How Thailand resisted colonization - Works in Progress

At the beginning of the 1833 dry season, a monk named Mongkut set out for Sukhothai, the old capital of Siam. Long journeys by boat and on foot for study, teaching, and religious observance were common for monks like Mongkut. Theravada Buddhism was a huge part of life in premodern Siam, and at any given time, a small percentage of adult men were ordained as monks. As they traveled around the kingdom, locals provided them with food, clothes, and lodging.But Mongkut was no ordinary monk. He was the 43rd child of King Rama II. Born to one of Rama II’s senior consorts, he was a high-ranking son and in the running to inherit the throne. As such, he would have been traveling with a retinue of attendants as well as fellow monks. The kingdom to which Mongkut was an heir covered most of modern-day Thailand, plus parts of Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia, and contained around five million subjects. Though most of these subjects were poor rice farmers, Siam’s largest city, Bangkok, was a major trading port, with a dense network of canals lined with houses on stilts, and an ethnically diverse population. The Works in Progress Newsletter Get new articles from Works in Progress delivered to your inbox. In contrast to the bustling capital, Sukhothai was by this time largely abandoned. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Sukhothai had flourished as a political, cultural, and religious center, but it had since been eclipsed by Ayutthaya to the south and, since its founding in the eighteenth century, Bangkok. When Mongkut arrived there, he would have been greeted, as visitors are today, by crumbling stupas (religious buildings), serene Buddha statues, and rust-colored brickwork weathered by centuries of blistering sunshine and tropical rains.At some point during his stay, Mongkut came across a remarkable object: a four-sided, black stone monolith, about a meter high and inscribed with an unusual script. The stone would become known as the Ramkhamhaeng Stele. Purported to date from 1292, it is often cited as the oldest surviving example of Thai writing. The Ramkhamhaeng Stele is thought to be the earliest surviving example of Thai writing. Image Mongkut brought the Stele to Bangkok and assembled a committee of scholars to decipher its enigmatic inscription. They compared it to known forms of old Thai and other related scripts, analyzed linguistic patterns, and collaborated with learned monks to interpret unfamiliar words and characters. What they found was extraordinary: the 124 lines of archaic text told of an ancient Thai kingdom ruled by a wise monarch, Ramkhamhaeng. According to the Stele, Ramkhamhaeng’s kingdom combined a literary tradition, a sophisticated legal and political system, independence, sovereignty, secure geographic boundaries, Buddhist kingship, and just rule.The discovery of the Stele was, as it turned out, serendipitous. Over five centuries, European powers colonized virtually every other territory on Earth, with exceptions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Japan is the best known example. Siam, perhaps the next clearest case of a state that resisted foreign occupation and retained sovereignty, is much less publicized. Siam held out through a combination of diplomacy, reform, and careful image management. By providing evidence of a longstanding complex civilization, the Ramkhamhaeng Stele was just the sort of brand asset the kingdom needed.The Siamese HoldoutBy the 1830s, the Siamese court was watching nervously as British power radiated outward from India. Just a few years before Mongkut’s discovery, during the First Burmese War of 1824–1826, British gunboats sailed up the sacred waters of the Irrawaddy River and humiliated the ancient kingdom of Burma, extracting huge territorial concessions from Siam’s long-term rival. To the east, French missionaries were active in Vietnam and Cambodia, representing the earliest phase of France’s colonial ambitions and its mission civilisatrice. One by one, Siam’s neighbors began to fall and it found itself the sole Southeast Asian holdout against European colonialism. The vanquished countries pursued a range of resistance strategies, all of them unsuccessful. Burma fought a series of doomed wars against Britain, only to be annexed. Cambodia willingly allowed itself to become a French protectorate, viewing this as the lesser of several evils after decades of encroachment from neighboring Siam and Vietnam, only for that protection to evolve into colonial rule within French Indochina. Vietnam relied on the country’s historic ties to China to ward off France, but its harsh treatment of missionaries and minorities gave Europeans an easy pretext for intervention.Instead, Siam’s leaders hoped that demonstrating it already had clear markers of civilization would undermine the pretexts for colonization. Even in the nineteenth century, countries did not want to be thought of as engaging in naked land grabs. Successful colonial ventures usually combined ostensibly noble justifications and straightforward power-hungry motivations. Europeans believed that technologically advanced, Christian nations had a moral duty to bring progress to ‘backward’ peoples who lacked proper government, writing systems, and cultural refinement. This ideology created domestic political support and international legitimacy for territorial conquest.Mongkut’s discovery of the Stele was comparable to finding a lost Magna Carta at just the right moment. Siam’s rulers realized that written language was key to civilizational legitimacy in Western eyes, and the inscription provided exactly what they needed: tangible evidence of a tradition of literary sophistication that overturned European assumptions of primitiveness.DiplomacyIn 1855, a new British special envoy to Southeast Asia arrived in Bangkok. Sir John Bowring was governor of recently conquered Hong Kong and represented a nation at the height of its powers. By this point, Britain controlled almost a fifth of the world's land mass, produced over half its industrial output, and had the most powerful navy the world had ever seen. Siam, on the other hand, had been in self-imposed relative isolation from the West since 1688, and had recently been accused of dealing contemptuously with British and American trade missions. John Crawfurd, a British envoy, described the Siamese as ‘unusually sordid, insincere and rapacious’. Under Rama III, Siam’s king and Mongkut’s older half-brother, most people thought Siam was headed down the same path as its neighbors.After Rama III died in 1851, Mongkut was crowned king, taking the name Rama IV. Mongkut was popular with the British, who thought him more friendly to their interests than the other contenders for the throne. As a monk, he had studied Western languages, sciences, and technology. He spoke English and Latin and had continuous contact with diplomats and Catholic and Protestant missionaries. He was fascinated by the Western concept of material and technological progress, an idea in stark contrast to Buddhist cosmology’s emphasis on repeated cycles of decay. King Mongkut in Western-inspired dress Image