Word: siam
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...weeks past, the news of his coming had been heard amidst the clatter of traffic on Bangkok's twisted, crowded streets. Peddlers had passed it from sampan to sampan along the winding, traffic-jammed klong (canals) that made Siam's capital an eastern Venice. Strawhatted boatmen on the wider canals that crisscross the rice-rich central plains to the north had told it to farmers' wives in houses perched on stilts. Up the great rivers, the Chao Phraya, the Mekong, the Tha Chin, the Ping, the Si and the Mun, it had gone with wandering merchants thumbing...
...broad King's Walk, behind whose fashionable modern apartment buildings lurk some of its best-advertised houses of prostitution, Chinese merchants set up hobbyhorse displays and giant paintings of the King. Incense candles were made ready to be lighted and to waft pleasant smells (very important in Siam) when the King arrived. A youngster got tired of waiting, climbed up into a tree and went to sleep. Passers-by tickled the soles of his feet. He went on sleeping. Police wormed their way through the crowd notifying property owners that a police order issued the day before had been...
...Clouds Gather. Chumphot, Phumiphon and many of their countrymen had been strongly influenced by the West. For good & ill, Siam was changing, yet it remained outside the main patterns of transition through which its neighbors were passing. Unique in many ways, Siam was most important in the fact that it had escaped any serious contact with Western imperialism. India had been unified by imperialism and its cultures had been left more or less intact under a veneer of Westernization; its rulers in independence were trying to bring old & new together. Burma's ancient way of life had been...
...Siam's virtues and defects were still largely its own, not a bastard product of two civilizations. Phumiphon's never-never land was a land of what-might-have-been, a jewel of (almost) unblemished Easternism shining on the junk heap of the wrecked empires. Like a jewel, Siam was temptingly easy to pick up. The Communist imperialists who had taken China might turn Siam's way any time...
...prize included the world's largest postwar (1,300,000 tons a year) exportable surplus of rice, a booming rubber and tin production, and a docile people. Siam was no bulwark, but the old land and its young King were worth a good look, as a garden is worth a good look as storm clouds gather...