The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers.
Among them is Guide to Bangkok: With Notes of Siam by Erik Seidenfaden, published by the Royal State Railways of Siam.
The TU Library collection also includes several books about different aspects of the history and operation of the railways of Thailand.
The State Railway of Thailand (SRT), the state-owned rail operator under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transport, was founded as the Royal State Railways of Siam (RSR) in 1890.
King Rama V (HM King Chulalongkorn) ordered the Department of Railways to be set up under the Department of Public Works and Town and Country Planning.
Construction of the Bangkok-Ayutthaya railway (71 kilometers (km)), the first part of the Northern Line, was started in 1890 and inaugurated in 1897.
The Thon Buri-Phetchaburi line (150 km), later the Southern Line, was opened in 1903.
Guide to Bangkok: With Notes of Siam was first published in 1927, with subsequent editions.
The publisher offered information about the places connected by rail, to encourage rail travel.
It includes decorative color plates, maps and half-tone illustrations created by the Arts and Craft School of Bangkok (today’s Poh-Chang Academy of Arts).
The author, Major Erik Seidenfaden, was commissioned by the State Railways of Siam to write what was then the most comprehensive guide to Bangkok.
Major Seidenfaden was a Danish Captain of The Royal Siamese Gendarmerie, the provincial military police force, who lived in Thailand from 1906 to 1947.
He served as part of the Provincial Gendarmerie where his role was to assist with the modernization of the Siamese military.
In 1914 Major Seidenfaden became the chief of The Royal Siamese Gendarmerie’s officer school.
In 1920 he demobilized and became chief of the accounting department of the Thai Electric Corporation Ltd., where he remained until 1941, retiring in Bangkok.
As an amateur ethnologist, he wrote books and articles on the history, culture and languages of the Thai peoples.
He was considered by academic researchers to have more knowledge of the culture and history of the Thai and related peoples than any other European of his century.
Nevertheless, his ethnological interpretations appear to be expressions of personal prejudice to today’s readers.
His descriptions of hotels and train routes may also have been somewhat idealized for promotional reasons.
His Guide to Bangkok for the Royal State Railway Department became known as a standard work describing many of Thailand’s Buddhist temples.
Major Seidenfaden was a president and honorary member of the Siam Society and wrote many articles, papers and reviews for the Journal of the Siam Society, which are now available online.
He noted that
pictoresque and time-honoured national and regional costumes, nearly all over the land, are fast disappearing, to be replaced by dresses of more or less international fashion.
To address this issue, in 1937 he organized an exhibition in the lecture hall of the Siam Society displaying costumes from different branches of the Thai peoples and of the non-Thai communities, mostly from the Northeast.
He blamed the loss of ethnic diversity on the negative influence of radio, movies, film, and recordings.
He especially considered that radio was responsible for the disappearance of old dialects, manners and cultural traditions.
In 2004, his library of Thai books was donated by his daughter to The Thai Section of the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
He considered that
a certain amount of courage is needed to bring out a guide book… No other city in Southeastern Asia compares with Bangkok, in the gripping and growing interest which leaves a permanent and fragrant impression on the mind of the visitor. It is difficult to set down in words, precisely whence comes the elusive fascination of Bangkok.
Since the guide was published by the Royal State Railways of Siam, the author focused on train routes leading into Bangkok and their convenience.
Other books in the same series by Major Seidenfaden about Petchaburi and Nakhon Pathom are also shelved in the Pridi Banomyong Rare Book Room.
According to a research article published in 2022 in the Journal of the Siam Society, Major Seidenfaden
praised the reforms launched by the Siamese government and believed that the gendarmerie could play a central role in this project, not only as a law and order institution, but also as a disciplinary body. He perceived the population in Siam at large as “indifferent, apathetic and lazy” and he hoped the gendarmerie could contribute to awakening the population from this lethargic state by turning gendarmes into loyal and disciplined subjects, and nourishing a sense of patriotism among them. At the same time, however, he also had great doubts about the possible success of this project. […]
He found that the development and modernization of Siam would be difficult to achieve, as he did not believe that Buddhism could supply the population with a proper morality to sustain such a transformation. After his return to Denmark, Seidenfaden explained his view on Buddhism to a Danish newspaper in the following way:
“Buddhism makes them somewhat carefree, but that religion does not exactly call for energy and initiative. I mean its goal is basically to fight the urge to exist! It does not quite work in a modern society…. Perhaps one could say that the average Siamese to some extent misses the determination that characterizes people in northern Europe. They are the children of the sun.”
In addition, Seidenfaden found that the workings of the gendarmerie were constantly curtailed by conflicts with local civil servants—district officers or village headmen—whom he believed colluded with local criminal gangs or were misusing their position for economic gain. Seidenfaden also had conflicts with the Siamese army, which he reckoned constituted a state within the state. […]
In late 1910, it was Seidenfaden’s ambition to start drafting a book on Siam containing information on the Khmer ruins he has surveyed on the Korat Plateau. This book, however, never materialized as he apparently encountered two obstacles. First, to locate, measure and sketch was one thing; identifying and interpreting the artefacts was quite another. In his diaries, he often complained about the difficulty of obtaining information about the ruins and other artefacts, with regard to both their history and their past function. On these matters, he found the local population ignorant. Second, he was unfamiliar with how to deal with, or present, the data he had collected. […]
The Royal State Railways of Siam hired him to write guidebooks to several destinations in Siam. Although commissioned to write guidebooks to nineteen destinations, only a few appeared in print, namely Bangkok (1927), Nakhon Pathom (1929) and Phetchaburi (1931).
Through these publications, Seidenfaden contributed to an early process of determining what was significant to travellers in Siam, foreigners and Siamese alike. For the travellers, the guidebooks turned localities into familiar places when they followed predetermined itineraries and saw the sights in predictable ways. This was yet another way of turning Siam into a knowable object.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)