The princes’ rising, 1933

In October 1933 a senior prince of the old Council, a former minister of war, raised the garrisons of the north-east at Nakhon Ratchasima and marched on the capital to restore it. The rising was beaten at Don Mueang within a fortnight by troops under Sakdi’s command. Prachathipok condemned it publicly on its second day, the only time a Chakri king has denounced a rising made in the throne’s name, and the prince fled to British Penang and died there in exile.

The army that won became the arbiter of the new state. Sakdi was its hero, and the civilians of the People’s Party, Pridi foremost, found that the government they had made depended on soldiers. Pridi’s economic plan of 1933, which proposed to nationalise farmland and pay farmers as state employees, was denounced as communist by the conservative ministers and shelved, and he spent some months abroad. He came back to found Thammasat University in 1934, open to anyone who could pay a small fee, and it became the school of the commoner state.

In February 1933 Siam was the only member of the League to abstain when the Assembly voted on its finding against Japan’s seizure of Manchuria. The vote was cast from fear of Japan and resentment of the European empires, and Tokyo remembered it as friendship.

Abdication and regency

Prachathipok abdicated on 2 March 1935, in England, where he had gone for an operation on his eyes. He gave as his reasons his health and his dislike of the soldiers’ growing influence, and he was careful to say that he did not repudiate the revolution, which he had backed. He died in England in 1941.

His nephew Ananthamahidon, Rama VIII, nine years old and at school in Lausanne, succeeded him. A council of three elder statesmen governed in his name, and for the first time in the dynasty’s history no prince sat on it. The boy visited Siam once before the war, in 1938, and returned to Switzerland.

Sakdi and Thailand

In December 1938, when the civilian ministers proposed to cut the army’s budget, Sakdi removed them by force. The Assembly confirmed what it could not undo, and Luang Sakdi Ronnachai became prime minister. He was forty-three, trained in Berlin, cold, efficient and uninterested in display; the cult that surrounded him was built by others, by propagandists who gave him a title, a portrait in every office and a radio programme, and he tolerated it because it was useful. His cause was the lost provinces of 1893 and 1907.

On 24 June 1939, the seventh anniversary of the revolution, his government renamed the country Thailand, to claim for it the Tai-speaking peoples beyond its borders. Between 1939 and 1942 it issued a series of cultural mandates, ratthaniyom, which required citizens to wear hats and Western dress in public, forbade the chewing of betel, required the use of Central Thai in place of regional languages in schools and offices, and closed the Chinese schools and newspapers. The Democracy Monument in Bangkok, commemorating the revolution of 1932, was built in the same year. The mandates fell hardest on the people least like the Bangkok model: the Lao of the north-east, the Malays of the south, the Khmer of the eastern border and the Chinese of the cities.

Some of the mandates’ inventions outlived them. In 1942 the government promoted a dish of rice noodles fried with egg, tamarind, peanuts and dried shrimp as a national food, to save rice for export and to give the nation something to eat in common. It is pad thai, and it kept its name after the country lost the one it was named for.

The border war, 1940 to 1941

By 1940 fascist France was at war with the Allies in Europe and winning, and its garrison in Indochina was cut off from home by the blockade. Sakdi demanded the return of the provinces lost in 1893 and 1907, and from November 1940 the frontier was fought over. In January 1941 Siamese troops took the Lao lands west of the Mekong and pushed into Battambang, and on 17 January the French navy caught the Siamese fleet at anchor off Ko Chang and sank or wrecked most of it in an afternoon. The war was never declared, and Siam did not thereby enter the wider one.

Japan, France’s co-belligerent in the Second Great War, imposed terms on both at Tokyo on 9 May 1941. Siam received the west-bank Lao lands, Battambang and the western part of Siem Reap, but not Angkor, which Japan left to Cambodia. It owed Tokyo a debt for the award, and London noticed. The Victory Monument, an obelisk of bayonets at the centre of a roundabout in the north of Bangkok, was begun that year for the war’s dead and unveiled in 1942.

Passage under protest

In the early hours of 8 December 1941, as its aircraft attacked Honolulu, Japan landed troops at Songkhla, Pattani and other points on Siam’s southern coast, on its way to Malaya, and sent columns across the eastern frontier from Indochina. Siamese troops, police and schoolboy volunteers fought them for several hours at Pattani and elsewhere. At noon Sakdi ordered a ceasefire and granted passage under protest. Siam signed no alliance and declared no war. It became a non-belligerent with a foreign army on its soil, and it remained one for three and a half years.

The same month Sakdi moved Pridi out of the cabinet and into the regency as sole regent, to be rid of a rival he could not dismiss. It was the worst appointment he made. The regent was the one officer of state whom the government could not instruct, and the regency became the headquarters of the resistance.

The occupation in all but name

Between 1942 and 1945 Japanese garrisons held the ports, the airfields and the railway junctions, and Japanese officers sat in the ministries. Sakdi’s government kept its offices, administered the country, and supplied rice and labour to the Japanese under pressure that grew every year. Britain treated Siam as enemy-held ground; the Realm did not. Allied aircraft bombed Bangkok’s rail yards and docks from 1942, and the raids of 1944 killed hundreds of civilians in the districts around them.

In 1943 Japan offered Siam the four Malay states it had lost in 1909 and two of the Shan states of Burma. Sakdi refused. To take them would have been to seize British territory, which no reading of the passage of 1941 could excuse, and it is the one open defiance of Tokyo in his record. It counted for Siam in 1945.

The railway

The worst thing done on Siamese soil in the war was done by Japan, and Siam allowed it. Between June 1942 and October 1943 the Japanese army built a railway from Ban Pong, west of Bangkok, through the jungle of the Tenasserim hills to Thanbyuzayat in Burma, 415 kilometres, to supply its army on the Burma front. It was built by about sixty thousand Allied prisoners of war, British, Dutch, men of New Wessex and of the Realm, and by more than two hundred thousand Asian labourers, Tamil, Malay, Burmese and Javanese (the last from the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), recruited by deception or force. About twelve thousand of the prisoners and perhaps ninety thousand of the labourers died of beatings, cholera, starvation and exhaustion.

Sakdi’s government acquiesced in the railway and did nothing to stop it. Siamese villagers along the line smuggled food and medicine to the prisoners at the risk of their lives, and a Siamese merchant in Kanchanaburi ran money into the camps for two years. The bridge that carried the line over the river west of Kanchanaburi became the railway’s emblem after the war, and the two war cemeteries at Kanchanaburi hold the graves of nearly nine thousand of the prisoners.

The Free Siamese

The resistance was built from two ends. In Bangkok, Pridi used the regency to run an underground of officials, officers, students and police, which passed intelligence to the Allies and hid their agents. In the Realm, Siam’s minister at New Westminster, Chamnong Phongsawat, a lawyer of the Berlin generation who had broken with Sakdi, refused his government’s instructions after December 1941 and placed the legation at the Realm’s disposal. He recruited Siamese students in the Realm for its wartime secret service, and Siamese students in Britain were trained by the British. Together they were the Free Siamese.

The Realm had never treated Siam as an enemy, and the Free Siamese were the reason it did not have to explain itself. From 1944 its aircraft dropped Free Siamese officers, radios and arms into the north and north-east, where they trained guerrilla bands in the forests and waited.

The rising of May 1945

On the night of 3 May 1945, as Allied troops entered Rangoon, the Free Siamese rose in Bangkok. The rising was led by the students the Realm had trained and dropped, armed with weapons the Realm and Britain had parachuted in over the previous months, and it took the ministries, the radio station and the bridges in a night. Pridi learned of it after it had started and put the regency behind it by morning, which made it lawful as well as brave. Sakdi was shot dead at the door of his ministry in the first hour, and his government died with him.

The Japanese garrison did not give up the city. It held the docks, the airfield at Don Mueang and the railway yards, and fought the Free Siamese across the northern districts and in the provinces for three months. A few thousand Siamese died in the fighting before Japan surrendered in August. Within a week of the rising the provisional government restored the name Siam, and on 2 September 1945 its representative signed the instrument of Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay among the Allied powers.

Britain asked for nothing. Siam’s refusal of the Malay and Shan states and the work of the Free Siamese had earned it a clean slate in London, and the only British request was that the dead of the railway be honoured. The Realm, which had never been at war with Siam, sent an ambassador.

The settlement of 1946

Ananthamahidon returned to Siam in December 1945 at the age of twenty, and Pridi’s government gave the kingdom a new constitution in May 1946, fully elected for the first time: an elected House and a Senate chosen by it, and no members appointed by anybody. The same constitution abolished the death penalty and adopted the common era for the official calendar in place of the Buddhist era, which survives in the temples.

On the morning of 9 June 1946 the King was found shot dead in his bedroom in the Grand Palace. The death has never been explained. Pridi’s government appointed an inquiry of judges and doctors, which heard evidence for a year and found that it could not say whether the King had been killed by his own hand, by accident or by another, and nobody was tried. His brother Phumiphon, eighteen, succeeded him as Rama IX and returned to Lausanne to finish his studies, and a regency governed until 1950.

The provinces taken in 1941 were returned. The Allies had resolved to undo every frontier Japan had drawn, and Siam, though it had ended the war among them, accepted the rule and handed the provinces back to French Indochina in November 1946. Battambang and the west-bank Lao lands are Cambodian and Lao again. Pridi stood down as prime minister in 1947, after the first election under his constitution, and lived until 1983 as the elder statesman of the Siam he had made.

The palace’s half-century, 1946 to 1997

Phumiphon came home in 1950. He had met Sumali Thanomsak, a Siamese chemistry student, at Lausanne, and married her in Bangkok in April 1950, a week before his coronation. He settled in Bangkok for good in 1951, the year their eldest child, Wachirathon, was born.

No coup succeeded after 1938. The army had been discredited by the occupation and had lost its hero on the night of the rising, and the Free Siamese, who had fought, were civilians and students. Pridi’s constitution held, amended several times and never suspended. The politics it produced were open, noisy and unstable. Many small parties formed shifting coalitions, governments lasted about a year, and seats in the provinces were bought, through local bosses who delivered villages for cash and public works. The north-east, the largest and poorest region, voted for whoever paid and got nothing back.

With a coalition falling every year, someone had to make the next one, and the palace made it. For fifty years the King’s Privy Council brokered each new government, sounding the party leaders, suggesting the prime minister and blessing the result, and the Assembly confirmed what had been arranged. Phumiphon never acted against an elected majority, because none ever existed without him. Democracy ran, and the palace decided who governed it. The arrangement had no basis in the constitution, and it worked well enough that nobody with the power to end it tried.

The King’s personal standing made it possible. Phumiphon spent the reign in the countryside, on irrigation schemes, agricultural stations and rural roads, and he was a sailor, a painter and a jazz composer of some ability whose songs are still played on state occasions. He made a state visit to the Realm in 1960: he addressed Parliament at New Westminster, played the saxophone with Benny Goodman, and visited the hospital at Cambridge where he had been born, which the Massachusetts papers covered for a week.

The law protecting the monarchy from insult was a royal defamation law of the ordinary kind, with modest penalties, and it was enforced a handful of times a decade. Its effect was cultural rather than penal. The death of Ananthamahidon was whispered about, not prosecuted, and polite society did not discuss it.

The treaty of 1954

France lost Indochina at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and Siam, which had watched the war across the Mekong for eight years, looked for a guarantee. The Atlantic Treaty Organization was closed to Asian states, and the Realm made its Asian alliances one at a time. In September 1954 Siam signed a mutual defence treaty with the Realm during the ministry of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and became the Realm’s anchor on the mainland of south-east Asia.

The Indochina war

The bases followed the treaty. From 1964 the Realm’s air forces flew from six Siamese airfields, Udon, Ubon, Khorat, Takhli and Nakhon Phanom in the north-east and U-Taphao on the Gulf coast, and most of the bombing of Laos and much of the bombing of northern Vietnam was flown from Siamese soil. A Siamese division served with the southern government’s forces from 1967 to 1972. Siam was well paid for both, in base rents, aid, contracts and the spending of the servicemen stationed there and sent there on leave, and it shares the war’s guilt.

The servicemen’s leave left something behind. The Realm’s troops on rest made a fishing village called Pattaya and a few streets of Bangkok into red-light districts known across the world, and the trade outlived the war by fifty years.

The students turned against the bases first. In October 1976, after the southern government’s collapse, Thammasat’s students marched through Bangkok demanding that the Realm’s forces leave. The government agreed, the north-eastern bases closed before the year was out, and nobody was killed. U-Taphao remained a Realm staging post under the 1954 treaty, as it remains. Siamese remember 1976 as the year their democracy proved itself.

The refugees came after 1975, by land from Laos and by sea from Vietnam, and Siam took everyone who came. It ran the largest camps on the mainland and resettled tens of thousands itself, most of them Lao and Hmong, as citizens in the north and north-east. Relations with Vietnam were restored in 1977, the year the Indochinese Union was founded.

The boom

From the middle of the 1980s Japanese carmakers and the Realm’s electronics firms made Siam the workshop of the mainland. The plants of the eastern seaboard turned out cars, pick-up trucks and the hard drives of half the world’s computers, and growth ran close to ten per cent a year from 1987 to 1996. Bangkok doubled in size, jammed solid and sank a little every year into the soft clay of the delta, and its banks and finance houses borrowed heavily abroad in American pounds and yen to lend at home.

Two things went right in the same decade. An epidemic of HIV, spread through the night trade and through needles, was met from 1991 with free condoms, frank broadcasting and the clinics of Queen Sumali’s public health foundations, and new infections fell by four-fifths in ten years. And in 1989, after floods on stripped hillsides killed hundreds in the south, the government banned commercial logging in the remaining forests.

1997

On 2 July 1997 speculators broke the peg that tied the tical to a basket of foreign currencies, and it lost half its value in six months. The finance houses that had borrowed abroad failed by the dozen, the property market collapsed, and the crash spread across the region to Korea and beyond as the Asian financial crisis. It began in Bangkok. The coalition then in office fell within months.

The crash discredited the system that had produced the coalitions. An elected drafting assembly wrote the people’s constitution, promulgated in October 1997. It created an election commission with the power to annul results bought with cash, a constitutional court, and a prime minister strong enough to govern through a parliament, and it replaced the elected Senate with one appointed by the King on the Prime Minister’s advice, a revising chamber of the great and the good kept out of the vote markets. It made citizens of the hill peoples of the north, who had lived without papers for half a century, and placed the Crown’s property in a public trust audited by Parliament. The shifting coalitions ended, and so did the palace’s brokerage.

The Cooperative Party

The first election under the new rules, in 2001, was won by the Cooperative Party, the party of the north-east. Its leader, Somkhit Saenphon, born in 1951 in Roi Et, was a village schoolteacher who had organised rice farmers into cooperatives in the 1980s; his voters called him Khru Somkhit, Teacher Somkhit, and Bangkok mocked the Lao accent of his Siamese. He was prime minister for ten years.

The Cooperative Party reformed the land. It gave full legal title to millions of farmers who had worked state and forest land for generations without it, founded the Farmers’ Bank, owned by its borrowers, and irrigated the dry plateau of the north-east. Isan’s rice yields doubled in fifteen years. It introduced universal health care in 2002, on the network of rural clinics Queen Sumali’s foundations had spent forty years building, and it moved much of the trade in food and the shops of the provincial towns into cooperative ownership. Its crackdown on trafficking in the night trade was real and partial.

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 struck the Andaman coast, and a warning from the navy’s station at Phuket cleared some of the beaches in time; under two thousand died. In 2005 the government gave the Malay provinces of the far south an elected assembly as the Patani Region, made Isan co-official with Siamese, and sent Somkhit to Vientiane, where he apologised to the people of Laos for the bombing flown from Siamese bases. It was the first such apology any of the war’s belligerents made. The Realm’s own apology to Laos followed in 2010, and nobody has apologised to Vietnam.

The Cooperative Party lost the election of 2011 to a coalition led by the Enterprise Party, the party of Bangkok business, and handed over peacefully. It was the first clean change of power in Siam between the rich and the poor, and the Cooperative Party won again in 2015, when Somkhit came back at sixty-four for a single term. His successor governed from 2019.

The death of Phumiphon

Crown Prince Wachirathon died of cancer in 2012, at sixty-one, after a long and private illness, and his eldest son Phumin became heir. Phumiphon died on 13 October 2016, at eighty-eight, after a reign of seventy years, the longest in Siamese history. Phumin succeeded him as Rama X and was crowned in 2017.

In a speech to the National Assembly in 2017 the new King admitted his grandfather’s role in choosing the governments of the half-century before 1997, the first public acknowledgement from the palace that it had happened, and thanked Parliament for the trust that now held the Crown’s property. The old court has not forgiven him. Queen Sumali died in 2019, three years after her husband.

The April Party

In the early 2020s the students of Thammasat marched against the draft lottery, drawn every April since 1905, and against an army budget nobody could explain in a country that had not fought since 1975. Their movement became the April Party, named for the lottery day on which they first marched, and it set itself against both old parties.

It won the election of 2027 and formed a coalition with the Cooperative Party, the party it had beaten. Its leader, Nattaya Khemthong, who had led the student marches, became prime minister in her thirties, the youngest in Siamese history. In its first year the coalition passed same-sex marriage, which allowed people to change their legal sex in the same act, with both old parties split down the middle; retired the kingdom’s captive elephants to sanctuaries by law; and called a drafting assembly to write a new constitution. Bangkok was awarded the 2036 Olympic Games in 2027.

When Ernest V was lost at sea in September 2028, King Phumin wrote to New Westminster and to London, and on the night of 29 September 2028, when the King was found alive, monks chanted for him at the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

Geography

Regions

Siam covers about 513,000 square kilometres and runs some 1,650 kilometres from the hills of the Burmese and Lao frontiers in the north to the Malayan border in the south. It is conventionally divided into four regions, which are also its four great political constituencies.

The North is a country of forested ridges and narrow valleys, cooler and drier than the rest, once the kingdom of Lan Na and annexed to Bangkok only at the end of the nineteenth century. Chiang Mai is its city, teak was its wealth, and its hills are home to the hill peoples, the Karen, Hmong, Akha, Lahu, Lisu and Mien, and since 1975 to the resettled Hmong and Lao.

The North-East, Isan, is the Khorat plateau, a dry, flat, red-soiled tableland drained by the Mun and Chi rivers to the Mekong. It holds about a third of the population on a third of the land, most of them Lao-speaking, and it was the poorest region of the kingdom for a century. Its politics have dominated the present one.

The Central plain is the basin of the Chao Phraya, the alluvial heart of the kingdom, flat, wet and planted with rice from the edge of the hills to the gulf. Bangkok sits at its foot. The South is the long tail of the Kra isthmus, between the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Siam, a land of rubber estates, tin, fishing ports and beaches, Buddhist in its upper half and Muslim and Malay-speaking in the provinces of the Patani Region at its southern end.

Rivers and coasts

The Chao Phraya is formed at Nakhon Sawan by the meeting of four northern rivers and reaches the Gulf of Siam below Bangkok, and the history of the kingdom is the history of its lower course. The Mekong forms some eight hundred kilometres of the frontier with Laos, the border drawn in 1893, and it is the kingdom’s great foreign problem as well as its great foreign river. The Salween marks part of the frontier with Burma in the north-west.

The coasts are long and different. The gulf coast, east and west of the river mouth, carries the ports, the industrial estates of the eastern seaboard and the old resorts; the Andaman coast of the south-west carries Phuket, Krabi and the islands, the limestone scenery that made Siam’s beaches famous, and the coast that the tsunami of 2004 struck.

Climate

Siam is tropical and lives by the monsoon. The year has three seasons: a cool, dry season from November to February, a hot season that peaks in April, when the Songkran festival soaks the country in water, and a rainy season from May to October. The plains flood in most years and the cities in some. In the north, the burning of crop stubble and forest undergrowth before the rains fills the valleys with smoke for a month each spring.

Bangkok

Bangkok is the capital, the seat of the court, the Assembly and nearly every company of consequence, and the home of about eleven million people, with more than seventeen million in its metropolitan region. It is twenty times the size of any other city in the kingdom. It was built on the soft clay of the delta and laced with canals, and it is sinking, by a centimetre or two a year in the inner city and more on the fringes, as the ground water beneath it is pumped out. Bangkok holds. A system of dikes, pumps, floodgates and canals has kept the city dry so far, at a cost that every budget argues about.

The city has had an elected governor since 1975, the one elected governor in a kingdom of appointed ones. It is also, by the count of arrivals, the most visited city in the world.

Cities

Khon Kaen, in the middle of the Khorat plateau, is the second city: a provincial market town in 1980, five times its size since the land reform, home of the Cooperative Party, the Farmers’ Bank and the north-east’s largest university, and the capital of Isan in all but name. Chiang Mai, the old northern capital, lives on tourism, universities and the hill country around it. Nakhon Ratchasima, known as Khorat, is the gateway from the plain to the plateau; Hat Yai is the commercial city of the south; Udon Thani grew around a Realm air base and kept growing after it closed. Pattani, the old port of the Malay sultans, is the seat of the Patani Region’s assembly.

Government and politics

The constitution

Siam is governed under the constitution of 1997, the people’s constitution, amended in 2005 to create the Patani Region and to make Isan co-official. It is a parliamentary constitutional monarchy: the King reigns, a prime minister chosen by the elected House governs, and a constitutional court interprets the text.

The constitution may not last much longer. In 2027 the April Party’s government called a drafting assembly to write its successor, and the assembly’s argument is about power to the provinces: the election of provincial governors, who have been appointed from Bangkok since Chulalongkon’s reforms, and regional assemblies for the north-east and the north on the model of the south’s. The abolition of the draft lottery has been written into the draft. The ministries in Bangkok are fighting the text clause by clause.

The new constitution will come into force only if a referendum, the first in Siamese history, approves it with a majority in every region, a rule the drafting assembly adopted to make the document legitimate in Isan and Patani and which gives the north-east and the far south a veto over Bangkok.

The Crown

The head of state is King Phumin, Rama X, the grandson of Phumiphon, born in 1974. He became heir when his father, Crown Prince Wachirathon, died in 2012, succeeded on 13 October 2016 and was crowned in 2017. He was educated in the Realm and in Switzerland, and he is careful, private and dull on purpose. He is content with a crown that the constitution of 1997 left without the palace’s old power, and he has said so, in the speech of 2017 in which he admitted that his grandfather’s palace had chosen governments for fifty years.

The King’s powers are those of a constitutional monarch. He gives assent to legislation, appoints the prime minister the House has chosen, appoints senators on the prime minister’s advice, and is the fount of honours. The Privy Council, which brokered governments until 1997, now advises him on royal affairs alone. He must be a Buddhist, and he is constitutionally the patron of every religion practised in the kingdom. The Crown’s property is held by a public trust audited by Parliament, and the King lives on an allowance from it.

Since 1997 the throne passes to the monarch’s children by birth order, daughters included. No queen has yet reigned. The King’s wife, Queen Kanokwan, is a doctor whom he met at the medical school of Mahidon University, and the heir is their eldest child, Prince Mahidon, named for the prince who studied medicine at Harvard; the birth-order rule has therefore not yet been tested. The April Party is royalist by indifference, with no position on the monarchy beyond the settlement of 1997, and the small republican movement sits outside every party in the Assembly.

The Prime Minister

The head of government is Nattaya Khemthong, leader of the April Party, prime minister since 2027. She was born in Bangkok around 1992, studied law at Thammasat, and led the student marches against the draft lottery in the early 2020s. She is the youngest prime minister in Siamese history and the first woman to hold the office.

The prime minister is chosen by the House of Representatives and appointed by the King, and under the constitution of 1997 commands a parliament rather than negotiating with one. Nattaya governs in coalition with the Cooperative Party, the party she beat. The partnership agrees on marriage, money and the provinces and on little else, and the Cooperative Party would not vote for a separate bill to end the draft, because the army is still a way out of the north-east for its young men. The prime minister’s residence and offices are at Government House in Bangkok.

The National Assembly

The National Assembly has two chambers. The House of Representatives of five hundred members is elected for four years, in single-member constituencies with a party-list top-up, and chooses the government. Voting is voluntary: turnout is high in the north-east and lower in Bangkok, which is one reason the Cooperative Party won so often.

The Senate of two hundred is appointed by the King on the Prime Minister’s advice, from lists of judges, scholars, doctors, retired officials and the heads of professional bodies. It revises legislation and can delay it for a year, and it has been the chamber of the great and the good since 1997, when the constitution’s authors removed it from the vote markets that had bought the elected Senate of 1946.

Parties and elections

Three parties dominate. The Cooperative Party, founded in the 1990s from Somkhit Saenphon’s rice cooperatives, is the party of the north-east and the poor, and governed from 2001 to 2011 and from 2015 to 2027. The Enterprise Party, founded in the 1970s, is the party of Bangkok’s business houses and the old royalist vote, led the coalition of 2011 to 2015, and revives the plan for a canal across the Kra isthmus at every election. The April Party, founded by the students of the draft marches, is the party of Bangkok’s young and has led the government since 2027. Smaller parties include the Democrats, the old royalist party founded in 1946, and the regional parties of Patani.

Elections are run by the election commission of 1997, which can annul a result bought with cash and has done so in several hundred constituencies since its creation. Vote-buying has not disappeared from the provinces, but it no longer decides elections, and Siam has changed its government at the ballot box four times since 2001.

Law and the courts

Siamese law was codified between 1908 and 1935, on German and Japanese models, to satisfy the powers that the kingdom’s courts were fit to judge their subjects, and the codes are the price of the end of the consular courts. The Supreme Court sits at Bangkok above the courts of appeal and first instance. The constitutional court created in 1997 is restrained: it has never dissolved a governing party, and its great cases upheld the Patani autonomy in 2005 and the marriage law in 2027. It is respected for knowing its limits.

The death penalty was abolished in 1946, by Pridi’s constitution. The Islamic family courts of the Patani Region apply Muslim personal law to Muslims in marriage, divorce and inheritance. The royal insult law survives in the criminal code with modest penalties and is rarely used.

Provinces and the Patani Region

The kingdom is divided into seventy-six provinces and the special administrative area of Bangkok. Each province is run by a governor appointed by the Ministry of the Interior, the system Chulalongkon created to bind the old principalities to the capital, and the governors’ power over the provinces is the main target of the drafting assembly.

The Patani Region, created in 2005, comprises the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat and four Malay-speaking districts of Songkhla, about two million people, most of them Malay Muslims. It has an elected regional assembly at Pattani and an executive responsible to it, with powers over education, culture, policing and local government. Malay, in the Jawi and Roman scripts, is taught in its schools, and its Islamic courts are part of the kingdom’s judiciary. Bangkok keeps defence, foreign affairs and money. The separatist violence that the region’s grievance produced in the 1960s and 1970s was never large, faded after the autonomy, and has stayed small.

Foreign relations

Siam’s foreign policy has been the same for a century and a half: choose a side early, choose well, and keep a second friend. It is the Realm’s closest ally in Asia after Japan and China’s closest friend on the mainland, and it intends to remain both.

The United Kingdom of America

The relationship is the oldest Siam has with any Western power and the closest. It began with the treaty of 1833, the Realm’s first with an Asian state, and its landmarks are the elephants of 1863, the surrender of the Realm’s consular courts in 1920, the Free Siamese, the treaty of 1954 and the bases. The two forces exercise together every year, the Realm still stages through U-Taphao, and a large Siamese community has lived in the Realm since the 1960s, centred on the district of Los Angeles that everyone calls Thai Town. There is a Siamese restaurant in every town in the Realm.

The Realm claims the monarchy a little. Phumiphon was born at Cambridge, and the Realm’s newspapers have never let his grandson forget it.

China

China is Siam’s largest trading partner, and Siam is China’s closest friend on the mainland: a deliberate balance to the Realm, maintained by every government since the 1970s, and noted with care by the Realm’s diplomats. The Sino-Siamese families that run so much of Siamese commerce give the relationship a warmth the two governments do not, though China claims no diaspora and the families claim no allegiance but Siam’s. The high-speed railway from Bangkok through Laos to K’un-ming in Yunnan was built with Qing money and opened in the 2020s, and it is the partnership in concrete.

The river divides them. China built the first dams on the upper Mekong, and Siam protests their effect on the river’s fish and silt every dry season. Peking remembers, more often than Bangkok would like, that the government of 1939 claimed the Tai peoples of Yunnan as part of its nation.

Japan

Japan is Siam’s largest investor and the owner of most of its car industry. The relationship carries the Tokyo award of 1941, the occupation in all but name and the railway, and Japan apologised for the railway in 1995 and pays for the museum at Kanchanaburi. Relations are warm and slightly formal.

Laos and Cambodia

Laos is kin. The people of Isan are Lao by language and descent, and since the Cooperative Party’s decade the kinship has been spoken of openly in both capitals. Siam is Laos’s largest market and buys most of the electricity its dams generate. Somkhit’s apology of 2005 for the bombing flown from Siamese bases is remembered in Vientiane, and relations have been easy since.

Relations with Cambodia are correct and not warm. Cambodians remember centuries of Siamese overlordship and the occupation of Battambang in 1941, and the Siamese forget both. Siam is Cambodia’s largest market for workers and goods, and most of the visitors to Angkor arrive through Bangkok. The temple of Khao Phra Wihan, Preah Vihear in Khmer, on the cliff of the Dangrek range above the border, has always been Siamese; France never pressed a claim to it, and Cambodia has not taken one up.

Vietnam and the Indochinese Union

Relations with Vietnam were restored in 1977, trade followed in the 1980s, and the war is now mentioned at state dinners only in the past tense. Siam has never apologised to Vietnam for the bombing flown from its bases or for the division it sent south.

Siam is the interest from the wider region that the Indochinese Union records at intervals. Siamese governments float membership about once a decade, and no application has ever been lodged. One vote each would put Siam on a level with its own lost provinces, which no Siamese government would accept, and the Union’s small members would never accept the dilution of their own votes that a fourth member would bring.

Burma, Malaya and Britain

Siam’s longest border is with Burma, the autonomous realm within the Empire of Raj, and it is long and quiet. The Shan and the Karen live on both sides of it and cross it to trade. There are no refugee camps on it, because Burma’s settlement of 1947 never gave anyone a war to flee, and Burmese workers are the largest group of migrants in Siam, under the work-permit scheme the Mainland Association has run since the 1990s, in which the Raj takes part for Burma.

To the south is Malaya, independent since 1957 under an elected king chosen from among its nine hereditary rulers, with the Hanoverian sovereign, since 31 October 2028 George V, as its protector, the one realm of his in which he is not head of state. The border is quiet. No Malayan government has claimed Patani, Kuala Lumpur welcomed the autonomy of 2005, and families on both sides cross it for weddings and markets. Malaya lobbies against the Kra canal whenever the Enterprise Party revives it.

Relations with Britain are warm. The clean slate of 1945 is remembered gratefully, and Siamese students still go to London before they go to New Westminster.

Germany

Germany is Siam’s largest European trading partner and the supplier of much of its machinery. The People’s Party was founded in Berlin, and the war academy there still trains a few Siamese officers each year, which the army does not advertise.

The League and the Mainland Association

Siam was a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and has served four terms on the Security Council since 1945, voting with the Realm on questions of security and with China on the Mekong. Prasong Wiwatchai, a veteran of the Free Siamese, was Secretary-General of the League from 1972 to 1979, the first from mainland Asia.

Siam founded the Mainland Association, formally the Association of Mainland South-East Asian States, at Bangkok in 1967, and its secretariat is there. It is a forum for trade, frontiers and labour and has never been a defence pact; the states of the Indochinese Union joined it after 1977. Siam also belongs to the regional organisations of maritime south-east Asia that the Philippines founded.

Defence

The armed forces

The Royal Siamese Armed Forces, an army, a navy and an air force of about two hundred thousand under arms, are inert and respected. They have not fought a war since 1975 or made a government since 1938, and they are politically neutral to the point of dullness. Their work is flood relief, disaster response and League peacekeeping, and their officers are trained at home, at the Realm’s staff colleges and, a few each year, in Berlin.

The navy keeps Ko Chang day on 17 January, for the fleet it lost to the French in 1941, which makes it one of the few navies in the world whose principal anniversary is a defeat. It has no aircraft carrier. It ordered one in 1992, the order was cancelled in the crash of 1997, and the navy has never quite got over it.

The draft lottery

Siam has conscripted its young men by lottery since the act of 1905. Every April, men of twenty-one who have not volunteered draw a card at their district office: a black card exempts them, and a red card means two years in the army. The draw is a public ceremony in every district, attended by mothers, and the April Party is named after it.

Abolition is written into the draft constitution, and until that is adopted the lottery is still drawn. The Cooperative Party, the April Party’s partner in government, would not vote for a separate bill.

The Realm treaty and U-Taphao

The mutual defence treaty of 1954 with the Realm is the foundation of Siamese defence. The Realm’s air and naval forces still stage through U-Taphao, on the Gulf coast south of Pattaya, under the treaty, though the north-eastern bases closed in 1976. The two forces have held a great annual exercise since 1982, Exercise White Elephant. The name was chosen by a Realm officer who did not know the idiom, and it was kept because everybody else did.

The nuclear-free zone

Siam has no nuclear weapons and no nuclear programme, civil or military, though the Raj and China, its two nuclear neighbours, have both. In 1995 it led the Mainland Association to a nuclear-free zone treaty, signed at Bangkok, which bars weapons from the territory of its members. The Realm’s warships still call at U-Taphao under a carefully worded exception that neither government has ever been asked to explain.

Economy

Structure

Siam is rich: its output per head is about A£25,000, and it joined the ranks of the rich countries in the 2010s, on the back of the boom of the 1980s and 1990s, the reforms that followed the crash of 1997 and the land reform of the Cooperative Party’s decade. It is the largest economy on the mainland of south-east Asia by a wide margin.

Tourism comes first. It provides about a quarter of the kingdom’s output and a fifth of its employment, and the factories that made the boom matter less every decade as wages rise and the car plants move their simpler work across the borders to Laos and Cambodia.

Tourism

About forty million visitors come each year, and Bangkok is the most visited city in the world. They come for the beaches of the Andaman coast and the gulf islands, the temples of Bangkok, Ayutthaya, Sukhothai and Chiang Mai, the food, and the night trade that the Realm’s servicemen built and that never quite went away. It runs every coastal province, and is resented in a few of them.

The land and the cooperatives

Siam is one of the world’s largest exporters of rice and its largest producer of natural rubber, and grows cassava, sugar and fruit for export. The land reform of the 2000s gave legal title to the farmers who worked the land, and the Farmers’ Bank, owned by eleven million members, its borrowers, is the largest lender in the kingdom outside Bangkok. Much of the trade in food and the shops of the provincial towns belong to cooperatives, a legacy of the Cooperative Party’s decade, and the great Sino-Siamese family houses that once dominated food, drink and retail are smaller than they were.

Bangkok and the rest

The economy’s great divide is between Bangkok and the rest. The capital is as rich as a European capital; the north-east earns a third as much per head. The gap has narrowed since the land reform, and it is still the widest regional gap of any rich country. It is the reason the Cooperative Party existed and the reason the drafting assembly is arguing about the provinces.

Industry, energy and transport

The eastern seaboard still builds cars for the Japanese makers and drives for the Realm’s electronics firms, and Bangkok is a regional centre for banking and shipping. Natural gas from the Gulf of Siam and electricity from the Lao dams supply most of the kingdom’s power, and the kingdom buys the Lao power while it protests the dams that make it.

The railways are the metre-gauge network that Chulalongkon began, with the high-speed line to K’un-ming through Laos since the 2020s and a second high-speed line under construction to the south. Bangkok has an elevated railway, opened in 1999, and an underground, and its main airport, Suwannaphum, opened in 2006 and is one of the busiest in Asia.

The tical

The currency is the tical, as the Realm’s merchants called it in the nineteenth century and as it is still called in English, and the baht at home; it is divided into a hundred satang. It was pegged to a basket of currencies until the crash of 2 July 1997, which began with its fall, and it has floated since.

Society

Population

Siam has about 75 million people, more than it would otherwise have had, because the refugees resettled after 1975 stayed and had children, and because its birth rate fell later than Japan’s or Korea’s. It is now falling fast, and Siam is ageing like any rich country, a generation after becoming one.

About a third of the population are Lao of the north-east, who call themselves Isan. The Central Thai of the plain, the Northern Thai of the hills and valleys and the Southern Thai of the peninsula make up most of the rest. About one Siamese in seven has Chinese ancestors, nearly all of them assimilated within two generations of arriving. There are about two and a half million Malays, most of them in the Patani Region, smaller Khmer and Mon communities on the borders, the hill peoples of the north, and the Hmong and Lao resettled after 1975 and their descendants.

Languages

Siamese, the Central Thai of Bangkok, written in the script descended from Sukhothai’s, was the only language of the state until 2005, when Isan, the Lao of the north-east, was made co-official with it. It was the largest change to the language of the state since Wachirawut, and it is visible on every form, road sign and banknote. Northern and Southern Thai are spoken as regional varieties, Malay is taught in the schools of the Patani Region in the Jawi and Roman scripts, and Khmer, Karen and Hmong are spoken at home. English is the second language of business and tourism.

Siamese is written in English by a single national system of romanisation, used for every name, royal and common, ancient and modern.

Religion

About nine Siamese in ten are Theravada Buddhists, and the monkhood, the Sangha, governed by its own council, is divided between Mongkut’s reformed Thammayut order and the older Mahanikai. Many young men still spend a few months in the robes before marriage or work. About one in twenty Siamese are Muslims, most of them the Malays of the south and the old Muslim communities of Bangkok, and about one in a hundred are Christians, Catholic since the missions of Ayutthaya and Protestant since the Realm’s missionaries of the nineteenth century.

There is no established church. The King must be a Buddhist and is constitutionally the patron of every religion, and he attends the great Muslim and Christian occasions as he does the Buddhist ones.

The hill peoples

The hill peoples of the north lived for half a century without citizenship: they had no papers, so they could not own land, travel or attend secondary school, and the state treated them as squatters in forests it was protecting. The constitution of 1997 made them citizens. It was a failing put right late, and the elderly among them still remember the checkpoints.

Their hills grew opium until the 1970s, when projects begun by Phumiphon and paid for in part by the Realm turned them to coffee, tea, vegetables and flowers. The drug problem of the present is methamphetamine, made in the hills across the borders and carried south.

The refugees’ grandchildren

The Hmong whom Siam took in after 1975 are citizens, and their grandchildren are a visible community of the north, with members in the National Assembly and a New Year festival in December that Bangkok’s ministers now attend. The Lao resettled in Isan have merged with the Lao who were there already, and most of their grandchildren could not say which of their grandparents crossed the Mekong in 1975.

Education

Schooling is universal and compulsory to the age of fifteen. The great universities are the old rivalry: Chulalongkon University, founded by Wachirawut in 1917 and the royal foundation, and Thammasat University, founded by Pridi in 1934 as an open university for the commoner state. The student marches against the draft and the April Party both began at Thammasat. Mahidon University, which grew from the medical school at Sirirat that the Rockefeller money rebuilt, leads in medicine, and Khon Kaen University is the university of the north-east and the place where half the Cooperative Party’s members of the Assembly studied.

Health

Siam has had universal health care since 2002, introduced by the Cooperative Party on the network of rural clinics that Queen Sumali’s foundations spent forty years building and that now carry her name. The response to the HIV epidemic of the late 1980s, from 1991, is cited across Asia as a model: free condoms, frank broadcasting, and clinics that asked no questions. Life expectancy is about eighty.

Gender

Kathoei, transgender women, are unusually visible in Siamese public life, in entertainment, commerce and the professions, and have been for generations. They were not recognised in law until 2027, when the April Party’s marriage act allowed people to change their legal sex and made same-sex marriage lawful in the same text, with both old parties split down the middle.

Media

The press is free and loud, among the freest in Asia. The royal insult law is rarely used, and the newspapers of Bangkok print what they please about every politician in the kingdom. The national broadcaster is a public corporation modelled on Britain’s.

Culture

Food

Siamese food is the kingdom’s best-known export. It is built on rice, fish sauce, chilli, lime and fresh herbs, and on the balance of hot, sour, salty and sweet in a single dish. Its regional cuisines differ sharply, and the food of Isan, sticky rice, grilled chicken, minced meat salads and the green papaya salad called som tam, became the national food in the Cooperative Party’s decade as the north-east’s cooks moved to the capital.

Pad thai, rice noodles fried with egg, tamarind, peanuts and dried shrimp, was invented by Sakdi’s government in 1942 to save rice for export and promoted as the national dish, and it kept its name after the country lost the name it was named for. Since 2002 the government has certified Siamese restaurants abroad and trained their cooks, and it is generally reckoned the most successful thing the tourism ministry has ever done.

Music

The popular music of Siam is mo lam, the sung poetry of Isan accompanied by the khaen, a bamboo mouth organ, and luk thung, its country cousin from the plains, which became the music of the whole country in the Cooperative Party’s decade. The piphat ensembles of the court play the classical repertoire, and Phumiphon’s jazz compositions are still played on state occasions.

Literature and the stage

The Ramakian, the Siamese version of the Ramayana, is the national epic, painted around the galleries of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and danced in the masked drama called khon. Sunthon Phu, who died in 1855, is the national poet. Wachirawut wrote plays and translated Shakespeare. The great modern novel is Four Reigns, Si Phaendin, by Khuekrit Pramot, published in 1953, which follows a woman of the palace from 1892 to 1946.

Cinema

Siamese cinema is known abroad for ghost films and martial-arts pictures, exported across Asia and to the Realm since the 1990s, and for a solemn art cinema that wins prizes at festivals. The best-known film about Siam was not made there. The Bridge on the River Kwai, of 1957, was filmed in Ceylon and got the history of the railway wrong, and in 1960 Siam renamed the stretch of river below the bridge the Khwae Yai to match the film, which is why the bridge is now among the most visited sites in the kingdom.

Sport

Muay thai, officially Siamese boxing in English, is the national sport, fought with fists, feet, knees and elbows, and its stadiums in Bangkok are temples of a kind. Football is the most watched game, and sepak takraw, kicked volleyball with a rattan ball, the most played in the villages. Bangkok has held the Asian Games four times, in 1966, 1970, 1978 and 1998, and was awarded the 2036 Olympic Games in 2027.

Festivals

Songkran, the Siamese New Year, falls in mid-April, at the hottest time of the year, and is celebrated by throwing water at everyone in the street for three days. The draft lottery is drawn in the first week of April, before it. Loi Krathong, in November, floats candles on the rivers. Chakri Day, 6 April, is the National Day, and the King’s birthday and the great Buddhist days are public holidays.

Elephants

The elephant is the national animal and the device on the flag. About four thousand live wild in the national parks of the west and north. The captive elephants, put out of work in the forests by the logging ban of 1989, went into the tourist trade, where their treatment was a standing scandal, and the April Party’s first animal law, in 2027, retired them to sanctuaries, to the fury of the mahout families who had kept them for generations.

Symbols

The flag is the white elephant on red: a plain white elephant facing the hoist on a red field, adopted by Mongkut in 1855 and never changed. It serves as the national, civil and state flag alike. Siam is one of the few states in the world whose flag carries an animal and nothing else.

The emblem is the Garuda, the bird-man mount of Vishnu, the King’s emblem since 1911, which appears on every government document and passport.

The anthem is Sansoen Phra Barami, the royal anthem, which has served as the national anthem throughout. The revolution of 1932 was made with the throne on its side and had no need of a song of its own.

The motto is Nation, Religion, King, Constitution, the four pillars: Wachirawut’s three, with the fourth added by the revolution of 1932.

The National Day is Chakri Day, 6 April, the anniversary of the founding of the dynasty and of Bangkok in 1782. The official calendar has been the common era since 1946, and the Buddhist era, which counts from the death of the Buddha and runs 543 years ahead of it, survives in the temples.

Failings

The war it lent its airfields to. From 1964 to 1976 most of the bombing of Laos and much of the bombing of northern Vietnam was flown from Siamese airfields, with the consent of every Siamese government of the period and for their profit, and a Siamese division fought for the southern government from 1967 to 1972. Laos was bombed more heavily for its size than almost any country in history, and the unexploded ordnance from the raids flown out of Udon and Nakhon Phanom still kills farmers in its fields. Siam apologised to Laos in 2005, sixty years late. It has never apologised to Vietnam.

The palace’s half-century. For fifty years, from 1946 to 1997, the palace chose the governments that the coalitions of the Assembly could not form, through a Privy Council that no constitution gave the power. Siam called itself a democracy throughout, and the claim was true of its elections and false of its governments. The arrangement was admitted by the palace only in 2017, by a king whose grandfather had run it, and the people who had been governed by it were never asked.

The Sakdi years. The cultural mandates of 1939 to 1942 were an attempt to make one nation out of several by decree. They closed the Chinese schools and newspapers, forbade the regional languages in schools and offices, and told the Lao of Isan, the Malays of the south and the Khmer of the border that what they spoke and wore was a fault to be corrected. The Malay south dates its grievance from them. In the same years Sakdi’s government acquiesced in the railway, on which some hundred thousand prisoners and labourers died, and administered the country for an occupier while calling the arrangement neutrality. Siam’s place among the Allies at the end of the war has let it forget much of this, and it has.

The Chinese. The pressure on the Chinese of Siam to stop being Chinese began with a king’s pamphlet in 1914 that compared them to the Jews of Europe, and it ended only when there was nothing left to press: the schools, the newspapers and the surnames had all gone. The Sino-Siamese families who run so much of the kingdom’s commerce are Siamese because they were required to be, and the pamphlet is still in print.

The night trade. The red-light districts that the Realm’s servicemen built in the 1960s outlived them by half a century. Women and girls were trafficked into them from the north-east, from the hill country and from across the borders, and the Cooperative Party’s crackdown of the 2000s was real and partial. The trade is smaller than it was and it is not gone.

The stateless hills. The hill peoples of the north were left without citizenship from the 1940s until 1997, unable to own the land they farmed, to travel or to finish school, in a kingdom that had made citizens of tens of thousands of refugees in the same years.

The north-east. For half a century the largest region of the kingdom was bought at elections rather than represented in government, and it is still the poorest region of a rich country, by a margin no other rich country tolerates.

The death of a king. Ananthamahidon was found shot dead in the Grand Palace in 1946, and nobody has ever been made to explain it. The law against insulting the monarchy is rarely used and did not need to be: the case has been whispered about for eighty years, in a kingdom that otherwise says what it likes, because the habit of not saying it was stronger than any statute.

Assessment

Siam is the buffer that chose. It survived between two empires in the nineteenth century, and among stronger neighbours in the twentieth, by choosing sides early and choosing well, and it paid for every choice somewhere other than Bangkok.

The choices are a record few states can match. Mongkut opened the kingdom to everyone in 1855 so that nobody could take it alone. Wachirawut went to war against France in 1917 for treaties rather than land, and got them. The Free Siamese chose the Allies in time to end the war among them, by days rather than years. Siam signed with the Realm in 1954, kept China as a second friend from the 1970s, and has kept both since. It was never colonised and has not had a coup since 1938, and in a region where both are rare it is the only state that can say both.

The bill was paid by others. The edges paid in 1893, 1907 and 1909, when Laos, western Cambodia and the northern Malay states were traded for the river basin and the courts. Laos and Vietnam paid in the 1960s and 1970s, when the bombers flew from Siamese fields. The women of the north-east paid in the night trade, the hill peoples in fifty years without papers, and the Chinese in their schools. At home, the absence of coups was bought with fifty years in which the palace chose the governments that voters could not, and the north-east was bought at every election and represented at none.

The constitution of 1997 is the hinge. It ended the palace’s brokerage, made the hill peoples citizens and gave the north-east a party that won, and the governments since have done more for the kingdom’s poorest region than all those before them. The record since then is better than the record before it, and the April Party’s drafting assembly is trying to make the provinces equal to the capital in law as the Cooperative Party tried to make them equal in land.

What has not changed is the method. Siam still chooses early and keeps a second friend: the Realm’s treaty and China’s railway, a seat beside the Union that it will not take, a monarchy it keeps because the monarchy no longer decides anything. The method has served the kingdom for a hundred and seventy years, and it has always been somebody else who paid for it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Republic of Vietnam
• Indochinese Union
• Empire of Raj
• Empire of China
• Empire of Japan
• Kingdom of the Philippines
• Kingdom of Korea
• League of Nations
• The First Great War
• The Second Great War
• United Kingdom of America

Categories

Nations of the World · Asia and the Pacific · Constitutional Monarchies