5 - Louis XIV and the Kingdom of Siam: The Development and Failure of a Particular Example of Diplomatic and Intercultural Relations in the Colonial Era

Summary

East–West diplomatic relations: Louis XIV and the Kingdom of Siam, 1660–88

The relations between the Kingdoms of Siam and France during the reign of Louis XIV were both singular and revealing with regard to the possibilities and limitations of diplomatic and intercultural relations between independent powers in the age of European expansion and colonialism. The Kingdom of Siam, the future Kingdom of Thailand, represents, in fact, one of the rare countries in the non-European world which resisted successfully the ambitions of the European colonial powers, and it may seem paradoxical that it had been in very close and intense contact, since the seventeenth century, with European powers, and especially with the Kingdom of France. Besides its contacts with Siam, the Kingdom of France in this period had also established relations with a number of other non-European powers: Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Bey of Tunis, China and Russia, with relations with the latter being intensified after the visit of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great to Versailles in 1717. For the Historical Dictionary of Thailand published in 2005, these relations were characterised as both intense and short, with consideration limited to the 1680s:

An exchange of embassies took place with the arrival of the French envoy Boureau- Deslandes in 1684; the Chevalier de Chaumont was nominated the first French ambassador in the Kingdom of Siam. Treaties were signed in 1685 and 1687, giving the French freedom of religious instruction, access to free trade, and a monopoly on tin extraction from the island of Phuket. In addition they were given extraordinary jurisdiction over French doctors, teachers, and other French citizens, and French troops were stationed in Bangkok and Mergui. When Phetracha seized the throne after Narai's death, he expelled the French soldiers and some French priests and ended French influence and privileges.

The authors of the dictionary point out that after 1688 the relations between France and Siam were interrupted for two hundred years before being resumed again at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, when Siam ‘experienced extremely difficult relations with France’ during the period of French colonisation in South East Asia and the conquest of Indochina.