Foreign dignitaries were amazed by the 17th-century Siamese court. Though the general population seemed, as one diplomat wrote, "rich in a general poverty," the court itself appeared wealthy to an extreme. Cloth of gold was worn daily, gems adorned both the sexes, and as for the elephants, "each one had its silk cushion and they slept on it as if they were small dogs. They were fastened with chains as heavy as door-chains, plated with gold, and each one of them had six very large bowls of gold."
Other exoticisms included culprits being beaten to death with sandalwood clubs and a royal consort being fed to tigers because of her unfaithfulness. There were great processions, by water and by land, with hundreds of elephants and thousands of men, with the king himself high on a gilded throne carried by pachyderms or on the shoulders of his men.
Then there were the audiences with his majesty. Everyone "must crawl on their hands and feet, all of which is done in an unbelievable silence, for no one dared make a noise, even exhale, so that in this gathering that sometimes comprises 10,000 people in close proximity there is such stillness that one can hear the song and wing-beat of little birds."
This proximity was not without its comic aspect. One French ambassador wrote of courtiers on their knees and elbows. "The posture of these mandarins with their caps seeming as if stuck in one another's bums made every Frenchman laugh."
Such laughter was, however, soon stifled. Deference to, and reverence of, the king was extreme, some said excessive. One foreign visitor thought that "the Pharaoh on the banks of the Nile must have paraded in similar pomp." Also, many thought of a comparison more contemporary -- Louis XIV.
Indeed, the two courts were much alike. Both monarchs sought not only to impress but also to intimidate. Those nearest the ruler had the most power, but this power was limited. The lords might have their landed estates on the one hand or their gilded barges on the other, but in return they had to dance attendance on the king. Thai grandees and French "noblesse d'epee" alike further had to perform this choreography far from their bases of provincial power. They were subject to royal disfavor, to banishment and to the forcible retention of relatives to ensure good behavior.
The French at the Thai court were afraid of finding themselves in the hands of a royal tyrant, forgetting that they had one such back home, but the evidence does not indicate that any of the Thai kings in the 17th century was unusually despotic, though it does find them informed, curious and given to sudden enthusiasms. (One became enamored of European hats and ordered dozens.) More troublesome was the diplomatic "language of gifts."
The amount and value of the gifts denoted the wealth or power of the giver, as well as the amount of goodwill shown toward the recipient. This was carefully judged by the Siamese court. The Dutch East India Co. gave spices, while the French ambassadors often gave glassware and silver plate, unless hats were also required -- as well as the whistles in which one monarch delighted.
Horses, once that talented animal was discovered, were welcomed and would-be donors had to scour the plains of Java to collect enough. Also, large copper lanterns from the Netherlands were appreciated. What they must have looked like is shown in one still on display at the Toshogu Shrine at Nikko, a gift from the Dutch to the Tokugawa shogun.
The presents received in return indicated one's standing in the court and the degree of inflection in the language of gifts was precise. If you got something worth more than you gave, your stock was up. If you got something less, watch out.
The Western visitors to the court made of all this what they were able to, and this account offers many a piquant misunderstanding. Such, however, is not the major concern of the author. As he says, "my principle objective is to analyze certain aspects of court life using the information of the European sources rather than to examine the premises and prejudices of the Westerners."
He does this because Thai sources for this period (1590-1703) are either scant or suspicious -- the royal chronicles were for the most part recompiled after 1782. The state of the court at Ayutthaya and in the royal palace at Lopburi may be thus reconstructed, in part, by using the often prejudiced and always naive reporting of the various French, Dutch and Japanese envoys.
The lay reader, however, may also revel in the wonders revealed and the exoticism unveiled at courts such as that of Ayutthaya, which one French missionary found "finer than that of Venice" with "the king's quarter the finest, because of the great squares and walks, the houses of the nobility and the pagodas which surround it."
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