Description of Siam in 1829

DESCRIPTION OF SIAM IN 1829 Barthélemy Bruguière Translated and edited by Kennon Breazeale and Michael Smithies The 1829 description of the Thai kingdom and its people was completed after Bruguière had lived in Bangkok for two years, and was sent in the form of a very long letter to the Vicar-General of Aire in his home region in the southwest of France. Bruguière composed it as a book-length work about the country, with attention to geography, natural history, the people (appearance, clothing, customs, occupations, food), religious beliefs and practices, court etiquette, the armed forces and a few remarks on the laws, legal system and sciences. This letter appears in a new English translation below. The French text was published in 1831 in the missionary journal, the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, issued every two months in Lyon. The following year, a shortened version of the text appeared in the Nouvelles annales des voyages, a French geographical journal published in Paris. The Paris version is extensively truncated (about half of the text is omitted altogether), and some passages have been condensed by rephrasing. It also contains a few observations added by the Paris editors that do not appear in Bruguière’s text. In particular, the editors in Paris omitted references to the French missions in Siam and elsewhere, and also nearly all of the section on religious beliefs and practices. They probably considered this section, which is tainted by the strong religious prejudices of the time, to be of little value to their more scientific-minded readers, and they may also have been obliged to truncate the text to fit the space available in the journal. This section has been retained in the present translation, in spite of its unpleasant character, because it helps to document the attitudes and misconceptions of the missionaries—even very scholarly ones such as Bruguière—who were, unsurprisingly, never very successful in proselytising. The section also contains some details that may be of value to folklorists and ethnographers. The text was translated into English and published in 1844 in The Chinese Repository in Canton. The anonymous translator was apparently William Dean, a Baptist among the first American missionaries in Thailand, who worked in Bangkok from 1835, became very knowledgeable about the Thai people and moved to Canton in 1842. He made numerous editorial comments, judging Bruguière’s work to be valuable, in spite of its shortcomings, misinformed assertions and intolerant opinions about the Thai and their religion: On the whole, these pages, though at times giving a wrong impression to the reader, are calculated to convey much information of a country and people Journal of the Siam Society 2008 Vol. 96 73 74 BARTHÉLEMY BRUGUIÈRE little known, but who [the pages] contain much to interest the commercial and religious world. (Chinese Repository 1844: 215) Much, but by no means all, of Bruguière’s 1829 composition appears in Dean’s translation. The entire initial section (on geography, climate, fauna and flora) is omitted, perhaps because it contained little new information of interest to the trading community at Canton, who were the readers of the Repository. Also, as the published English version informs us, ‘The translation abridges the bishop’s language a little in leaving out some minor particulars.’ Some passages may have been regarded by Dean or by the editor of the journal as too critical. Some omitted passages were obviously of no value to local readers, including the sections about the Catholic Church and the Chinese in Bangkok, and the appended essay on the Thai language. One wonders how and why Bruguière collected all his information, and why he sent it to the Vicar-General of Aire, who must have been an old friend in the southwest of France. It is not a simple record of first impressions of the country, because he had been working in Bangkok for two years by the time he completed the work. No doubt he obtained many of his facts from the elderly bishop, Florens, and much else from the local priests and the students at the college in Bangkok. He may have begun collecting information about natural history during his first visit to Penang and his transpeninsular adventure of 1827. He surely also consulted numerous books about Siam before he left France, especially the late seventeenth century works that discussed earlier mission work. Several reasons for compiling this work are clear. Bruguière was originally assigned to Vietnam. But during his brief period of training at the seminary in Paris, he must have turned, for information about the nearby Siam Mission, to the most recent book on the subject: the two-volume study published in 1771 by François Turpin. Turpin’s work was encyclopaedic and included geography, trade, flora, fauna, government and political history—all adapted from materials provided by the last bishop to reside in Ayutthaya, as Turpin himself never went to Siam. But it was more than 50 years out of date, and was concerned with Ayutthaya (a capital that no longer existed) and with the French mission that had vanished in wartime. Nothing substantial about the country and the Thai people had appeared in print since then in French. Bruguière may have intended his study to fill the need for a new reference work, for the benefit of students at the Paris seminary and to attract potential missionaries in France to the mission in Siam. These intellectual endeavours were certainly inspired by the accomplish- ments of Charles Langlois, a mentor at the MEP Seminary, who was active in publishing works related to foreign missions in the 1820s. Further inspiration also came from the monumental work on Indian culture published in 1817 and 1825 by Jean-Antoine Dubois, a mentor at the seminary in Paris. But Bruguière did not have Journal of the Siam Society 2008 Vol. 96 Description of Siam in 1829 75 the advantage of Dubois’ long experience in the field or the intellectual inclination to detach himself from his subject. He inserted much misinformed commentary, tinged with strong theological prejudice, which detracted from its appeal to general readers. Bruguière’s efforts were already overshadowed by a much longer work in English by the British envoy, John Crawfurd, who visited Bangkok in 1822 and published an important reference work about the country in 1828. Crawfurd’s book likewise overshadowed the more limited but scientific publication about the country by his own mission-colleague, George Finlayson, in 1826. Like the two Britons, Bruguière obtained a lot of his information at second hand. Unlike them, he had the advantages of long residence in the country (two years, compared with their visit of four months) and a knowledge of the Thai language. Also unlike them (both of whom had studied surgery at the University of Edinburgh), he had no training in sciences. He wrote from a very different perspective, as a theologian. His work did not reach a wide audience and was largely forgotten except by French missionaries in training, who must have read it eagerly. For them, it was a useful introduction to Bangkok and the Thai people, and the most up-to-date work of its kind in French. But it ceased to be of use, even for this small audience, after the publication of a major reference work in 1854 by Bishop Pallegoix, who must have learned a great deal at the outset of his career from Bruguière’s description. Pallegoix in turn was quickly overshadowed by the description of Siam published in 1857 by the British envoy, John Bowring, who drew some of his information from Bruguière’s work, which he acknowledged. The editors of the French missionary journal had another, practical reason for publishing the description. They had urged Florens to provide some interest- ing accounts of his mission for readers of the journal. But Bangkok was relatively peaceful and did not produce newsworthy events comparable to those in Vietnam, where missionaries were often persecuted, driven out of the country or killed by the authorities. If Bruguière intended his description to be published in the journal, he may have written it with fund-raising in mind, as a means of attracting the interest of pious European readers and stimulating them to donate generously to the foreign missions. Journal of the Siam Society 2008 Vol. 96 76 BARTHÉLEMY BRUGUIÈRE Annales de l’Association de la Propagation de la Foi Recueil Périodique Tome Cinquième Lyon, Rusand / Paris, Rusand 1831 pp.63-215 Letter from Mgr. Bruguière, Bishop of Capsa, to M. Bousquet, vicar-general of Aire1 [63] Bangkok, 1829 J.M.J. [Jesus, Mary, Joseph] Good Sir, and dear friend, You asked me for some information about the country where I now find myself, about the customs, practices, the religion of the inhabitants, etc. You demand of me a [64] huge undertaking. However, to prove to you that there is nothing I would not undertake to please you, I am going to apply myself to the task. I shall try to be as concise as possible, while omitting nothing essential. I do not propose to relate anything uncertain or doubtful. It is quite likely, though, that some inac- curacies may occur, but that will be involuntary; I am eye-witness to many of the facts related here. You may find some disorder in my account; please forgive this negligence. I have written at different times and only when I was free to do so, which was not often. The apostolic vicariate constituting our mission includes all the provinces of the kingdom of Siam. The bishop [Mgr. Joseph Florens] even has under his ju- risdiction several neighbouring states; he will certainly send missionaries to them when France supplies more.

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