Rattanakosin: Bangkok and the Chakri Kings Face Their Neighbours, 1782–1932

In 1782, a general moved the Siamese capital from one bank of the Chao Phraya to the other and founded a dynasty that still reigns today. The name Rattanakosin refers both to this royal Bangkok and to the period that began that year, which historians often extend to the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. In little more than a century, Siam fell from the rank of regional power, crushing Vientiane and contesting Cambodia with Vietnam, to that of a buffer state forced to cede territory to the French and British empires. This reversal can be read through its kings, its ministers and its adversaries, but also through the fate of its neighbours.

1782: a new dynasty on the opposite bank

When the Rattanakosin period opened, the Siamese kingdom was barely recovering from catastrophe. Burmese armies had destroyed Ayutthaya in 1767. A warlord, Taksin, had regrouped the scattered forces and established his capital at Thonburi, on the western bank of the Chao Phraya. In 1782, Taksin was overthrown and then put to death. The version handed down by official historiography, and repeated by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, attributes his fall to a mental instability that the court found intolerable. This is the traditional reading. It should be taken as such, and not as a final verdict.

Power passed to his former military commander, known by his title of Chao Phraya (the highest rank of the nobility) Chakri. Posterity calls him Rama I. According to Britannica, he was the son of a senior court dignitary and a wife of partly Chinese descent. His date of birth, in March 1737, varies by a day depending on the source (the 20th or the 21st). His reign began on 6 April 1782. A first coronation took place in June 1782, and a second ceremony followed in 1785.

One of his first acts was to move the capital. He left Thonburi for Bangkok, on the eastern bank, which was then no more than a modest village. Why change banks? A widespread interpretation sees in it a desire to distance himself from Taksin's regime. It also stresses that building a palace and a royal temple, Wat Phra Kaew, was meant to establish the legitimacy of the new house. The hypothesis is plausible, but it remains a reading of royal intentions, which the sources do not reveal directly.

The founder did not act alone. His brother, Maha Sura Singhanat (1744–1803), held the office of viceroy, that of the 'Front Palace', from 1782 until his death. This institution would weigh heavily on the history of the dynasty.

Rebuilding Ayutthaya on the banks of the Chao Phraya

What visitors see today around the Grand Palace is first and foremost a political project: the rebirth of Ayutthaya. The early Chakri kings had temples and palaces built in the styles of the old capital. They sometimes used bricks salvaged from its ruins and brought downriver. Rama I re-established court rituals, promulgated law codes and had authoritative Buddhist texts compiled. He also reorganised the sangha, the community of monks, placing learned clerics at its head.

This restoration was not mere nostalgia. After the collapse of 1767, re-establishing the laws, the texts and the rites meant asserting that the order of the Siamese world endured, and that the new dynasty was its legitimate guardian. The monumental landscape of Rattanakosin Island, the historic heart of Bangkok, can therefore be read as a quotation of Ayutthaya: a continuity proclaimed rather than a break.

Yet the city soon changed its face. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bangkok is thought to have had some 400,000 inhabitants, according to an order of magnitude put forward by Britannica. This growth was due in large part to heavy Chinese immigration. Chinese merchants, craftsmen and labourers turned the royal capital into a trading city, oriented towards the maritime networks of the China Sea.

A western frontier under strain

Security long remained the overriding concern. Burmese attacks continued under the early Chakri kings. In 1785, a major invasion was repelled only with great difficulty. The founder's son, Rama II, succeeded him in 1809 and reigned until 1824. Throughout this period, the threat from the west never disappeared.

It was a change in a neighbour's fortunes, not a Siamese victory, that altered the situation. In the 1820s, the British advance into Burma forced it to turn inwards. For the first time in decades, Siam could lower its guard in the west. This pattern would recur throughout the period: the colonisation of a neighbour first loosened the grip on Bangkok, before bringing to bear a pressure of a new kind.

Rama III, the height of a regional power (1824–1851)

Freed from the Burmese threat, the Siam of Rama III turned east and south. His reign marked the greatest extent of Bangkok's influence over the Lao, Khmer and Malay worlds.

Vientiane: the revolt of Anouvong

Anouvong (Chao Anou), king of Vientiane, sought to free himself from Siamese suzerainty. According to a common interpretation, he also wanted to rebuild the old kingdom of Lan Xang, which had once united the Lao lands. In December 1826, he launched an army of some 10,000 men onto the Khorat Plateau and seized Nakhon Ratchasima.

The Siamese response was overwhelming. The viceroy Sakdiphonlasep commanded the campaign. A general destined for a great role, Chaophraya Bodindecha, took Champassak and sent its king, Nyô, to Bangkok. The Lao viceroy Tissa was captured on 19 July 1827. The consequences were drastic. Vientiane was burned and sacked, and part of its population deported. Anouvong, once captured, ended his days in an iron cage. The kingdom of Vientiane ceased to exist, and Bangkok tightened its hold over both the Khorat Plateau and Champassak.

Memory of the episode differs depending on which bank of the Mekong one stands. In the Siamese account, it was a rebellion crushed by Rama III. In Laos, Anouvong is readily honoured as a national hero. These two readings of the same event are a reminder that today's borders did not yet exist: what was at stake then were relations of vassalage between courts.

Cambodia between Bangkok and Hue

Under Rama III, the Khmer territories were reduced to vassal status. But Siam was not alone there. The Vietnamese court at Hue exercised a rival domination. After the death of the emperor Minh Mạng, a Cambodian revolt broke out against Vietnamese tutelage. Bodindecha then brought back from Bangkok a Khmer prince who had been living there in exile, Ang Duong (1796–1860). A Siamese–Vietnamese war followed, from 1840 or 1841 depending on the source, until the peace of December 1845.

The outcome reveals how politics worked in the region. Ang Duong became a vassal of both Siam and Vietnam. Crowned on 7 March 1848, he is said to have been so at a ceremony held simultaneously in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, which remains to be confirmed. Princess Ang Mey, backed by the Vietnamese camp, was set aside. A generation later, Ang Duong's son, Norodom, placed Cambodia under a French protectorate. The neighbour that Bangkok and Hue had fought over thus became a piece of colonial Indochina.

The southern sultanates

In the peninsula, Rama III likewise strengthened Siamese control over the tributary Malay states. These sultanates sent tokens of allegiance to Bangkok while keeping their dynasties and institutions. Eighty years later, this loose bond would lie at the heart of a negotiation with London.

Mongkut and Chulalongkorn: coming to terms with the West

In the mid-nineteenth century, the nature of the danger changed. It no longer came from neighbouring kingdoms but from European empires. Mongkut (Rama IV) opened Siam to Westerners. The British mission led by John Bowring obtained in 1855 a treaty providing for a consulate in Bangkok. It also secured separate courts to try British subjects: this was extraterritoriality. This regime, later extended to other powers, limited the kingdom's judicial sovereignty. Recovering it would become one of the guiding threads of Siamese diplomacy until the early twentieth century. Mongkut, and then his son, set about playing the British and the French off against each other.

A fifteen-year-old king

Chulalongkorn (Rama V, 1853–1910) came to the throne in 1868, at the age of fifteen. A regency governed until 1873. Early in 1875 the 'Front Palace crisis' broke out. The viceroy Wichaichan took refuge in the British consulate. The affair could have offered the powers a pretext for interference. But London and Paris refused to back their consuls and treated it as an internal matter, which allowed the king to settle it. The episode shows how dangerous the rivalry between the two poles of Siamese power could become once foreign consuls were drawn into it.

The reforms and their architects

Chulalongkorn's long reign was one of profound transformation of the state. The administration was centralised and taxation modernised. Slavery was abolished, courts were created, modern schools opened, and railways and the telegraph spread. The Buddhist clergy itself was organised into a national hierarchy linked to the king: the reform of the sangha begun by Rama I here took on a new form.

The king relied on trusted men. The most important for foreign relations was Prince Devawongse, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1886 and the true architect of Siamese diplomacy. From 1904, an American jurist, Edward H. Strobel, General Adviser to the government, played a decisive part in shaping the kingdom's foreign policy. This reliance on Western advisers is telling: to negotiate with the empires, Siam adopted their legal language.

1893–1909: the price of borders

The crisis of the year R.S. 112

In Thai, the crisis of 1893 is called wikrittakan R.S. 112, the 'crisis of the year 112 of the Rattanakosin era' (Rattanakosin Sok, a reckoning of years from the founding of Bangkok). The very name ties the event to the dynasty.

From the mid-1880s, French ambitions in Indochina collided with Siamese suzerainty over the Lao lands. According to the historian Meyers (Journal of the Siam Society), the left bank of the Mekong had by then been under Siamese control for more than a century, in effect since the subjugation of Vientiane. On the French side, two names stand out: Auguste Pavie, who knew Lao country intimately, and Jean de Lanessan, Governor-General of Indochina. On the Siamese side, Devawongse led the diplomacy and the Danish officer Andreas du Plessis de Richelieu, in Siamese service, organised the defence.

On 13 July 1893, French gunboats forced their way into the Chao Phraya at Paknam and blockaded Bangkok. The commonly cited casualty figures are 16 killed and 20 wounded on the Siamese side, and 3 killed and 3 wounded on the French side. The treaty signed in early October (on the 3rd according to most sources, the 2nd according to others) imposed several conditions on Siam:

• the cession of the left bank of the Mekong;
• an indemnity of 3 million francs;
• a 25-kilometre demilitarised zone on the right bank and around Battambang and Siem Reap;
• the temporary occupation of Chanthaburi by France.

Siam was isolated: the United Kingdom refused to intervene. Chulalongkorn sank into nearly a year of illness and depression. Later, the episode would be reread as a national humiliation. It would become the core of the 'lost territories' narrative mobilised by the Phibun regime in the twentieth century. Here one can gauge the risk of a retrospective reading: what had been a loss of suzerainty over Lao principalities was reinterpreted, decades later, as the amputation of national territory.

The buffer state

In 1896, an Anglo-French declaration guaranteed the integrity of central Siam, that is, the Chao Phraya basin. The protection was also a delimitation. The north-east remained exposed to French pressure, and the south to British pressure. In 1897, Chulalongkorn undertook a journey to Europe, a gesture as diplomatic as it was symbolic: an Asian sovereign treated as an equal by the European courts.

The Franco-Siamese treaty of 23 March 1907 illustrates the logic of bargaining. Siam handed back 'inner Cambodia': Battambang, Siem Reap (under Siamese control since 1795) and Sisophon, together with Angkor, which the Siamese call Nakhon Wat. In exchange, France evacuated Trat and Dan Sai, and gave up trying its Asian subjects in Siam. The French signatory was Victor Collin de Plancy. On the Cambodian side, King Sisowath then divided the recovered territory into two provinces, Battambang and Siem Reap. For Cambodia, it meant the return of Angkor. The French negotiator Fernand Bernard published a first-hand account of it in 1933, which George Cœdès regarded as the liveliest written since 1893 on the 'Siamese question'.

The Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909

On 10 March 1909, Siam transferred to Great Britain its rights and suzerainty over Kedah, Kelantan, Terengganu and Perlis. The treaty was ratified in London on 9 July. In return, London renounced extraterritoriality for all its subjects, European and Asian alike, and a secret convention of 1897 was abrogated. The Federated Malay States granted Siam a loan of 4 million pounds sterling for the peninsular railway. Great Britain also recognised Siamese sovereignty over Pattani. Devawongse signed the treaty; Strobel had been one of its principal negotiators.

Seen from Bangkok, the exchange made sense: distant tributaries in return for full judicial sovereignty, the greatest gain since 1855. Seen from the sultanates, it was another matter. Research carried out at Universiti Sains Malaysia stresses that the Malay rulers, particularly those of Kelantan and Terengganu, resented an agreement concluded without them. Malay opposition was directed against both Siam and the British. These territories had been negotiated over the heads of their own rulers.

A kingdom preserved, neighbours transformed

Why did Siam remain independent when all its neighbours came under colonial rule? Britannica combines three factors: the reforms, which made the Siamese state credible in European eyes; the territorial cessions, which appeased appetites; and the Anglo-French need for a buffer state between Indochina and British Burma or Malaya. The same encyclopaedia adds 'a measure of luck', an admission that diplomatic genius alone does not suffice as an explanation. Interpretations diverge above all on the relative weight of these factors. The dynastic narrative emphasises the foresight of the sovereigns. Other readings stress the territorial price paid and the rivalry between the two empires, which left Siam a room for manoeuvre that neither Burma nor Vietnam enjoyed.

What stands out across the period as a whole is the reversal of positions. In 1828, Bangkok destroyed Vientiane; in 1848, it shared with Hue the tutelage of Cambodia. Burma, its age-old enemy, was eaten into by the British from the 1820s and later lost its monarchy. Laos and Cambodia became French, the sultanates of the northern peninsula British. The borders crossed today between Thailand and its neighbours derive in large part from the treaties of 1893, 1907 and 1909. They turned once-shifting relations of vassalage into lines on a map.

Chulalongkorn died on 23 October 1910. His successors, Vajiravudh (Rama VI) and then Prajadhipok (Rama VII), reigned over a centralised state whose capital now concentrated the administration, the schools and the railway. In 1932, the end of absolute monarchy closed what historians often call the 'Rattanakosin kingdom'. The dynasty, however, endures, and Bangkok remains the capital. The Ayutthaya bricks reused by Rama I, the courtyard of Wat Phra Kaew and the ministries built under Chulalongkorn together bear witness to this twofold ambition: to restore an ancient order, then to reinvent it in order to survive in a world dominated by empires.

Sources and further reading

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (collectif), Thailand – The Thon Buri and Early Bangkok periods, Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d..
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Rama I, Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d..
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chakkri Dynasty, Britannica, n.d..
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Thailand – Chulalongkorn and the foundations of modern Thailand, Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d..
5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, History of Thailand, Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d..
6. Encyclopedia of World Biography, Chulalongkorn, Encyclopedia.com, n.d..
7. Meyers, Siam under Siege (1893–1902): Section VII, Siam at the end of the nineteenth century, Journal of the Siam Society, vol. 82, 1994.
8. non précisé dans l'extrait consulté (thèse SOAS), The Anglo-Siamese Negotiations, 1900–1909, SOAS University of London ; PDF hébergé par le ministère thaïlandais des Affaires étrangères, n.d..
9. collectif, 1893 Franco-Siamese crisis ; Rattanakosin Kingdom (1782–1932), Wikipedia, consulté 2025.
10. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Rattanakosin Kingdom (1782–1932), Wikipedia, n.d..
11. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Rama I, Wikipedia (en), 2025.
12. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Lao rebellion (1826–1828), Wikipedia, n.d..
13. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Kingdom of Vientiane, Wikipedia (en), 2025.
14. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Wat Phra Kaew, Wikipedia, n.d..
15. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Siamese–Vietnamese War (1840–1845), Wikipedia, n.d..
16. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Ang Duong, Wikipedia, n.d..
17. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909, Wikipedia, n.d..
18. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Franco-Siamese Treaty of 1907, Wikipedia, n.d..
19. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Siem Reap province, Wikipedia, n.d..
20. Cambodgemag, Cambodia & History: At the school of diplomats, the loss and triumphant return of Angkor, Cambodgemag, n.d..
21. non précisé dans l'extrait consulté, The Effects of the Anglo-Siamese Treaty 1909 on Northern Malay States, Universiti Sains Malaysia (eprints), n.d..
22. GlobalSecurity.org, Franco-Siamese War 1893, GlobalSecurity.org, n.d..