In 1963, Edward Van Roy arrived in Thailand to work on a survey of hilltribes. This was a golden era of anthropology with an emphasis on ethnicity and villages. Since his retirement from the UN in 1997, Van Roy has been tramping round the localities of old Bangkok, peering into the temples and shrines, rooting out the memories of the remaining old residents, and ransacking libraries for memoirs and histories.
The result is a historical anthropology, or anthropological history, of Bangkok, with a focus still on ethnicity and villages. The results of this work have appeared in articles and chapters, but here, are assembled together and marshalled within a strong framework. The book is a history of early Bangkok from the ground up. And it is a delight.
When Bangkok-Thon Buri suddenly became a proto-capital in 1767, there was little there except a bastion and some sparse settlements of Chinese, Mon and Portuguese descendants. By 1910, when this study ends, the population was around 800,000, and over two-thirds was non-Thai, meaning Chinese or a dozen major ethnic minorities. At that point Siam was turning into a nation with an imagined ethnicity as "Thai". Few capitals in the world have approached that momentous transition with such a cosmopolitan population. How did this happen?
Van Roy divides the story into three phases. In the first, in the late 18th century, Bangkok-Thon Buri emerged as an increasingly secure refuge from the political and military chaos of mainland Southeast Asia. Siam's elite welcomed these Lao, Khmer, Malay, Mon and Cham refugees, and settled them in villages ringing the walled royal citadel, mainly to act as soldiers and guards for the new and fragile capital and dynasty.
In the second period, covering the first half of the 19th century, Bangkok sent armies in all directions, to expand its regional power, but also to sweep up war prisoners and captured families, especially Lao, Khmer, Vietnamese and Malay. These additions to the sparse population were settled further from the citadel, either up or down the river, or on the Thon Buri side.
Their main function was to provide goods and services to the expanding ranks of the royal and aristocratic elite living within the walled city. Various ethnic groups developed their specialities as artisans, market gardeners, or purveyors of magic.
In the third period to 1910, marked by the opening of the free-trade economy, the main influx was a small but influential community of farang ethnicity, and a much larger number of Chinese. They settled down the river, with the Chinese in and opposite Sampheng, and the farang in Bang Rak. Both the Chinese and the ethnic minorities were drawn into the booming economy as traders, shopkeepers and coolie labour.
Van Roy organises the book into five main chapters on the Portuguese, Mon, Lao, Muslims and Chinese, and a sixth on the smaller communities of Khmer, Vietnamese, Yuan/Lanna, Sikhs and farang.
On Van Roy's superb maps, the grey blobs depicting each ethnic village jostle and overlap. Yet this jumbled city was surprisingly peaceful. Van Roy argues that the political and social organisation was a variant of Europe's medieval feudalism. Immigrants were initially settled by the king or second king. They then sought a powerful patron within the royal elite by offering various services, of which the most effective was presenting daughters.
After a time, each of the major ethnicities was headed by a quasi-feudal lord. For the Lao and Khmer, these were drawn from refugee royalty; for the Mon, from the great military lineages; for the Muslims, from the remnants of Ayutthaya-era Persian trader-aristocracy; and for the Chinese from the head of the trading community.
The management of Bangkok worked because power was dispersed. Ideologically it was held together by the assertion of royal supremacy, mapped onto the city in the shape of a mandala radiating from the centre, and constantly dramatised in a calendar of rituals.
From the last quarter of the 19th century, everything changed. The feudal ties were weakened by "the common quest for profits, rents, wages and interest". Ethnically distinct settlements were crushed into a denser urban mass. The royal elite junked its traditional ideology in favour of Western-inspired modernity, and wrecked the sacred geography of the city with new town planning. The new and aggressive concept of a single-ethnicity-based nation forced other ethnicities to assimilate or to compromise ("Thai-Muslim").
As Van Roy notes, this breakdown contains the seeds of the "chaos" which recent urban theorists have identified as the organising principle of today's Bangkok.
Van Roy ends the book by describing the concepts that underlie his study: ethnology, feudalism, the plural society, and the mandala.
This is a marvellous book. At the simplest levels, it decodes the past that lingers in the names of streets, neighbourhoods and temples. Much of the ethnic kaleidoscope that Van Roy describes and maps has now disappeared, though there are vestiges that this book will help people to find.
In addition, the book tells the story of the city with the people who made it a city firmly in the foreground, without forgetting the roles of monarchy and commerce that dominate other accounts. Finally, it's a model of how history and anthropology/ethnology can work together to put the people there in the foreground.
Siamese Melting Pot: Ethnic Minorities In The Making Of Bangkok
By Edward Van Roy
Silkworm Books and ISEAS Publishing
795 baht
