Transcription
When the world thinks of a Thai royal wife, it pictures Anna Leonowins and the king of Syiam, the Urin film, the polished floors and the foreign governness teaching the children English. Anna Leon Owens was not a wife. She was a governness at the previous court hired by the king's father, and most of what she wrote about it was invented. Her two memoirs are banned in Thailand. Her descriptions of floggings and burnings have no support in any Thai source. The court she described in English to a Victorian audience was a fiction designed for export. The court that actually existed was something else entirely.
It was a walled city of 3,000 women inside the Grand Palace in Bangkok. 218,000 m of compound governed by women, judged by women, policed by a regiment of 400 armed female guards trained in musketss and pistols, organized in four companies of 100, recruited at 13, retired at 25. Westerners who glimpsed them called them the palace Amazon. Inside the walls, there were markets, schools, courts of law, two-story shophouse residences, artificial lakes, and a population larger than most provincial Thai towns of the period. No man was permitted to enter. No man, with one exception. One man held the key. That man had 153 royal wives, 77 surviving children, 32 sons and 45 daughters, four queens, all four of them his own halfsisters, three of them sharing the same mother. He reigned for 42 years. His name was Chula Longorn, Chula Longorn, the fifth king of the Chakri dynasty. And on a single morning in October 1910, all of it ended.
In 1906, a 16-year-old girl entered that compound and was given by the king himself a gold bracelet shaped like two crossed nails. The next time anyone removed it from her wrist, she would have been dead for several hours, and the year would be 1983. What one man did with a system this size? And what happened to all of those women when he died at 2:45 in the morning on the 23rd of October, 1910 is the story of how an institution founded in 1782 survived for 153 years and was made legally impossible in a single afternoon.
The popular image leaves out the architecture. Behind the gates of the grand palace stood a compound covering nearly 60 acres enclosed within walls totaling 1,900 m founded with the palace itself on the 6th of May 1782 under the first Chakri king. It was modeled on the inner compound of the older capital at Aayutaya which had fallen to a Burmese army 15 years earlier. The institution did not begin with Chula Longorn. It was inherited. It was governed by a written code called the Cotmon Montthian ban, Cotmon Montean Barn, the palace maintenance law that traced back to the 15th century. The law specified everything, who could speak to whom, which corridors were forbidden after sunset, what constituted unauthorized contact with a royal. The punishments ranged from confinement to execution. There was no informality. There was no improvisation.
A girl entered the system in one of three ways. She was given as a gift from a noble family seeking favor. She was the daughter of an official whose position required the offering of a daughter. She was a political marriage negotiated to bind a distant province or a foreign court. Most entered between the ages of 12 and 16. None of them entered voluntarily in any meaningful sense of the word. There was no return path. A woman who entered the inner court did not leave it except in death or to be moved to another royal residence as a widow.
The ranks descended through nine clear tears. At the top sat the supreme queen, Somdet Fraakara Mahesi, Somdet Prahayakaramahi. Below her the queen mother of the crown prince. Below her the royal queens, halfsisters of the king, elevated to full queen status. Below them a unique fifth tier of princess consort that existed for only one woman in the entire reign. Below her the high secondary consorts called Frasenom Ek Prasanom Ek. Below them the consort mothers Chao Chom Mandanda Chao Chom Mandar who had borne the king a child. Below them the Chao Chom the consorts who had not. Below them the ladies in waiting. At the bottom, the servants and slaves. The difference between ranks was not ceremonial. It was structural.
A child born to a queen became chao, chao, full royal, and was eligible for foreign education and for the throne itself. A child born to a chao chong mandar became frag praong half royal and was eligible for a provincial governorship but not the crown. The mother's rank determined the child's lifetime. The child's lifetime determined which lineage held siam. The four queens of Chula Longorn were all his own halfsisters. The first was Sunandanda Kumaratana Sunandkumar Ratana. The second was Savang Vadhana Sawang Watana. The third was Saoaba Fongri Sa Pongri. Three of them shared the same mother. Princess Consort Pamsu Charitakul Pamsu Charitakul. The fourth queen Sukuma Marasri Suumala Marasri had a different mother. The logic was specific. Marriage to a halfsister preserved the purity of the royal bloodline. It also blocked the powerful Banag Bunak family, a Persian descended aristocratic dynasty that had effectively ruled Siam through chief minister positions for over a century from supplying a queen and through her a future king. The halfsister marriages were defensive architecture.
Inside the walls, governance was entirely female. The director of the inner court was called the athibod fai art fi the direess of the inside. She had judges under her, tax collectors, market inspectors. Each queen ran her own household of two to 300 women, complete with its own internal hierarchy. The female guard regiment called the Crom Clon. Crom clone had been founded in 1688 during the Aayutaya period. Its commander bore one of the most imposing titles in Siamese government. Maying Tafhan, Maying Tapan, the great mother of war. She answered to the king and to no one else. The British physician Malcolm Smith, who served Queen Zawwapa in the years after Chula Longorn's death, described the inner court as a town complete in itself, a town of women controlled by women with its own government, its own institutions, its own laws and law courts. He was not exaggerating. He had walked through it.
What happened if you broke the rules depended on the rule and the rank. Unauthorized contact with a man, even passing a letter, was treated as treason. The punishment could be execution. Pregnancy outside the king's bed was impossible to hide and impossible to survive. Theft from a royal household was punished by flogging. Failure to bow in the correct sequence was punished by demotion. The system was designed to produce one thing. uncontested royal succession through verified paternity and everything inside it served that single function. Birth changed your rank. A Chow Chom who delivered a son became a Chowo Chom Mandar overnight with her allowance increased and her quarters upgraded. Childlessness fixed your rank for life. Some women lived inside those walls for 60 years and died at the rank they had entered with. There was no other ladder to climb.
This was the architecture into which 153 women entered during the reign of one king. They did not all enter at once. They entered over 42 years in waves as the king's tastes changed, as political marriages were arranged, as families pressed gifts on the throne. The 77 children they produced filled the palaces with princes and princesses who would eventually run the modernization of Syiam. the army, the navy, the legal codes, the railways, the universities. The inner court was not only a domestic institution. It was a workshop for the future state.
The regulations said the king commanded everything inside those walls. The records show that for 8 months in 1897, the kingdom was governed by a woman who had entered the compound as his halfsister and consort. Her name was Sawa Pa Pong Shri, full sister of the drowned first queens Sununandanda, full sister of the long lived Saang Watana. She was born on the 1st of January 1864. She was the mother of two future kings and on the 21st of March 1897, her husband appointed her regent of Syiam with full absolute monarchy powers and boarded a steamer for Europe. Chula Longorn was the first Asian monarch to make an official tour of Europe. He met Queen Victoria. He met Zar Nicholas II. He visited Berlin, Paris, Vienna, St. Petersburg. He was gone for 253 days. During those 253 days, the Kingdom of Siam was run by a woman.
The same century had already produced another example of a former consort wielding regnal power on a far larger stage. In Beijing, the Empress Daaja Siki Tsu was finishing 40 years of regency over the Qing dynasty. A regency that would end with the imperial system in ruins and the young emperor she had raised dead in his bed, poisoned with a dose of arsenic 2,400 times the normal level, 22 hours before her own death. The pattern looked similar from a distance. A former consort ruling absolutely while the throne's nominal occupant could not. The Bangkok version produced something different. The 253 days of Sao Pa's regency did not destroy the dynasty. They built infrastructure that survives in Thailand today. She founded Rajini Girls School in 1904, the first school of its kind in the country. She championed westernstyle midwiffery training at siraj siri rat hospital which cut maternal death rates across Bangkok within a generation. She founded what became the Queen Saabha Memorial Institute which still produces snake antivenenom. Thailand was and remains a country with 70 species of venomous snake and the antivenenom her institute developed has saved more lives than any single act of charity in Thai history.
When her husband returned from Europe, he did not quietly retire her regency. He elevated her with a new title. The crucial syllable was the last one. Rachinat, not Rachini. Queen, not queen consort. The grammar acknowledged that what had happened for 253 days had not been ceremonial. She was not alone. The official record described one king and 153 women. The actual power inside the walls flowed through channels the regulations did not name. 15 of those 153 consorts came from a single family. The Bunac clan had supplied chief ministers to the Siamese throne for more than a 100red years. They were Persian in origin, Muslim in their ancestral religion, converted to Buddhism over generations of intermarriage with the Thai nobility. They had served as regent during Chula Longorn's own minority from 1868 to 1873. They were not a family the king could refuse. They were the family that had put him on the throne and kept him there. Seven of those 15 boonac consorts were daughters of one man, the governor of Petaburi, Petaburi. Five of them, sisters by the same mother, became known inside the court as the O clique, because every one of their names began with the same Thai letter. on on embar and u u they photographed each other. They cooked together. They controlled access to information moving in and out of the inner court for decades. The most senior of them, Chaokun Fra Praurong, Chaokun Praura Wong, born Feb Nak, was elevated to the highest rank ever given to a non-royal consort in the Chakri dynasty. The Bunac women were not decorative additions to the Haram. They were the Harams interior government.
Other consorts wielded power through politically consequential sons. M Bunak. Mott Bunak was the mother of Admiral Prince Abhakar. Apakara, the officer who founded the Royal Thai Navy and is still called its father. Talap Ketudat. Talap Kaudat was the mother of Prince Rafi. Raphi, the prince who codified modern Thai law and is still called its father. Their authority did not come from their husband. It came from what they had produced for him. And there was Chao Chom herb. Chaocher, one of the Oak Cle who became one of the first known female photographers in the history of Sam. The king himself was an enthusiastic amateur photographer and he gave the women of his court cameras. They photographed each other in their daily life cooking, embroidering, dressing for ceremonies, posing in the gardens of Vimmanmech, Vimmanmech mansion. One of Herp's most famous images shows the king himself in everyday dress bent over a walk in a palace kitchen. The visual archive she and the other consort photographers produced is the most important non-male photographic record of late 19th century Sam in existence. They did not just live inside the inner court. They documented it.
What looked like a herum from outside the walls was in fact a parallel government. A women's bureaucracy that the king of Siam needed in order to govern at all. The inner court was not a cage. It was a ministry. Understanding what these women actually controlled makes the next three stories comprehensible. Without that understanding, they look like accidents of history. They were not accidents.
The first story begins on the 31st of May 1880 on the Chao Fria Chiao Priya River just downstream of Bangkok. A royal barge undertoe is moving north along the river. The barge carries Queen Sunandumar Ratana, first wife and first queen of Chula Longorn, halfsister of the king, daughter of his father by the same mother who would later produce two more queens for the same man. She is 19 years old. She is 5 months pregnant. She is traveling with her toddler daughter, Princess Cannaborn Bearatana, Kapon Bai Charatana, 1 year and 9 months old. They are going to meet the king at the summer palace at Bangpa Bangpa where he is already in residence. The steam yacht towing her barge is called Pan Marut Panar. The river is wide. The traffic on it is heavy. Near a bend at Bangfoot Bangput in Nontaburi, Nontaburi province, a second steam launch. The Sorowan Soran collides with the towed royal barge. The barge capsizes. The queen, her toddler, the unborn child, and the canopies and silk curtains of the royal compartment all go into the water together. Neither the queen nor the princess can swim. The silk curtains entangle them. The attendants on the towing yacht and on the surrounding boat see it happen. What they do next is the most disputed scene in the entire fifth reign.
The palace law of Aayutaya, the same cotmonthian ban that governed every gesture inside the inner court, made physical contact with a royal by a commoner a capital offense. The taboo extended into the river. A commoner did not touch a queen. A commoner did not touch a princess. To do so was to die for it. The popular version of what followed, the version repeated on tourist signage at Bangpa Inn today and in countless English language histories, is that the attendant stood frozen, extending bamboo poles and coconuts and floating timbers while the queen and her daughter drowned in front of them. In this version, the chief attendant of the accompanying boat actively forbade rescue and was later imprisoned for it. Historians disagree on whether boatman ultimately entered the water. What they agree on is that hesitation killed her. The palace law created a culture of paralysis around royal bodies and the paralysis lasted long enough to be fatal.
Chulaong was kilome upstream at Bang Pain when the message reached him. The queen, the princess, and the unborn son were all dead. He did not punish the law. He did not bury her quickly. He had her imbalmed body placed in golden urns and held it for 10 months. During those 10 months, he built a funeral p at Sanam Luang, Sanam Luang, the royal cremation ground in Bangkok, 85 m tall, 280 ft. On the 15th of March 1881, at 6:00 in the evening, he lit it with his own hand. The cost was extraordinary even by the standards of 19th century Siamese royal funerals. Then he built memorials. A marble obelisk at Bangpaan inscribed with poems he composed in Thai and in English. A second obelisk at the Sarin Rom Saran Ramrom royal garden in Bangkok, her favorite place in life. A statue at Namtok Fleo, Namk Pleo National Park. and the Sunsandandalaya Sunsandlaya building Thailand's first westernstyle school building designed by the Austrian architect Yawakim Grassi built explicitly because Sun Nandanda Da had advocated for women's education during her short life. It was radical. Royal memorials in Syiam had always been temples. This one was a school. She had drowned because no one was permitted to touch her. She was memorialized by a building where Thai girls would learn to read in their own language.
The court that watched a queen drown without entering the water was the same court that 6 years later opened its gates to a 13-year-old girl from a kingdom Bangkok had not yet finished swallowing. Her name was Darra Rasmi Darra Rasmi. She arrived in Bangkok in February 1886 by elephant caravan from Chiang Mai. She was a princess of the Chaochett Ton Chaoet Ton dynasty, the ruling house of the northern kingdom of Lana, Lana. Lann had been a tributary of Siam for generations, but its kings still ruled and still called themselves kings. Whether Lana was Siamese was in 1886 an open question. She had been summoned because of a rumor. In 1883, word reached Bangkok that Queen Victoria wished to adopt her to bring her to London as a ward of the British crown. Bangkok read this as a diplomatic signal. The British had just conquered upper Burma in 1885 and now occupied the territory directly to Lann's west. A British adoption of a Lanner princess was indistinguishable from a British claim on Lannor itself. Chula Longorn dispatched his half-brother, Prince Fichchit, Pchit, to negotiate a marriage. Darra Rasmi was 13 when she left Chiang Mai. She was honored formally and publicly. She was also functionally a hostage with a title.
The Central Thai consorts at court did not accept her. They called her a Lao Lady. They said she smelled of fermented fish. They mocked her Lanner dialect, her unfamiliar dress, her long hair worn in the northern style rather than cropped short in the Bangkok fashion. Her response was deliberate and total. She kept her dress. She kept her hair. She kept her dialect. She kept her household. Lana ladies in waiting. Lana musicians. Lana cooks. She refused to assimilate. She lived inside the inner court for 28 years as a visible foreigner by choice inside the central institution of the Siamese state. In 1892, her only child, Princess Vimlaka Nabisi, Wimonaka Nabisi, died at the age of two. Darra Rasmi destroyed every photograph of her. 16 more years passed inside a court that had never accepted her. Then on the 12th of February 1908, Chula Longorn created a new rank. He called it Frajachaya, Praachachaya, Princess Consort. And he created it for one person, for her. It is the only such title in the entire history of the Chakri dynasty. It positioned her between the queens and the high secondary consorts. It acknowledged that she was not a Thai consort. She was the daughter of a sovereign. He was elevating her, but he was also acknowledging that her father had been a king. After Chula Longorn died in 1910, she stayed in Bangkok only as long as protocol required. On the 22nd of January, 1914, she went home. The new king, Chula Longorn's son, built her a palace called Daraper, Dari Rom, in the May rim, May district outside Chiang Mai. and she lived there for the rest of her life. She ran a silkwaving revival. She trained Lannort dancers. She patronized Buddhism and she imported European roses from the British, hybridizing them in her garden until she produced a tall pink rose she named Chula Long Corn after the man she had been sent south at 13 to marry. She died of lung disease on the 9th of December 1933, 60 years old at her brother's palace in Shiang Mai. Her ashes are at Watswan Dock, Watswan Do in a white cheddy.
Darra Rasmi's authority was symbolic, granted to honor a kingdom Sam was absorbing. The next woman's authority was constitutional, granted to a king's full sister, and it was absolute. Sao Wapa Pongshri when she took the regency in March 1897 was 33 years old. She had been married to her half-brother for 16 years. She had borne him nine children. She was already the most politically experienced woman in the kingdom and she was about to demonstrate it. Chula Longorn left Bangkok on the 7th of April 1897 aboard a German steamer. The decision to leave was unprecedented. No Siamese king had ever toured Europe. Siamese kings did not leave Syiam. The trip was a diplomatic offensive, a personal demonstration to the European powers that Siam was a modern state run by a modern monarch, not a colony in waiting. France had taken Indo-China to the east. Britain held Burma to the west and Malaya to the south. Siam was the only kingdom in Southeast Asia still ruled by its own throne. and Chula Longorn was going to Europe to keep it that way.
For 253 days, Sao Pa governed. She signed decrees. She received foreign ambassadors. She presided over the council of ministers. She managed the ongoing dispute with France over the Lao territories on the east bank of the Meong. She did not rule as a placeholder. She ruled. When her husband returned in December 1897, he did not retire her quietly. He elevated her with that crucial new title, Rachi Ninat, Queen Regnant, and he kept her in the high political role until her death 22 years later. She became the mother of two kings, Rama V 6th, Vajirav, Wii Rawut, and Rama IIth, Praad, Prachhat. She founded girls schools and hospitals and the antivenenom institute that still bears her name. And in the long political maneuvering that determined Siamese succession, she ensured that the throne stayed in her bloodline. It did all the way down to King Bumol Pumi Pon who reigned from 1946 to 2016 and was her great great grandson by direct descent. She died on the 20th of October 1919 of colurectal cancer. She was 55 years old. The system she had administered had four more queens left in it. The institution itself had 16 years to live.
The system did not die because the women inside it failed. It died because a generation of men outside it. Western diplomats, junior Thai officers, a homosexual king, a constitutional lawyer educated in Paris decided that monogamy was the price of modernity. The first blow was the new king himself. Wii Rauut was Chula Longorn's son by Sao and he had been educated at Sandhurst and at Christ Church Oxford. He was the first Siamese monarch to grow up in Europe. He was also by every account that survives exclusively interested in men. His inner circle of male favorites, the Na Ni Na Ni numbered around 50. He did not marry until he was 40 years old. And when he did marry, he married four times in 3 years, late and unhappily, producing one daughter and then dying within a day of her birth in November 1925. He had no interest in maintaining a polygamous court. The inner court population of 3,000 began draining the day his father died and it kept draining for 15 years.
The second blow was his brother. Prachhat Pac was the 33rd son of Chula Longorn and the youngest. He was educated at Eaton at the Royal Military Academy at Wulitch and at the Akol Superior Degair in France. He married his first cousin Princess Rambi Barney. Rambi Barnet in 1918 and he took no other wife ever. When he became king in 1925, he was the first Chakri monarch to occupy the throne with one wife and only one. The third blow came at dawn on the 24th of June 1932. A coalition of approximately 102 junior officers and western educated civilians calling themselves the Karnatzadon. Ka ratsadon the people's party moved through Bangkok in the dark. They seized armored vehicles. They occupied the Ananta samak ananta samak throne hall. At 6:00 in the morning, Colonel Fria Fahon Fonfaya Priya Pahon Ponua stood on top of a tank in the square in front of the throne hall and read out the Ka Ratadon manifesto drafted by a lawyer named Pri Banamyong. Pi Banamyong who had studied at the Saon. The manifesto denounced the king for filling his government with court relatives and toadies. The army faction was led by plaque fibonr plaque pibans. The whole operation was over before breakfast. No shot was fired. 150 years of absolute chakri monarchy ended bloodlessly between dawn and 7 in the morning. Prachhat Pac was at the Kleangwan Kleangwan Palace in Huah Hin Huah Hin when the news reached him. He accepted the terms. A temporary constitution was promulgated 3 days later. The permanent constitution followed on the 10th of December 1932.
3 years after that on the 1st of October 1935, book five of the new civil and commercial code took effect. It made monogamy the only legal form of marriage insiam. It abolished the three traditional categories of wife that had governed the country since the Aayutaya period. The principal wife, the minor wife, and the slave wife. It required that all marriages be registered with the state. Existing polygamous marriages contracted before that date were grandfathered, which was the only reason Chula Longorn's surviving consorts could keep their titles and their stipens. From October 1935 forward, no Siamese man could legally take more than one wife. The historian Tamar Loose called this the imperialism of monogamy. Siam codified westernstyle family law not because Siamese women had demanded it but because western diplomats had. The unequal treaties dating to the 1855 Bowering Treaty had imposed extr territorial jurisdiction onsiam on the grounds that Siamese family law was insufficiently civilized to apply to European citizens. To get rid of those treaties had to look like Europe. Looking like Europe meant one man, one wife. The price of being treated as a modern country was the end of the consort system.
Pratchetto did not live to see the new code take effect. He had already abdicated. On the 2nd of March 1935, from a country house in Cranley Surrey in England, where he was receiving medical treatment, he renounced the throne. He wrote that he was willing to relinquish the power that had previously belonged to him to the people in general, but that he refused to seed all his powers to anyone or any group. He died of heart failure on the 30th of May 1941 at Vain Court in Biddendon, Kent. He was 47. He remains the only Chakri monarch to have abdicated. Queen Rambi Barnet carried his ashes home to Siam in 1949 and lived another 35 years. An institution founded in 1782, operational for 153 years, made legally impossible in a single afternoon's vote. The institution is gone. The bracelet is not.
In April 1906, a girl of 16 entered the inner court of the Grand Palace. Her name was Saddap Ladawan. Sardab Lad. She was the great granddaughter of a king who had ruled three reigns earlier, which made her in the Thai system of descending royal titles, Mom Raja Wong, Mom Raja Wong, Sardab. She had been at court as a lady in waiting since the age of 11. She had a remarkable singing voice. Chula Long Korn was 53 years old. He had been on the throne for 37 years. He had already taken into his service more than 140 other women. And on the day she entered formally as his consort, number 62 on the official roster, he placed on her wrist a bracelet that he had commissioned for her personally. It was heavy. It was made of four bart of bang safan bang sarapan gold. It was shaped like two crossed nails, an unusual design, almost industrial, and it was inscribed in his own handwriting with verses he had written about constancy. He called it the Camlas, Camas. For a poem about her singing voice, he wrote, "Oh, sweet voiced one." She was promoted to high secondary consort at 17. She was the youngest woman ever given that rank in the fifth reign. She would be the last person ever to hold it in the history of the Chakri dynasty.
Four years later in October 1910, Chula Longorn died. Sardab was 20 years old. She tried to take her own life by drinking photoeveloping fluid. The royal physician saved her. When she recovered, she returned to Queen Sao Pa every piece of jewelry he had ever given her except the bracelet so that no one could ever say she had worn his gifts on any other man. She vowed perpetual widowhood. She kept the bracelet on her wrist. In 1932, the year the People's Party came down the streets of Bangkok at dawn, she moved from the palace to a monastery. She built a three-story residence on the grounds of Wata Bangai, Wat Cao Bangsai in Chonbururi, Chonburi province and she kept the Buddhist 8 precepts there for more than 50 years. In her old age, King Bumibball invited her back to live within the Grand Palace itself and she returned. She gave oral history interviews to Chula Longorn University in 1982 at the age of 92. She pounded Thai chili paste by hand when Princess Sirindhorn a Sirinone came to visit her. The bracelet was still on her wrist. She died at Siraj Hospital on the 3rd of June 1983. She was 93 years old. She had worn the bracelet for 77 years. She had outlived her husband by 73. She had outlived the absolute monarchy itself by 51. She had lived through five reigns. Rama V through Rama the 9inth and through every event in this story. Her grand niece removed the bracelet from her wrist after her death and presented it to Queen Sirakit C rekit. It is now on permanent display at Vimmanmech Weim Manmech mansion in Bangkok. the world's largest golden teakwood building, which Chula Longorn built in 1900 and which has been closed to the public since 2016, awaiting a restoration that has not yet been completed. 153 women, 3,000 inside the walls, one bracelet behind glass, and only the bracelet has been allowed to survive.