| |
Noknoi
|
Bros,
I know my Siamese history very well and all about the large quantity of farangs in Ayuthaya, esp in the 17th Century. I will be doing a living history program in Udon Thani in the summer. I am trying to find evidence of Europeans trading with Siam in the 18th Century. Does anyone know any history about this?
Thanx
Rice
|
Bangkok Girls : Meet Attractive Thai Girls
Posted on: 9:41 am on Jan. 27, 2005
|
|
sanook269
|
Here is a start. Maybe it can lead you elsewhere:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54/072.html
|
Bangkok Women : Meet Sensual Bangkok Women
Posted on: 11:42 am on Jan. 27, 2005
|
|
Noknoi
|
Some good ideas cum to mind here:
The Chinese voyager Ma Huan, writing in 1433, records that in Siam:
If a married woman is very intimate with one of our men from China, wine and food are provided, and they drink and sit and sleep together. The husband is quite calm and takes no exception to it; indeed, he says "My wife is beautiful, and the man from China is delighted with her".
Despite Ma's whimsical style, readers should be assured that this is not, and never has been, a traditional Thai custom. While there are no direct indications that the "men of China" paid for the privilege, one can fairly assume that this is an early record of prostitution (and of procurers) in Thailand.
When, some 200 years later, European vessels began regularly to visit Siam, prostitution certainly existed. A Dutchman called Van Neck, who visited Pattani in 1604, reports that "when foreigners come there from other lands to do their business... men come and ask them whether they do not desire a woman" -- an approach that any single male who has landed at Bangkok's Don Muang International Airport will instantly recognise. Another Dutchman, Gisbert Heeck, referring to the conditions in which the VOC staff lived at Ayutthaya, the Siamese capital, in 1655, notes that:
Most of them had concubines or mistresses, in order (so they said) to avoid the common whores, and they maintained them with all necessities, buying or building houses for them... (though) they rarely refer to them other than as whores, sluts, trollops and the like, up to and including the director, for hardly anybody was free of this failing. Anybody who earned enough to keep such trollop had to have one, even if it meant they had not a penny to their name afterwards -- indeed, some were deep In debts, as I saw for myself.
Quoting further passages of this kind is really not necessary. The point is not that medieval Siam was to blame for having prostitutes -- London, Amsterdam, and indeed any port in Europe were undoubtedly much the same. Rather, what is significant is that Thai society has long had a tradition of prostitution, and it is both misleading and ultimately self-defeating to blame this exclusively on the West.
To bear this out from an early Thai source, we know that in the 1680s a particular Thai official was licensed by the state to run a monopoly of the prostitution business in Ayutthaya, using 600 women bought or enslaved for various offences. As Anthony Reid, a distinguished Australian scholar of Southeast Asian history has indicated, this appears to have been the origin of Thai tradition of deriving significant state revenue from prostitution. By the mid-19th century -- still well over 100 years before the US involvement in Vietnam -- Bangkok's extensive prostitution industry was centred on the Chinese district of Sampeng Lane, where green lights instead of the usual red signalled houses of ill repute.
|
Thai Girls : Meet Sexy Thai Girls
Posted on: 1:42 am on Jan. 28, 2005
|
|
DaffyDuck
|
This is pretty cool!
Look forward to meeting you one of these days...
*Quack*
|
Bangkok Girls : Meet Sexy Bangkok Girls
Posted on: 2:42 am on Jan. 28, 2005
|
|
yodsaker
|
Interesting, indeed.
The part I found most fascinating was about the Chinese account of the men seemingly pimping out their wives to foreigners.
Plus ca change, c'est toujours la meme chose.
Look f'ward to hearing more from your researches noknoi.
Thanks.
|
Bangkok Girls : Meet Attractive Thai Girls
Posted on: 12:41 pm on Jan. 28, 2005
|
|
Noknoi
|
Yes, and that is why EVA, China Air, Air China, and Cathay Pacific keep offering discounts to fly to China.
Did you the fortune cookie was invented by a Chinese cookie maker in Bangkok in 1869.
http://www.siamnookiecookie.com
Rice
|
Bangkok Women : Meet Beautiful Thai Girls
Posted on: 9:39 pm on Jan. 30, 2005
|
|
| |
|
