Siam signs treaties with Belgium, Italy and Sweden-Norway in 1868.
King Rama IV dies on October 1 of this year and is succeeded by his eldest son, the fifteen-year-old Chulalongkorn, who will expand upon his father’s modernization policies, despite mounting aggression from Western nations.
Mongkut had come to the Siamese throne as Rama IV in 1851, determined to save his country from colonial domination by forcing modernization on his reluctant subjects.
An absolute monarch in theory, his power was limited.
Having been a monk for twenty-seven years, he lacked a base among the powerful royal princes, and did not have a modern state apparatus to carry out his wishes.
His first attempts at reform, to establish a modern system of administration and to improve the status of debt-slaves and women, had been frustrated.
Rama IV had thus come to welcome western intrusion in Siam.
Indeed, the king and his entourages were actively pro-British.
British influence had begun in 1855 in the form of a mission led by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, who had arrived in Bangkok with demands for immediate changes, backed by the threat of force.
The King had readily agreed to his demand for a new treaty, called the Bowring Treaty, which had restricted import duties to three percent, abolished royal trade monopolies, and granted extraterritoriality to British subjects.
Other western powers had soon demanded and received similar concessions.
The king had shortly come to consider that the real threat to Siam comes from the French, not the British.
The British are interested in commercial advantage, the French in building a colonial empire.
In light of the French occupation of Saigon in 1859, and the establishment of a French protectorate over southern Vietnam and eastern Cambodia, in 1867, Rama IV had hoped that the British would defend Siam if he gave them the economic concessions they demanded.
This will prove to be an illusion in the next reign, but it is true that the British see Siam as a useful buffer state between British Burma and French Indochina.
