Mongkut

Mongkut was born on October 18, 1804, in Thonburi, across the Chao Phraya River from Bangkok, during the reign of his grandfather Rama I, founder of the Chakri dynasty ^[1]. His father, Prince Itsarasunthon, became King Rama II in 1809, and Mongkut, as the eldest son of the king by a royal queen, Srisuriyendra, held the strongest hereditary claim to the throne under Siamese custom ^[2].

His upbringing followed the pattern expected of a senior Chakri prince. He received instruction in Buddhist texts, Siamese literature, statecraft, and the ceremonial duties of the court, and at thirteen he underwent the traditional tonsure ceremony marking the passage from childhood ^[1]. Shortly before his father's death in 1824, the twenty year old prince entered the monkhood, a temporary ordination customary for young Siamese men of every rank ^[2].

What began as convention became the defining circumstance of his early life. When Rama II died in July 1824, the royal accession council passed over Mongkut in favor of his older half brother, Prince Chetsadabodin, a son of a concubine who was considerably more experienced in administration and commanded the loyalty of powerful court factions ^[3]. Rather than contest the decision and risk his life, Mongkut remained in the monastery. The choice removed him from palace politics and kept him safe through the entire twenty seven year reign of his half brother, who ruled as Rama III ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Mongkut before he became king finds the answer in the wat, not the palace. Under the monastic name Vajirananao he pursued Pali scholarship with unusual rigor, passing the highest level of the royal Pali examinations and earning a reputation as one of the most accomplished textual scholars in the kingdom ^[3]. His pilgrimages on foot through the provinces gave him direct contact with ordinary Siamese life that few princes ever acquired ^[1].

His study of the earliest Buddhist scriptures convinced him that Siamese monastic practice had drifted from the discipline prescribed in the Pali canon. Around 1833 he began gathering like minded monks into a reform movement that became the Thammayut order (Thammayutika Nikaya), which stressed strict adherence to the monastic code, careful scriptural study, and the stripping away of accreted folk ritual ^[4]. The order, though always a minority within Siamese Buddhism, remains an established branch of the Thai sangha today and counts among Mongkut's most durable creations ^[4].

The monastery also became his window on the wider world. From the 1830s he cultivated friendships with Western missionaries in Bangkok, including the American physician Dan Beach Bradley and the French Catholic vicar Jean-Baptiste Pallegoix, exchanging language lessons for instruction in Latin, English, mathematics, and Western astronomy ^[5]. By the time he left the cloister he could read scientific works in English, followed European affairs through imported newspapers, and understood, as few Asian rulers then did, both the mechanics and the ambitions of Western power ^[3].

Rama III died on April 2, 1851, without designating an heir, and this time the accession council turned to the fourty six year old monk prince ^[2]. Mongkut left the monastery, was crowned in May 1851, and took the reign name Phra Chom Klao, though he is conventionally numbered Rama IV ^[1]. In an unusual arrangement he elevated his full brother, Prince Chuthamani, to the rank of second king, styled Pinklao, giving him near royal honors and his own palace establishment ^[3].

The kingdom he inherited faced a narrowing set of choices. Britain had defeated Burma in war and annexed its coastal provinces, the Opium War had forced open China's ports, and French ambitions were stirring in Vietnam and Cambodia. Rama III had rebuffed Western treaty missions, and Mongkut judged that continued refusal would eventually invite the gunboats ^[6]. His long acquaintance with Westerners, and his fluency in their language, positioned him to attempt a different course: controlled accommodation on terms Siam could survive ^[3].

The central act of the reign came in April 1855, when Mongkut received Sir John Bowring, governor of Hong Kong and envoy of Queen Victoria, and concluded a treaty within weeks. The Bowring Treaty granted British subjects extraterritorial legal rights, capped import duties at three percent, permitted free trade in most goods, and allowed foreigners to reside and own property near Bangkok ^[6]. The concessions were real, yet the treaty was negotiated rather than dictated, and similar agreements with the United States, France, and other powers soon followed on comparable terms ^[2]. Historians generally count this policy of voluntary opening among the reasons Siam, alone among the states of Southeast Asia, was never colonized ^[3].

Any fair account of Mongkut achievements must range beyond diplomacy. Trade with the West expanded rapidly after 1855, rice exports grew into the backbone of the economy, and the king chartered canal construction and road building in Bangkok, including Charoen Krung, often described as the capital's first paved street ^[1]. He established a royal mint to produce flat coinage in place of the old bullet shaped money, reorganized elements of the fiscal administration, and hired Western advisers, instructors, and a harbormaster into royal service ^[6].

He also chipped at old customs by personal example. He allowed subjects to gaze upon the royal person during processions, permitted petitions to the throne, and moderated certain court prostration rituals, changes modest in themselves but symbolically loud in a sacral monarchy ^[3]. His voluminous correspondence, written in idiosyncratic but forceful English, went out to Queen Victoria, Pope Pius IX, and President Buchanan; his 1861 letter offering elephants to the United States, answered courteously by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, remains among the most quoted curiosities of Siamese American relations ^[7].

Science held a special place in the reign. Mongkut maintained private observatories, calculated calendars, and in 1868 computed the path and timing of a total solar eclipse over southern Siam nearly two years in advance ^[5]. The prediction, vindicated on August 18, 1868, at Wa Ko in Prachuap Khiri Khan province before an audience of French astronomers and British colonial officials, is commemorated in Thailand, where the king is honored as the father of Thai science ^[5].

Having entered the monkhood at twenty and left it at forty six, Mongkut married only after his accession. He then assembled a large royal household in the traditional manner, and his children numbered more than eighty by numerous wives and consorts ^[2]. His most consequential marriage was to Queen Debsirindra, mother of Prince Chulalongkorn, the son he groomed as successor ^[1].

The education of his children preoccupied him. He engaged the Englishwoman Anna Leonowens in 1862 to teach English to his sons and daughters inside the Grand Palace, an appointment that would later be inflated by her memoirs and by the derived novel and musical The King and I into a caricature that Thai institutions and Western historians alike have criticized as unreliable ^[8]. The historical record shows a demanding, curious, sometimes irascible monarch who read widely, drafted his own state papers in English, and interrogated visitors on subjects from theology to steam engines ^[3].

Among recorded Mongkut facts, his daily routine is striking for a nineteenth century absolute monarch: he kept monastic habits of early rising and study, took a close interest in Pali scholarship throughout his reign, and continued to write on Buddhist doctrine even while managing treaty diplomacy ^[4].

The final years of the reign were shadowed by France. In 1863 the French established a protectorate over Cambodia, long a Siamese tributary, and in 1867 Mongkut accepted a treaty acknowledging the French position in exchange for recognition of Siamese control over the Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap ^[6]. The bargain stung, but it preserved the core of the kingdom, consistent with his stated view that yielding at the edges was preferable to losing the whole ^[3].

The eclipse expedition of August 1868 proved fatal. The observation camp at Wa Ko sat in mosquito ridden lowland, and both the king and Prince Chulalongkorn contracted malaria there ^[5]. Mongkut sickened after returning to Bangkok and died in the Grand Palace on October 1, 1868, seventeen days before what would have been his sixty fourth birthday ^[1]. The fifteen year old Chulalongkorn was proclaimed King Rama V under the regency of the minister Si Suriyawong, and recovered to rule for four decades ^[2].

Mongkut occupies an unusual place among modernizing rulers: he arrived at the throne late, reigned barely seventeen years, and yet set the strategic direction his country followed for the rest of the century. The policy of opening to Western trade while playing rival empires against one another was extended by Chulalongkorn, whose sweeping reforms, abolition of slavery, and administrative centralization built directly on foundations his father laid ^[3]. Thai historiography treats father and son together as the architects of Siam's survival in the age of empire ^[2].

His religious legacy runs on a parallel track. The Thammayut order he founded reshaped Thai Buddhist education and monastic standards, and several of his descendants led it as supreme patriarchs of the Thai sangha ^[4]. In science, Thailand marks August 18, the anniversary of the Wa Ko eclipse, as National Science Day in his honor ^[5].

Outside Thailand his image long suffered from the Leonowens legend, in which a whimsical despot is civilized by an English governess. Scholars who have worked through his letters, decrees, and the diplomatic archives describe something closer to the reverse: a ruler more broadly educated than most of the envoys sent to him, making calculated concessions from a position of weakness and buying his kingdom time ^[8]. Any serious Mongkut biography now begins from that record rather than from the musical, and the verdict of the record is that few rulers anywhere read the nineteenth century more clearly ^[3].