Mongkut

• 1. Introduction

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  Mongkut, King of Siam, predicted the path of a total solar eclipse down to the degree and the minute of arc, at a latitude of 11 degrees 39' north and a longitude of 99 degrees 42' east of Greenwich. That single calculation, made in the 1860s by a reigning monarch who had spent twenty-seven years as a Buddhist monk, placed him at a jungle village called Wakor on the 18th of August 1868 to watch the sky go dark exactly as he said it would. He was right. His court astrologers, who had predicted something different, received a public rebuke when he returned. Six weeks later, he was dead from malaria contracted on that same expedition.

  The life of Mongkut sits at the collision of two worlds: a Siam trying to hold its ground against nineteenth-century European expansionism, and a king who believed that the best defense was knowledge. He founded a new Buddhist sect, negotiated a treaty that rewrote the economic rules of Siam, and hired an English teacher named Anna Leonowens whose account of his court became one of the most contested stories in modern Thai history. The asteroid 151834 Mongkut now bears his name.

• 2. Twenty-Seven Years in Robes

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  In 1824, Mongkut followed Siamese custom and took his vows as a Buddhist monk at the age of twenty. His ordination name was Vajirayan. That same year, his father died, and by tradition the throne should have passed to Mongkut. It did not. The nobility chose Prince Chetsadabodin instead, partly for his experience and influence, and Mongkut concluded that the throne was beyond his reach. Rather than leave monastic life and enter the political hazards of the court, he stayed.

  Wandering the country as a monk gave him a view of institutional religion that disturbed him. He found Siamese monks relaxing the rules of the Pali Canon in ways he judged improper. The turning point came in 1829 at Phetchaburi, where he encountered a monk named Buddhawangso who adhered strictly to the vinaya, the code of monastic discipline. That meeting inspired Vajirayan to pursue reform, and in 1835 he launched a movement that would eventually become the Dhammayuttika Nikaya, known as the Dhammayut sect. Its guiding principle, in Mongkut's own framing, was that true Buddhism should stay out of worldly affairs and focus on the spiritual and the moral.

  In 1836, Vajirayan arrived at Wat Bowonniwet in Bangkok and became its first abbot. Living there, he studied Latin, English, and astronomy with missionaries and sailors who passed through the city. One neighbor was Vicar Pallegoix of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bangkok. The two became close friends, and Vajirayan invited Pallegoix to preach in the wat. He admired Christian ethics but found Christian doctrine incomprehensible. The remark he made then followed him the rest of his life: "What you teach people to do is admirable, but what you teach them to believe is foolish."

  Mongkut would later be praised for an excellent command of English. His younger brother, Viceroy Pinklao, was said to speak it even better.

• 3. A Throne Built on Alliances

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  Prince Mongkut's path from monastery to palace ran through one name above all others: Dit Bunnag, who held the title Samuha Kalahom and served as the head of the armed forces department. Bunnag was the most powerful noble of the reign of Rama III and was firmly pro-British. He saw in the monk-prince a figure who could protect Siamese relations with European powers, and British merchants who feared the anti-Western stance of the previous monarch shared that view.

  Bunnag moved decisively while the old king was still alive. He sent men to Mongkut's ceremony for leaving monastic life even before Nangklao's death in 1851. With that backing secured, the succession was not in doubt. Mongkut ascended the throne that year at the age of 47, took the name Phra Chom Klao, and promptly rewarded those who had put him there. He elevated Dit Bunnag to the highest rank of nobility, Somdet Chao Phraya Borom Maha Prayurawongse, and made him regent kingdom-wide. Dit's brother, Tat Bunnag, received the equivalent title and served as regent in Bangkok. Real administrative power over Siam flowed through these two men.

  Mongkut also acted on astrological grounds to give his brother, Prince Chutamani, a formal co-kingship. His own calculations suggested Chutamani was as well-favored for rule as himself, so Mongkut crowned him King Pinklao in 1851 as Second King. The precedent he cited was King Naresuan's elevation of his brother Ekathotsarot in 1583. Sir James Brooke, a British delegate, described Mongkut warmly as "our own king."

• 4. The Bowring Treaty

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  In 1854, John Bowring arrived in Siam. He came as governor of Hong Kong on behalf of Queen Victoria to negotiate a trade agreement, and what he extracted from those talks transformed Siamese commerce at its foundations. Dit Bunnag, now Prayurawongse, handled the negotiations on the Siamese side.

  The central target was the Royal Storage, a monopoly institution dating back to the Ayutthaya period that controlled all foreign trade. It had generated enormous revenues through layered taxation, including a levy based on the width of incoming galleons. Siamese citizens who traded directly with foreigners faced severe punishment. The Burney Treaty had trimmed some of those taxes before, but the Royal Storage had survived. The Bowring Treaty abolished it entirely. Import taxation was cut to 3 percent and could be collected only once.

  The immediate effect on national revenue was damaging. The longer-term effects reshaped the country. Common Siamese citizens gained access to foreign trade for the first time, and people moved quickly to acquire farmland for rice cultivation. That rush eventually pushed ownership of those fields toward the nobility. The first coinage entered Siam in 1860. Rice milling and sugar production became the country's first industrial sectors. Roads were paved and canals dug to support transport and plantations.

  The treaty also had a legal dimension that cut against Siamese sovereignty. British subjects in Siam became subject only to British law, not to Siamese courts, partly because of Western alarm at the Nakorn Bala methods used in Siamese judicial proceedings. More treaties with other powers followed, each one further eroding Siam's revenue base and legal jurisdiction.

• 5. The Anna Question

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  In 1862, on the recommendation of Tan Kim Ching in Singapore, Mongkut's court hired Anna Leonowens to teach English to the royal children. What Leonowens made of that appointment, and what she did with it afterward, has been disputed in Thailand ever since.

  Around 1870, Leonowens published a memoir called "The English Governess at the Siamese Court." Author Margaret Langdon later drew on that text and on interviews with Leonowens' descendants to produce a more fictionalized account, "Anna and the King of Siam," in 1944. That book became the source for Hollywood films and for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The King and I," with its 1956 film adaptation in which Yul Brynner played Mongkut and won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 29th Academy Awards in 1957. Thailand banned these works on grounds that their fictionalized portrayals constituted lese-majeste.

  To correct the record, Thai intellectuals Seni and Kukrit Pramoj wrote "The King of Siam Speaks" in 1948. They sent the manuscript to the American diplomat Abbot Low Moffat, born in 1901, who drew on it for his 1961 biography "Mongkut the King of Siam." Moffat donated the Pramoj manuscript to the United States Library of Congress in 1961.

  Leonowens claimed that her conversations with Prince Chulalongkorn about human freedom, and her reading of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" with him, inspired his eventual abolition of slavery nearly four decades later. Western observers and scholars noted that Siamese slavery was structured differently from what the term suggested elsewhere; individuals could voluntarily enter it to shed social and financial obligations, and those who mistreated slaves could be punished.

• 6. Science Against Empire

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  When Western missionaries and traders arrived in Siam, they brought with them the idea of a spherical earth. For many Siamese, this was genuinely difficult to accept. The Traiphum, a traditional geo-astrological map, described the universe as containing a path between mountain ranges through which the sun, moon, stars, and planets traveled. Buddhist scholars had worked to reconcile the two frameworks, treating scriptural descriptions of the natural world as figurative rather than literal.

  Mongkut claimed he had abandoned the Traiphum cosmology before 1836 and had understood the earth was round fifteen years before American missionaries arrived. Whether or not that timeline was precise, his public stance on Western science had real political weight. The argument made by later Siamese intellectuals was that mastering Western astronomy and geography allowed Siam to meet European powers on intellectual terms. The implicit claim of empire, that colonized peoples were uncivilized and therefore required Western governance, could not hold against a kingdom whose king predicted solar eclipses with precision.

  Mongkut hired missionaries as teachers for the royal family, urging his relatives toward what he called a European-style education. He also hired Western mercenaries to train Siamese troops in Western methods. American Dan Beach Bradley had already reformed the printing system in Bangkok and resumed publication of Siam's first newspaper, the Bangkok Recorder. Six years after Mongkut's death, the first Thai-language geography book, Phumanithet by J.W. Van Dyke, appeared in 1874. Thongchai Winichakul later argued that Mongkut's push to spread Western geography was the engine of educational reform in Siam.

  Mongkut also sent a royal letter dated the 14th of February 1861 to US President James Buchanan, offering to send domesticated elephants to serve as transport animals. The letter took long enough to arrive that Buchanan had left office by then. Abraham Lincoln politely declined in a reply dated the 3rd of February 1862, noting that the American climate might not suit elephant breeding and that steam engines already answered the country's transport needs. A century later, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Mongkut's great-grandson, mentioned this exchange in a speech before the US Congress on the 29th of June 1960.

• 7. Wakor and the Eclipse

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  By 1868, Mongkut had tracked the path of an upcoming total solar eclipse to a precise spot in southern Siam: Wakor village in Prachuap Khiri Khan Province, south of Hua Hin. He calculated that the eclipse would be best seen at a longitude of 99 degrees 42' east of Greenwich and a latitude of 11 degrees 39' north. He invited high-ranking Siamese and European officials to travel there with him, including Sir Harry Ord, the British governor of the Straits Settlements from Singapore.

  The eclipse occurred on the 18th of August 1868. Mongkut's prediction was accurate. On the journey home, he and his son Prince Chulalongkorn both contracted malaria. Chulalongkorn recovered. Mongkut died six weeks later in the capital, aged 64. His court astrologers, who had made different predictions, received a pointed rebuke before his death for, in his words, their "stupid statements because of their negligence of his detailed prediction and their inattention to measurement and calculation by modern instruments."

  Chulalongkorn took the throne and carried several of his father's projects forward. In 1902, he granted the Dhammayut sect formal royal recognition through the Ecclesiastical Polity Act, making it one of the two major Buddhist denominations in modern Thailand. He also persuaded his father's 47th child, Vajirañana, to enter the order; that son rose to become the 10th Supreme Patriarch of Thailand, serving from 1910 to 1921. Three universities now bear Mongkut's name, collectively known as the Three Phra Chom, focused on engineering and technology. An asteroid, 151834 Mongkut, was named in his honor.