{"id":85,"date":"2014-09-01T18:26:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-01T18:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the-perfect-library.zonkdev.uk\/?p=85"},"modified":"2014-09-27T07:03:33","modified_gmt":"2014-09-27T07:03:33","slug":"siamese-white","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/?p=85","title":{"rendered":"Siamese White"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Siamese<\/a>Maurice Collis, \u00a0Penguin Adventure & Travel, 1940.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whenever I cut the deck of postcards and revealed\u00a0Siamese White <\/em>the title of this book intrigued me.\u00a0Was the subject\u00a0<\/span>a breed of cat? A\u00a0butterfly\u00a0or an artists\u2019 pigment?\u00a0Maybe it was the story of\u00a0\u00a0a beautiful courtesan, the product of a mixed race liaison? All were\u00a0plausible, but all quite wrong. Siamese White was a man – \u00a0an Englishman from Bath. During the reign of James II he was appointed as a mandarin by the King of Siam\u00a0and\u00a0Maurice Collis\u2019s book\u00a0is his story.<\/p>\n

Siam adopted its modern name, Thailand, in 1939. Many in Thailand argue that the modernizing reforms of the Thai government allowed the country to avoid the colonial wars which devastated its neighbours in the third quarter of the 20th<\/sup>\u00a0century. However,\u00a0\u00a0the diplomatic skills of Siamese monarchs in the 19th and early 20th centuries also had an important role in allowing Siam, and later Thailand,\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0to\u00a0escape\u00a0European colonisation.<\/p>\n

Formal British relations with Thailand began in 1612, when the East India Company ship\u00a0The Globe<\/em>\u00a0arrived in Siam carrying a present and a letter from King James I for the Siamese monarch. The present must have been a good one; in return, the fledgling English East-Indian Company was given a piece of ground upon which to construct a warehouse.<\/p>\n

Samuel White sailed for Madras in 1675 in the services of the East India Company. By that time the\u00a0Company had developed into\u00a0<\/span>an enormously powerful corporation which controlled the British government\u2019s interests in Asia. White was a merchant adventurer of the most roguish kind and moved on to Mergui, an important Siamese trade centre. The principal scenes of\u00a0Siamese White<\/em>\u00a0are set there, where Collis spent some years as a member of the Indian Civil Service. White administered the port on behalf of the Siamese state and, typical of British\u00a0administrators of the time, it seems clear that he used his position to considerable personal gain<\/p>\n

Collis based the book on two original sources. One of these was the\u00a0Davenport Papers<\/em>, a collection of documents written by Francis Davenport, also of the East India Company. Davenport’s criticism of White went well beyond accusations of misuse of power. He was taken prisoner by White and accused him\u00a0of piracy and – perhaps even more heinous in the eyes of the East India Company – of damaging the Company\u2019s reputation in Asia.<\/p>\n

White continued to argue his innocence until he died in 1689. Touchingly, his case was taken up by his brother George, on behalf of White\u2019s daughters. George was nothing if not thorough. His pamphlet refuting Davenport\u2019s accusations was the second of Collis\u2019s sources. It could not have had a more comprehensive title, “Reflections on a Scandalous Paper Entitled the Answer to the East India Company to the two Printed Papers of Samuel White Together with the true Character of Francis Davenport the said Company Historiographer”.<\/em><\/p>\n

Shame on you Mr Davenport!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maurice Collis, \u00a0Penguin Adventure & Travel, 1940. Whenever I cut the deck of postcards and revealed\u00a0Siamese White the title of this book intrigued me.\u00a0Was the subject\u00a0a breed of cat? A\u00a0butterfly\u00a0or an artists\u2019 pigment?\u00a0Maybe it was the story of\u00a0\u00a0a beautiful courtesan, the product of a mixed race liaison? All were\u00a0plausible, but all quite wrong. Siamese White […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-perfect-library.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}