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, especially those interested in ASEAN studies, Thailand, literature, history, political science, ethnography, linguistics, anthropology, and related subjects.

Among them is Ancient Siamese Government and Administration by H. G. Quaritch Wales.

Horace Geoffrey Quaritch Wales was born in 1900.

In 1924, he entered the service of the Siamese government and from 1924-1928 acted as an adviser to HM King Rama VI and HM King Rama VII.

This led to the publication of Siamese State Ceremonies (1931), and Ancient Siamese Government and Administration (1934), this volume being translated into Thai in the same year. He married, and with his wife, Dorothy, began extensive travel, particularly in south and southeast Asia.

During 1934-6 he served as field-director for the Greater India Research Committee, directing archaeological work on early Buddhist sites in Thailand.

From 1937-1940 he and his wife undertook surveys and excavations in Malaya, particularly in the Kedah region.

He published The Making of Greater India (1951) and continued to publish books, articles and reviews throughout his career.

The TU Library circulating collection also includes several other books by Mr. Wales.

When Ancient Siamese Government and Administration was first published, it was praised by a review in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Oct., 1935):

The history of Siam as an independent state begins in the thirteenth century and the author explains in his preface that the term ” ancient ” is used in a relative sense. After an introductory chapter, the work traces the evolution of the institutions of Government in Siam, from a paternal feudalism to an absolute despotism with a complex administrative system, in a series of chapters entitled the Monarchy, Classes of the People, the Central Administration, Provincial Administration, the Army, Legislation, Administration of Justice, Revenue and Expenditure, and the Church, ending with a brief Conclusion.

Appended to these chapters are a list of kings, a bibliography, and an index. In the several chapters of which the headings have been mentioned there is much detailed information on all these various subjects and the author deals with them critically. Inevitably there are many technical terms (of Indian, Siamese, Mon, or Khmer origin), and the book, while full of interesting matter, demands careful reading.

It is based on a number of sources, Siamese and foreign, and also on the author’s own knowledge of the country and its institutions and customs. There is no other book in any European language which covers the ground as this one does and it is likely to remain for a long time the standard work on the subject.

The reviewer, Charles Otto Blagden, was an English Orientalist and linguist who specialized in the Malay, Mon and Pyu languages.

Here are some excerpts from Ancient Siamese Government and Administration:

Siamese social differentiation stopped at class because the Hindu institution of caste never obtained a hold on the Siamese people as it did to a certain extent on the Khmers

Even class was largely fluid and unstable since royalty was merged with the commonality after the fifth generation; there was, at least in later times, no hereditary nobility; while the majority of the members of the Buddhist Order and a large proportion of the slaves were only temporarily abstracted from the main mass of freemen.

The great levelling features which militated against the formation of caste, or even the stability of class, were the influence of Buddhism and the absolute power of the monarchy, the latter naturally unwilling to tolerate such dangerous developments.

Once the theory of the divine kingship had been fully evolved, the status of every one of the king’s subjects from the highest prince downwards, in relation to the king, was but as dust, and the terms kha fau and kha hlvan,  applied to courtiers and royal commissioners of the highest rank and having the literal meaning “royal slaves,” were not merely expressions of empty flattery.

Despite these conditions, the respect due to royal blood and religion demanded privileges for the royal family and the monks. Again, even in the earliest period of which we have knowledge, the king was unable to administer the whole of his kingdom himself, and this necessitated the existence of a class of nobles; while the fully developed administration required the services of a numerous official class. These nobles and officials could not have hoped to function properly had not their position and the respect due to it been clearly marked by the conferment of appropriate privileges.

Thus there grew up classes whose privileges were very real and so while bearing in mind the fact that individuals of every class were alike of equally little account in the sight of the king, in the present chapter we shall endeavour to study the character and organization of both privileged and unprivileged classes of the society, and the nature of their relationship to one another and to the monarchy, with special regard to the part that each played in connection with the administrative system. […]

We now come to consider the administrative ditties of the princes and their official ranks as distinct from the birth or family ranks that we have just discussed. During the later part of the Sukhodaya period and about the first two hundred years of the Ayudhya period, it would seem that the duties of princes were as is laid down in the Palatine Law.

That is to say the sons of queens were obliged to live at ease in the capital where they were under the control of the king (though apparently the heir apparent was often given the government of a province); the luk hlvan ek and luk hlvan were appointed to rule over first and second class provinces respectively; while the brah yauvaraja did not receive such appointments.

This custom of appointing princes to govern certain provinces, which they did with almost royal pomp as semi-independent states, prevailed, at least in the case of the more distant provinces, until nearly the end of the sixteenth century, after which it was abandoned owing to the trouble brought upon the country through the constant warring together of these powerful princes over the succession, on the death of a king.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)