Produced by Hunter Monroe, Juliet Sutherland and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: GREAT PAGODA WAT CHANG.]
_ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY OF TRAVEL_
SIAM
THE LAND OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT
_AS IT WAS AND IS_
COMPILED AND ARRANGED BY
GEORGE B. BACON
REVISED BY
FREDERICK WELLS WILLIAMS
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1893.
COPYRIGHT, 1881, 1892, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK
REVISER'S NOTE
The present editor's aim in revising this little volume has been to
leave untouched, so far as possible, Mr. Bacon's compilation, omitting
only such portions as were inaccurate or obsolete, and adding rather
sparingly from the narratives of a few recent travellers. The
authoritative history and description of Siam has yet to be written, and
until this work appears the accounts of Pallegoix, of Bowring, and of
Mouhot convey as satisfactory and accurate impressions of the country as
those of later writers. Though the wonderful ruins at Angkor are now
technically within the confines of Siam, their consideration still
belongs to a treatise on Cambodia, and this as a separate country could
not fairly be joined to Siam in carrying out the plan of the series. In
other respects, without attempting to be exhaustive, the reviser's
endeavor has been to neglect no important part or feature of the
kingdom.
The regeneration effected in Siam during the past half century presents
a suggestive contrast to that ebullition of new life which has within an
even briefer period transformed despotic Japan into a free and ambitious
state. Here, as there, the stranger is impressed with those outward
symbols of nineteenth-century life, the agencies of steam, gas, and
electricity that appear in many busy centres in whimsical incongruity
to their Oriental setting; but these are the adjuncts rather than the
essentials of that Western civilization which both countries are
striving to imitate. In Siam, it must be confessed, there is no such
evidence of popular awakening as now directs the world's attention to
the Mikado's empire. The languor and content of life in the tropics
disposes the people to seek new ideals and accept new institutions less
eagerly than under Northern skies. Siam's policy of gradual progress
toward a condition of higher enlightenment is in admirable accordance
with her needs, and promises to achieve its purpose with no such risks
of reaction or shipwreck as beset the course of more ambitious states in
the East.
F. W. W.
CONTENTS PAGE
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II.
GEOGRAPHY OF SIAM, 10
CHAPTER III.
OLD SIAM--ITS HISTORY, 17
CHAPTER IV.
THE STORIES OF TWO ADVENTURERS, 36
CHAPTER V.
MODERN SIAM, 65
CHAPTER VI.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS, 73
CHAPTER VII.
A ROYAL GENTLEMAN, 86
CHAPTER VIII.
PHRABAT SOMDETCH PHRA PARAMENDR MAHA MONGKUT, 104
CHAPTER IX.
AYUTHIA, 121
CHAPTER X.
PHRABAT AND PATAWI, 130
CHAPTER XI.
FROM BANGKOK TO CHANTABOUN--A MISSIONARY JOURNEY
IN 1835, 146
CHAPTER XII.
CHANTABOUN AND THE GULF, 170
CHAPTER XIII.
MOUHOT IN THE HILL-COUNTRY OF CHANTABOUN, 183
CHAPTER XIV.
PECHABURI OR P'RIPP'REE, 200
CHAPTER XV.
THE TRIBES OF NORTHERN SIAM, 216
CHAPTER XVI.
SIAMESE LIFE AND CUSTOMS, 234
CHAPTER XVII.
NATURAL PRODUCTIONS OF SIAM, 258
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN SIAM--THE OUTLOOK FOR THE
FUTURE, 270
CHAPTER XIX.
BANGKOK AND THE NEW SIAM, 277
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
GREAT PAGODA WAT CHANG, _Frontispiece_
INUNDATION OF THE MEINAM, 11
PAGODA AT AYUTHIA, 21
VIEW TAKEN FROM THE CANAL AT AYUTHIA, 31
RUINS OF A PAGODA AT AYUTHIA, 38
GENERAL VIEW OF BANGKOK, 76
THE LATE FIRST KING AND QUEEN, 105
ONE OF THE SONS OF THE LATE FIRST KING, 109
A FEW OF THE CHILDREN OF THE LATE FIRST KING, 120
REMOVAL OF THE TUFT OF A YOUNG SIAMESE, 122
ELEPHANTS IN AN ENCLOSURE OR PARK AT AYUTHIA, 127
PAKNAM ON THE MEINAM, 129
PAGODA AT MOUNT PHRABAT, 130
MOUNTAINS OF KORAT FROM PATAWI, 141
PORT OF CHANTABOUN, 149
MONKEYS PLAYING WITH A CROCODILE, 180
SIAMESE ACTORS, 194
MOUNTAINS OF PECHABURI, 200
SIAMESE WOMEN, 234
SIAMESE ROPE-DANCER, 237
SIAMESE LADIES AT DINNER, 242
BUILDING ERECTED AT FUNERAL OF SIAMESE OF HIGH
RANK, 251
HALL OF AUDIENCE, PALACE OF BANGKOK, 277
PORTICO OF THE AUDIENCE HALL AT BANGKOK, 280
THE PALACE OF THE KING OF SIAM, BANGKOK, 292
SIAM
CHAPTER I.
EARLY INTERCOURSE WITH SIAM--RELATIONS WITH OTHER COUNTRIES
The acquaintance of the Christian world with the kingdom and people of
Siam dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and is due to
the adventurous and enterprising spirit of the Portuguese. It is
difficult for us, in these days when Portugal occupies a position so
inconsiderable, and plays a part so insignificant, among the peoples of
the earth, to realize what great achievements were wrought in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the peaceful victories of the early
navigators and discoverers from that country, or by the military
conquests which not seldom followed in the track of their explorations.
It was while Alphonso d'Albuquerque was occupied with a military
expedition in Malacca, that he seized the occasion to open diplomatic
intercourse with Siam. A lieutenant under his command, who was fitted
for the service by an experience of captivity during which he had
acquired the Malay language, was selected for the mission. He was well
received by the king, and came back to his general, bringing royal
presents and proposals to assist in the siege of Malacca. So cordial a
response to the overtures of the Portuguese led to the more formal
establishment of diplomatic and commercial intercourse. And before the
middle of the sixteenth century a considerable number of Portuguese had
settled, some of them in the neighborhood of the capital (Ayuthia), and
some of them in the provinces of the peninsula of Malacca, at that time
belonging to the kingdom of Siam. One or two adventurers, such as De
Seixas and De Mello, rose to positions of great power and dignity under
the Siamese king. And for almost a century the Portuguese maintained, if
not an exclusive, certainly a pre-eminent, right to the commercial and
diplomatic intercourse which they had inaugurated.
As in other parts of the East Indies, however, the Dutch presently began
to dispute the supremacy of their rivals, and, partly by the injudicious
and presumptuous arrogance of the Portuguese themselves, succeeded in
supplanting them. The cool and mercenary cunning of the greedy
Hollanders was more than a match for the proud temper of the hot-blooded
Dons. And as, in the case of Japan, the story of Simabara lives in
history to witness what shameless and unscrupulous wickedness commercial
rivalry could lead to; so in Siam there is for fifty years a story of
intrigue and greed, over-reaching itself first on one side, and then on
the other. First, the Portuguese were crowded out of their exclusive
privileges. And then in turn the Dutch were obliged to surrender theirs.
To-day there are still visible in the jungle, near the mouth of the
Meinam River, the ruins of the Amsterdam which grew up between the years
1672 and 1725, under the enterprise of the Dutch East India Company,
protected and fostered by the Siamese Government. And to-day, also, the
descendants of the Portuguese, easy to be recognized, notwithstanding
the mixture of blood for many generations, hold insignificant or menial
offices about the capital and court.
As a result of Portuguese intercourse with Siam, there came the
introduction of the Christian religion by Jesuit missionaries, who, as
in China and Japan, were quick to follow in the steps of the first
explorers. No hindrance was put in the way of the unmolested exercise of
religious rites by the foreign settlers. Two churches were built; and
the ecclesiastics in charge of the church at Ayuthia had begun to
acquire some of that political influence which is so irresistible a
temptation to the Roman Catholic missionary, and so dangerous a
possession when he has once acquired it. It is probable enough (although
the evidence does not distinctly appear) that this tendency of religious
zeal toward political intrigue inflamed the animosity of the Dutch
traders, and afforded them a convenient occasion for undermining the
supremacy of their rivals. However this may be, the Christian religion
did not make any great headway among the Siamese people. And while they
conceded to the foreigners religious liberty, they showed no eagerness
to receive from them the gift of a new religion.
In the year 1604 the Siamese king sent an ambassador to the Dutch
colony at Bantam, in the island of Java. And in 1608 the same ambassador
extended his journey to Holland, expressing "much surprise at finding
that the Dutch actually possessed a country of their own, and were not a
nation of pirates, as the Portuguese had always insinuated." The history
of this period of the intercourse between Siam and the European nations,
abundantly proves that shrewdness, enterprise, and diplomatic skill were
not on one side only.
Between Siam and France there was no considerable intercourse until the
reign of Louis XIV., when an embassy of a curiously characteristic sort
was sent out by the French monarch. The embassy was ostentatiously
splendid, and made great profession of a religious purpose no less
important than the conversion of the Siamese king to Christianity. The
origin of the mission was strangely interesting, and the record of it,
even after the lapse of nearly two hundred years, is so lively and
instructive that it deserves to be reproduced, in part, in another
chapter of this volume. The enterprise was a failure. The king refused
to be converted, and was able to give some dignified and substantial
reasons for distrusting the religious interest which his "esteemed
friend, the king of France," had taken "in an affair which seems to
belong to God, and which the Divine Being appears to have left entirely
to our discretion." Commercially and diplomatically, also, as well as
religiously, the embassy was a failure. The Siamese prime minister (a
Greek by birth, a Roman Catholic by religion), at whose instigation the
French king had acted, soon after was deposed from his office, and came
to his death by violence. The Jesuit priests were put under restraint
and detained as hostages, and the military force which accompanied the
mission met with an inglorious fate. A scheme which seemed at first to
promise the establishment of a great dominion tributary to the throne of
France, perished in its very conception.
The Government of Spain had early relations with Siam, through the
Spanish colony in the Philippine Islands; and on one or more occasions
there was an interchange of courtesies and good offices between Manilla
and Ayuthia. But the Spanish never had a foothold in the kingdom, and
the occasional and unimportant intercourse referred to ceased almost
wholly until, during the last fifty years, and even the last twenty, a
new era of commercial activity has brought the nations of Europe and
America into close and familiar relations with the Land of the White
Elephant.
The relations of the kingdom of Siam with its immediate neighbors have
been full of the vicissitudes of peace and war. There still remains some
trace of a remote period of partial vassalage to the Chinese Empire, in
the custom of sending gifts--which were originally understood, by the
recipients at least, if not by the givers, to be tribute to Peking. With
Burmah and Pegu on the one side, and with Cambodia and Cochin China on
the other, there has existed from time immemorial a state of jealous
hostility. The boundaries of Siam, eastward and westward, have
fluctuated with the successes or defeats of the Siamese arms. Southward
the deep gulf shuts off the country from any neighbors, whether good or
bad, and for more than three centuries this has been the highway of a
commerce of unequal importance, sometimes very active and remunerative,
but never wholly interrupted even in the period of the most complete
reactionary seclusion of the kingdom.
The new era in Siam may be properly dated from the year 1854, when the
existing treaties between Siam on the one part, and Great Britain and
the United States on the other part, were successfully negotiated. But
before this time, various influences had been quietly at work to produce
a change of such singular interest and importance. The change is indeed
a part of that great movement by which the whole Oriental world has been
re-discovered in our day; by which China has been started on a new
course of development and progress; by which Japan and Corea have been
made to lay aside their policy of hostile seclusion. It is hard to fix
the precise date of a movement which is the result of tendencies so
various and so numerous, and which is evidently, as yet, only at the
beginning of its history. But the treaty negotiated by Sir John Bowring,
as the ambassador of Great Britain, and that negotiated by the Honorable
Townsend Harris, as the ambassador of the United States, served to call
public attention in those two countries to a land which was previously
almost unheard of except by geographical students. There was no popular
narrative of travel and exploration. Indeed, there had been no travel
and exploration much beyond the walls of Bangkok or the ruins of
Ayuthia. The German, Mandelslohe, is the earliest traveller who has left
a record of what he saw and heard. His visit to Ayuthia, to which he
gave the name which subsequent travellers have agreed in bestowing on
Bangkok, the present capital--"The Venice of the East"--was made in
1537. The Portuguese, Mendez Pinto, whose visit was made in the course
of the same century, has also left a record of his travels, which is
evidently faithful and trustworthy. We have also the records of various
embassies, and the narratives of missionaries (both the Roman Catholic
and, during the present century, the American Protestant missionaries),
who have found time, amid their arduous and discouraging labors, to
furnish to the Christian world much valuable information concerning the
people among whom they have chosen to dwell.
Of these missionary records, by far the most complete and the most
valuable is the work of Bishop Pallegoix (published in French in the
year 1854), entitled "Description du Royaume Thai ou Siam." The long
residence of the excellent Bishop in the country of which he wrote, and
in which, not many years afterward (in 1862) he died, sincerely lamented
and honored, fitted him to speak with intelligent authority; and his
book was of especial value at the time when it was published, because
the Western Powers were engaged that very year in the successful attempt
to renew and to enlarge their treaties with Siam. To Bishop Pallegoix
the English envoy, Sir John Bowring, is largely indebted, as he does not
fail to confess, for a knowledge of the history, manners, and customs
of the realm, which helped to make the work of his embassy more easy,
and also for much of the material which gives the work of Bowring
himself ("The Kingdom and People of Siam," London, 1857) its value.
Since Sir John Bowring's time the interior of Siam has been largely
explored, and especially by one adventurous traveller, Henry Mouhot, who
lost his life in the jungles of Laos while engaged in his work of
exploration. With him begins our real knowledge of the interior of Siam,
and its partly dependent neighbors Laos and Cambodia. The scientific
results of his travel are unfortunately not presented in such orderly
completeness as would have been given to them had Mouhot lived to
arrange and to supplement the details of his fragmentary and outlined
journal. But notwithstanding these necessary defects, Mouhot's book
deserves a high place, as giving the most adventurous exploration of a
country which appears more interesting the more and better it is known.
The great ruins of Angkor (or Angeor) Wat, for example, near the
boundary which separates Siam from Cambodia, were by him for the first
time examined, measured, and reported with some approach to scientific
exactness.
Among more recent and easily accessible works on the country, from some
of which we have borrowed, may be mentioned, F. Vincent's, "Land of the
White Elephant," 1874, A. Gréhan's, "Royaume de Siam," fourth edition,
Paris, 1878, "Siam and Laos, as seen by our American Missionaries,"
Philadelphia, 1884, Carl Bock's "Temples and Elephants," London, 1884,
A. R. Colquhoun's, "Among the Shans," 1885, L. de Carné's, "Travels in
Indo-China, etc.," 1872, Miss M. L. Cort's, "Siam, or the Heart of
Farther India," 1886, and John Anderson's, "English Intercourse with
Siam," 1890. The most authoritative map of Siam is that published in the
"Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society," London, 1888, by Mr. J.
McCarthy, Superintendent of Surveys in Siam.