Relations between Siam (now Thailand) and the rapacious West were distinguished by Siam's never having been colonized. The European powers -- Portugal, Holland, England -- may have hungrily circled this rich and exotic kingdom but, despite all the efforts of Western state and church, colonization did not occur.
This was undoubtedly good for Siam, but it complicated the task of future historians. As Dirk van der Cruysse remarks in his excellent short history, "having never been colonized, Thailand had never felt the need to define its cultural identity and determine its history in relation to former colonizers." This leads to an odd situation where, as a leading Thai historian has written, "European evidence of the seventeenth century, however flawed, is still more valid as a primary source than, say, the Siamese royal annals." What is the historian's loss, however, is in this case the reader's gain. We see Siam and its court through foreign eyes that witness what seemed to have been fabulous exoticism.
Gold everywhere, jewels, the monarch carried aloft like an idol on a towering throne with two chained tigers at its foot. Tempering this extravagance was a king who burned on a vast bonfire 800 men guilty of not having gone to the front against the Burmese, and a society where a royal execution meant that "he was secured in a velvet sack and beaten to death with cudgels of sandalwood so that not a drop of royal blood fell to the ground."