Vajiravudh

Biography

In 1912 conspirators, young army and navy officers, planned to kill the king or force him to give up power on 1 April, the traditional Siamese New Year. The plot was discovered in advance: the participant who had drawn the lot to carry out the attempt took fright and revealed the plan. The sentences were severe, from execution to long prison terms, but the king commuted them and released some of those convicted.

Among the conspirators' charges was this one: the king spends his time writing plays and acting in them with his courtiers.

Vajiravudh was born on 1 January 1881 in the Grand Palace in Bangkok, the son of King Chulalongkorn and Queen Saovabha. In 1888 he received the title Prince of Ayutthaya. He was first educated at the palace, with teaching in Thai and English. In January 1895 his elder half-brother, Crown Prince Maha Vajirunhis, died, and Vajiravudh became heir. He studied in Britain: at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, then briefly served in the Durham Light Infantry, and afterwards read law and history at Christ Church, Oxford, where he belonged to the Bullingdon Club. Illness prevented him from finishing the course in 1901. From England he travelled around Europe; in 1902 he was in Berlin and Copenhagen, attended the enthronement ceremony of Alfonso XIII in Madrid, and represented his father at the coronation of Edward VII. He returned home by way of the United States and Japan. In 1904, in keeping with Siamese custom, he entered the monkhood for a time. When his father left for Europe in 1907, Vajiravudh became regent and oversaw the making of the equestrian statue of Chulalongkorn.

Chulalongkorn died on 23 October 1910, and Vajiravudh took the throne. Even before his coronation he began reforms in the army: he founded military academies and for the first time in Siam introduced the rank of general, and his uncle, Prince Bhanurangsi Savangwongse, became the first Siamese field marshal. The new king's first undertaking was the construction of the Royal Pages College, a boarding school modelled on English public schools such as Eton and Harrow. It was built on a site where by custom a king would have raised a monastery: in Bangkok, in Vajiravudh's view, there were already too many temples. The college later took his name. He turned the school for civil servants into the Chulalongkorn Academy for Civil Officials, from which in 1917 grew Chulalongkorn University, the first in the country. Some of the earliest public hospitals in Siam opened in his reign: Vajira (1912) and Chulalongkorn (1914).

In 1911 the king founded the Wild Tiger Corps, a paramilitary organisation outside the normal army hierarchy. At first it was a ceremonial guard, but within the first year it numbered about four thousand men and took up much of the king's time. The army saw it as a threat to its prerogatives. A branch for children, the Tiger Cubs, was created, and the Boy Scout movement grew out of it. The second, formal coronation took place on 28 November 1911; members of the royal houses of Europe and Japan attended, and the festivities lasted thirteen days and, by one estimate, consumed about 8% of the national budget.

In 1912 Vajiravudh changed the numbering of years from the Rattanakosin Era to the Buddhist Era. On 22 July 1917 Siam declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The king regarded the war as an opportunity to strengthen national feeling and at the same time replaced the flag showing an elephant with a tricolour. The Siamese expeditionary force reached Europe near the end of the war and saw almost no fighting; most of the nineteen who died succumbed to Spanish flu. Taking part in the war nevertheless allowed Siam later to press for revision of the unequal treaties with the Western powers. In 1924 he issued a law of succession, which has ever since governed the transfer of the throne in the Chakri dynasty.

Vajiravudh wrote a great deal: poems, novels, short stories, newspaper articles and plays, the number of which varies in the sources from sixty to a hundred and more. For the khon theatre he adapted the Ramayana, wrote the first prose comedies in Thai drama, and created the genre of spoken theatre, lakhon phut. He translated “The Merchant of Venice”, “As You Like It” and “Romeo and Juliet” into Thai, and in other adaptations turned to Molière and Kalidasa. He wrote the play “The Hearts of a Warrior” to urge young men to join the Wild Tigers. He introduced the detective story into Thai literature and invented a Siamese detective, Nai Thong-In. In 1918, next to Dusit Palace, appeared Dusit Thani, a miniature city with elections, a parliament and a press, in which the king himself was one of the “citizens”; many saw in it one more theatrical conceit. Lumphini Park, conceived as an exhibition ground on royal land, Vajiravudh gave to the public at his own expense.

The end of the reign came amid a financial crisis: a loan had to be taken from Britain, officials were dismissed, and in 1925 the Nakhon Si Thammarat Regiment, the king's personal guard, was disbanded and provinces were merged. The king died on 25 November 1925 in Bangkok. Two hours before his death his only daughter, Princess Bejaratana Rajasuda, was born; her father saw her once, and her name was given by his successor, the king's brother Prajadhipok.