“Light of A Northern Star: A ‘Foreign’ Concubine in the Siamese Palace, Princess Dara Rasami (1873-1933)” by Leslie Ann Woodhouse Woodhouse ~ Light of A Northern Star Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................. p. 1 Chapter 1. Becoming Lan Na: Constituting an Inland Constellation ..................................... 7 Appendix: Kings of Lan Na’s Chao Chet Ton Dynasty ...................................................... 63 Illustrations ............................................................................................................................ 64 Chapter 2. Into the Palace: Dara Rasami and Life in the Siamese Court ............................. 65 Illustrations ........................................................................................................................... 119 Chapter 3. Performing Lan Na: Dara Rasami and Ethnicity in the Siamese Court .......... 129 Illustrations .......................................................................................................................... 182 Chapter 4. After Bangkok: Dara Rasami and the Invention of Lan Na “Tradition” ....... 216 Illustrations ........................................................................................................................... 240 Chapter 5. Afterword: Problems of Post-Polygyny in Contemporary Thailand ............... 251 Bibliography Archives Consulted ................................................................................................................ 265 English-Language Sources ........................................................................................................... Thai-Language Sources ................................................................................................................ i Woodhouse ~ Light of A Northern Star ABBREVIATIONS USED FOR ARCHIVAL SOURCES: D.R.L. [Prince] Damrong Rajanubhab Library, Bangkok N.A.T. National Archives of Thailand (หอจดหมายเห็ตุแหงชาต), Bangkok N.L.T. National Library of Thailand (ห้องสมุดแหงชาต), Bangkok S.R.L. Archive of the Royal Secretariat (สํานักราชเลขาธิการ), Bangkok B.N.A. British National Archives, Kew, U.K. F.O. British Foreign Office Records (subset of the B.N.A. or B.L.) B.L. British Library, London, U.K. L/P.&S. Political & Secret Documents (subset of B.L./F.O. documents) ii Woodhouse ~ Light of A Northern Star I. Introduction In the early 1880s, a wild rumor swept Bangkok: that Queen Victoria wished to adopt a young princess named Dara Rasami from Lan Na, then one of Siam’s principal tributaries. The threat of such a move greatly alarmed the Siamese rulership, as the British annexation of neighboring Burma was well underway. The French had also begun pressing in on Siam’s eastern peripheries from Cambodia and Laos. If such an adoption were to take place, it could have expanded England’s colonial reach into the Chao Phraya River valley – uncomfortably close to Bangkok’s back-doorstep. It was nearly unheard of for the king to reach out to individual families in asking for their daughter’s hand, as women were usually “gifted” to the Siamese king as consorts (literally in the hundreds, in King Chulalongkorn’s case). But in response to this rumor, Siam’s King Chulalongkorn acted quickly, sending a gift of jewels and a letter of engagement to secure Dara Rasami as a royal consort in 1883. Princess Dara Rasami, the only daughter of the ruling line of Lan Na’s hundred-year-old Chao Chet Ton dynasty, was nine years old. My first encounter with this story raised a number of questions which I quickly realized could not be answered by the current available historical scholarship. Who were the wives, queens and concubines of the kings of Siam? How did the system of royal concubinage work, exactly? Could non-Siamese (and/or non-Buddhist) women become wives of the Siamese king? When did the practice of royal concubinage begin, and when did it end? While we are dimly aware of the fact that polygamy was practiced by the kings of Siam (as well as many other places) until relatively recently, these questions remain unanswered by English- language scholarship. Which leads to the bigger question: Why not? 1 Woodhouse ~ Light of A Northern Star The reason for this absence can be traced back to Anna Leonowens’ nineteenth-century books on the subject, “An English Governess in the Siamese Court” (1870) and “Romance of the Harem” (1872) among them. These books were wildly popular in their time, and understandably so: the setting of Leonowens’ tales in the heart of Southeast Asia was incredibly exotic for nineteenth-century Western readers, and her anti-slavery subtext resonated particularly deeply with American audiences in the wake of the U.S. Civil War. At the same time, European travelers’ sensationalistic accounts and images of Ottoman, Arab and Egyptian “harems” began to seep into the minds of Western audiences. But how accurate were Leonowens’ depictions of Siam’s royal consorts? Were girls really rounded up én masse from Siam’s hinterlands to be enslaved within the royal “harem,” and did common people really disfigure their daughters to spare them such a fate? What about the story of Tuptim, a “harem” girl whose love for a common man resulted in both their executions? These and the many other compelling stories Leonowens spun out of her personal experiences within the palace made a great impact upon Western perceptions of royal polygamy. By depicting royal polygamy as an institution which enslaved women and deprived them of rights to personal freedom and property, Leonowens’ narratives formed a perfect confluence with contemporary notions of the “oriental despot,” whose absolute rule was deemed arbitrary and cruel in comparison with the modern, “civilized” (Western) nation-state. At the same time, ideas as to the desirability of assimilating Western “siwilai” (i.e., civilization) began seeping into the consciousness of a number of influential Siamese elites – among them King Chulalongkorn himself, and his half-brother ministers and advisors. While polygamy’s undesirability – as a mark of a non-siwilai polity – was becoming well-understood by this generation of Siamese princes and nobles, it was nonetheless practiced by most of 2 Woodhouse ~ Light of A Northern Star them. In fact, King Chulalongkorn, the fifth king of the Chakri dynasty, maintained more than 150 women as consorts over the course of his forty-two-year reign. Yet after his death in 1910, subsequent kings renounced the practice, ultimately abandoning it: The sixth Chakri king (Vajiravudh, r. 1910-1925) took only four wives, and the seventh king, Prajatiphok (r. 1925-1933) married only one woman. Thus by 1925 royal polygamy in Siam was officially dead. So where is the scholarship? Also largely dead, thanks in part to Anna Leonowens, but also to the many (male) scholars of Siam’s history – both Thai and foreign. These scholars saw royal polygamy as illegitimate, a decadent element of “oriental despotic” rule which had to be eliminated in order for Siam to be considered “civilized” as well as “modern.” To this generation of scholars, steeped in Western bourgeois categories, polygamy represented the “private” domestic world of women, home and family, as opposed to the “public” world of men, politics, and statecraft. As such, the “private” sphere of royal polygamy was considered to merely contaminate the “public” sphere with personal and clan ties, which were seen as nepotistic and corrupt. In practice, the Siamese system of royal concubinage was little different from the practices of European monarchs during Europe’s middle ages – with the exception that neither the mistresses of those monarchs (nor their children) enjoyed legal recognition or many of the customary rights that their Siamese royal counterparts did. Among Thai scholars, the traditional proscription against speech considered critical of the ruling monarch has achieved a similar end, making it difficult to write royal histories which are anything but hagiographic. Given palace women’s close proximity to the realities of the Siamese king’s daily life, any first-person accounts in particular would have required intense circumspection on the writer’s part – if not outright censorship altogether – to avoid 3 Woodhouse ~ Light of A Northern Star charges of lese-majeste (a crime still punishable with long jail sentences in Thailand today). Although there is great demand from the Thai reading public for memoirs and accounts of palace life in the past, many of the published Thai-language texts suffer from a dearth of anything resembling critical analysis, much less the humanistic, socio-politico-economic critique inherent to most contemporary Western scholarship. For these reasons, there is little scholarship that even acknowledges – let alone focuses upon – the polygynous system of marital alliance that formed a major part of Siam’s political landscape until 1925. Dara Rasami’s story demonstrates the centrality of the Siamese palace as an intersection of personal and regional politics in pre-modern Siam. Although the Fifth Reign era has engaged both Thai and Western scholars for decades, the topic of royal polygyny promises to shed new light upon this otherwise well-studied period of Siamese history, fleshing out the social contours of a heretofore two-dimensional historical picture composed solely of political and economic dimensions. The focus of this study is a woman named Dara