Chulalongkorn

Chulalongkorn, the fifth king of the Chakri dynasty and known in Thailand as Rama V, reigned over Siam from 1868 to 1910. Hemmed in by British and French colonies, he centralised and modernised his kingdom, abolished slavery and gave up outlying territories, and Siam kept its independence while its neighbours fell to European empires. Thais remember him as Phra Piya Maharat, "the great beloved king".

He was born on 20 September 1853, a son of King Mongkut and Queen Debsirindra. Mongkut, who had dozens of wives and 82 children, prepared him to rule and gave him both a traditional schooling in Buddhism, Pali and court ritual and lessons from Western tutors, among them the Englishwoman Anna Leonowens. In 1868 father and son travelled to the coast south of Hua Hin to watch a solar eclipse Mongkut had predicted. Both caught malaria there, and Mongkut died on 1 October. A council of princes, monks and nobles chose the fifteen-year-old Chulalongkorn as king.

Real power at first lay with the regent, Chuang Bunnag (Sri Suriyawongse), head of the dominant noble family. The young king used these years to visit Singapore, Java and British India and study colonial government. Crowned again in his own right in 1873, he set up a central tax office to wrest revenue from the nobility and created a Council of State and a privy council. A tense night in December 1874, when armed troops of the "Front Palace", the semi-independent court of the viceroy, appeared at the royal palace during a fire, showed how limited his authority still was. When the viceroy died in 1885 he abolished the office and created the title of crown prince instead.

From the late 1880s Chulalongkorn transformed the government. He founded a military academy in 1887, replaced the old overlapping offices with ministries in 1892, and brought in Western-style law with the help of a Belgian adviser, Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns. From 1897 the provinces were grouped into monthons run by officials of the interior ministry, ending the power of local dynasties; rebellions against this in 1901 were put down by 1902. He had abolished prostration before superiors in 1873, and he introduced conscription in 1905, opened the first railway from Bangkok to Korat in 1901, and sent princes to study in Europe. He rejected a petition of 1884 from officials who urged a constitution, saying the time had not come.

Debt slavery was widespread: by one estimate a third of the population were slaves in 1867. Wishing to avoid the bloodshed he associated with emancipation in the United States, Chulalongkorn acted in stages. A law of 1874 freed children of slaves born from 1867 once they reached 21, and the Slave Abolition Act of 1905 ended slavery in all forms. Forced labour service was also phased out in favour of paid work.

The greatest danger came from French Indochina. In 1893, after a French demand for all Lao lands east of the Mekong, French warships entered the Chao Phraya, the river of Bangkok, and blockaded the coast; Siam had to cede those lands, roughly modern Laos. French troops held Chanthaburi for about ten years; later treaties of 1904 and 1906 traded further territory, including the western Cambodian provinces, for their withdrawal. In 1909 a treaty with the British Empire handed four Malay sultanates to British influence. Chulalongkorn toured Europe in 1897 and 1907 to win acceptance of Siam as a sovereign state.

Kidney disease killed him on 23 October 1910 at the Dusit Palace, and his son Vajiravudh took the throne as Rama VI. His memory is honoured by the country's first university, named after him in 1917, and by an equestrian statue in Bangkok, and he is widely revered in Thailand today.

Our 1880 map shows the Rattanakosin Kingdom before the French and British gains; the 1900 map shows it without the lands east of the Mekong, and by the 1914 map it has also lost western Cambodia and the northern Malay states.