and foodstuffs from China.
This close-up of the gable end of a Chinese residence built in the Thonburi palace in Siam, today’s Thailand, by King Taksin after 1824 evokes the Chaozhou domestic architectural style.
By the end of the eighteenth century, an additional “commodity”—immigrant Chinese—from areas along the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong began to scout, trade, and then settle in increasing numbers at various ports along the Gulf of Siam as well as spread into the interior. Irregularly shaped and approximately half the size of the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Siam, which is a relatively shallow body of water that bleeds on its southern edge into the vast South China Sea, is bounded on three sides by land: the southern cape of Vietnam, coastal Cambodia, and the continental and peninsular portions of Siam/Thailand. An increasingly close relationship grew between Chinese merchants and Siamese aristocracy, who appointed some of the immigrants as tax farmers with monopoly rights in collecting birds’ nests, tobacco, and other commodities in exchange for a payment of silver.
At the apex of the gulf, along the banks of the lower Chao Phraya River, Chinese merchants established trading posts and residences not only at the old imperial capital at Ayutthaya but also at its successor site downstream at Thonburi on the west bank, followed by Bangkok on the east bank. The Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, which thrived from 1351 until it was destroyed by the Burmese in 1767, had a cosmopolitan capital city with a substantial Chinese immigrant population. After a lengthy siege, the grand city was burned to the ground, leaving no evidence of the residences, temples, markets, or shops of the Chinese who once lived there. Today, only magnificent stone and brick ruins remain to suggest its past splendor, much like Angkor to which it is often compared. In 1991 the Ayutthaya Historical Park was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Muang Boran, an open-air museum some 33 kilometers east of Bangkok, which includes both reconstructed buildings and replicas, features many structures that display Chinese influences in their construction and ornamentation.
During the nineteenth century, when grand Chinese-style homes were built along the banks of the Chao Phraya, such as this one on the right belonging to Koh Hong Lee, each family’s rice mills, storage facilities, and commercial wharf were adjacent.
After the destruction of Ayutthaya, the new monarch, Taksin, shifted the capital 80 kilometers downstream to Thonburi, a move that brought in its wake the increasing in-migration of Chinese merchants to the new capital. Taksin, called Zheng Xin and Zheng Zhao in Chinese, was born in 1734 of a Chinese father and a Siamese mother. Taksin’s father, who in Siam used the name Zheng Yong and Hai-Hong, had migrated to Ayutthaya from Chenghai in eastern Guangdong province. Conversant in the Chaozhou dialect as well as the Siamese language, Taksin served as monarch for fourteen years (1767–82). He is not only revered today in Thailand for his role in unifying Siam after the Burmese invasion, but is also celebrated in Chenghai, which takes great pride in being the ancestral home of a king of Siam. In 1782 some of Taksin’s clothing was brought back to his father’s ancestral village, Huafu, where the garments were buried in a tomb that is the focus of tourism today.
King Taksin built his Thonburi palace in 1768 on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River. The largest structure in the palace complex incorporates both a Siamese-style throne hall and a residence with many Chinese features. After King Rama I ascended the throne in 1782 and moved the capital across the river, Taksin’s Thonburi palace became known as Phra Racha Wang Derm, and was used as a residence by royal family members. The Chinese-style residences that were built there between 1824 and 1851, while having undergone considerable renovation to become modern exhibition spaces, still have gables and roofs that evoke styles reminiscent of the Chaozhou region. In 2004 the complex won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award of Merit for its restoration. This royal site today serves also as the headquarters for the Royal Thai Navy.
Well into the twentieth century, Thonburi remained much less developed than Bangkok across the river, with which it merged as a metropolitan area only in 1972. Along both sides of the river, Chinese-style residences as well as those in more eclectic styles were sited adjacent to riverside rice mills, warehouses, and berths. Thonburi and Bangkok indeed were Chinese towns in a Siamese kingdom. The home of Koh Hong Lee, the oldest rice milling Chinese family, is shown in an adjacent photograph. While this residence is no longer standing, there are a handful of nineteenth-century mansions that have, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, survived even as newer homes and commercial structures were built adjacent to them. Part Two focuses on two of these Chinese-style residences. One, which is known today as the Wanglee Mansion (pages 228–31), was identified in 1908 by Arnold Wright as the residence of Tan Lip Buoy, whose father had returned to Shantou, the port city for the Chaozhou region.
Not too far from the Wanglee mansion is the ancestral home of another Chaozhou immigrant family known today by the surname Poshyanonda, whose progenitor was Kim Lo Chair. Arriving in Siam from a village on the outskirts of Shantou sometime between 1824 and 1851, he initially lived on a wooden boat on the Chao Phraya River while supervising other Chinese workers. His home, which was constructed sometime during the last half of the nineteenth century, is a three-bay, single storey structure and a pair of flanking buildings. Known for its elaborately ornamented wooden components and friezes around its entry and two courtyards, the ornately carved and richly gilded triple altar is but one one of its most outstanding features.
A second featured home, which is located across the river in what is today Bangkok’s Chinatown, was build in the late nineteenth century by Soa Hengtai, an immigrant from Fujian. Today, it is the home of Soa’s descendants who have the Thai name Posayachinda (pages 222–7).
The narrow sea-flanked region known as peninsular Siam, which is washed on the east by the Gulf of Siam and on the west by the Andaman Sea, traditionally was a crossroads area in which Indian and Chinese traditions came into contact with each other. On the west coast of the peninsula is the coastal town of Ranong, which is said to have “looked and felt like a transplanted Fukkien village, with houses, shophouses, and temples” in the nineteenth century (Aasen, 1998: 169). Here, Khaw Soo Cheang, born in Zhangzhou, Fujian, in 1797, migrated first to Penang in the 1820s with only a carrying pole to start life as a coolie, before moving to Ranong farther up the peninsular where marriage and alliances set a foundation for economic success.
During the reign of King Rama III, in 1844, he was granted tin-mining rights and opium concessions, setting in train a veritable family dynasty that thrived until 1932. In 1854, under the patronage of a Siamese family, he became governor, as did his eldest son. All four sons prospered as able administrators. Khaw Sim Bee, who became one of Phuket’s leading shipping and insurance magnates and was well known in Penang, is said to have traveled to the capital in 1901 where he “formally changed his nationality by going through the ceremony of having his queue cut off in the presence of a large gathering of princes and officials” (Campbell, 1902: 100). Although he married a Chinese woman from Penang, his family adopted the name Na Ranong, which today is known throughout Thailand. Khaw Sim Bee’s introduction of rubber into southern Thailand helped transform the economy, just as it had earlier in British Malaya and in Sumatra. Only the pillars of the Khaw family residence are still standing in Ranong, and thus there is no full sense of its scale and style. On the other hand, the cemetery Khaw Soo Cheang established for his family, was laid out according to strict Chinese fengshui principals. After he died at the age of 86 in 1882, stone guardian figures and ornamented stelae were set in place to grace his gravesite. On the east side of the peninsula in Songkhla, another Fujian immigrant from Zhangzhou prospered under similar circumstances. Wu Rang, also known as Wu Yang, migrated in 1750. His descendants built a magisterial residence in 1878, which is featured in Part Two (pages 214–21), that surpasses
