Land of Smiles
Land of Smiles: Southeast Asia In Context
Prayut Sajakul, Years of Lead: Southeast Asia in the Great Asian War. Seville: Obelisco Press, 1981 (Free excerpt, 25 pages remaining)
Before we start talking about the Great Asian War and its effects on the Southeast Asian psyche— and mine, since I somehow survived it— it’s important to remember that the Great European War, though less destructive by an order of magnitude, was itself a watershed moment for my country and its neighbors.
Don’t believe me? Think about what Southeast Asia was before the 20th century came knocking: a patchwork of protectorates, economically and politically dependent on Paris and Delhi. If you were Ayutthayan, Lanxangese, or Vietnamese, you could probably secure an education in the Prey Nokor Polytechnic; if you were Burmese, you turned to the University of Dhaka. After you played the good student for a couple of years, you came back and helped staff the civil service, oversee an economic enterprise, or command a military unit— in other words, you became a finger joint on the hand with which your imperialist chessmaster moved pieces around the board. Of course, you’d only have access to such opportunities if you were rich or well-connected. Most Southeast Asians weren’t, and so remained ignorant of modern ideologies and modern warfare until such forces kicked down their door and raided the pantry. And kick down the door they did, for almost no country’s territory avoided occupation by some enemy or another over the course of the war.
Ayutthaya, Lan Xang, and Vietnam participated in the Great European War from its beginning in March 1911, and the Mughals dragged in Burma around half a year later. By February 1912, the Baltic-Adriatics had occupied Ayutthaya’s Tenasserim region, and found that the locals spoke strange languages like Karen but also some familiar ones like Mon and Burmese. The French-assisted “Summer Offensive” of 1912 cut this tearful reunion short, as Ayutthaya recaptured its lost territory and briefly conquered the Burmese province of Zinme [1], which had been an independent Northern Thai kingdom in medieval times. The Summer Offensive was a commendable effort, to be sure— but it was also the high-water mark of Entente success.
The first king to end up in serious trouble as the defeats really piled up was Sanphet X of Ayutthaya. His brother Paramet, who had served as the Ayutthayan viceroy in Zinme until the recapture of that province by Indian-Burmese forces in the summer of 1913, resurfaced in the BAC-occupied town of Sukhothai— except now the man styled himself as Rama I, and was backed by the aforementioned Indian-Burmese forces and a native-Ayutthayan army of rebels, defectors, prisoners-of-war, and assorted adventurers. Anyone Sanphet sent to stop the steady loss of his lands was now likely to defect to Rama, who promised a quick end to the war and a comprehensive re-evaluation of the kingdom’s relationship with the French. As Lopburi fell to the invaders, Sanphet’s government fled to the east. From its new headquarters in Surin, it watched Rama move into Ayutthaya’s royal palace on October 21, 1914. Lan Xang and Vietnam fared little better— within months of its entry into the war, China occupied both countries’ capitals at Luang Prabang and Dong Kinh [2]. Over the course of 1914, the Imperial Army of the Great Shun left the rest of Lan Xang to the Indians and pursued Vietnam’s fleeing emperor Mac Tri Lap all the way to the gates of Prey Nokor.
The Paris Peace Conference resolved things pretty easily for Vietnam, which emerged from French protection (and, depending on who you ask, into Chinese vassalage) as a de jure sovereign Empire under the Mac dynasty. For everyone else, though, interesting times had only just begun. In March 1915, Rama’s government had offered Sanphet the chance to talk. Rama had power, but lacked legitimacy. Sanphet wanted his throne back, but lacked the power to retake it. The solution, Rama’s envoys suggested, was for Sanphet to return to his post as king, and allow Rama to lead Ayutthaya’s National Diet as the nation’s new Chancellor. Sanphet’s advisors liked the plan more than they let on, but replied that they would not support it unless the Chancellor limited himself to only two terms. It came to be that the Paris Peace Conference, shortly after recognizing Rama I as the legitimate representative of the fully sovereign Ayutthayan nation, found that Rama had become Paramet once more. Taking the surname of Raengtawan (แรงตะวัน, “Ardent Sun”), he rolled up his sleeves and started tearing down centuries of royalist absolutism.
By 1916, the government of Setthathirath VII, the King of Lan Xang, governed only the province of Champasak. Around three armies (Indian, Chinese, French-Lanxangese) and countless community self-defense militias governed the ruins of a kingdom that had never been particularly stable in the first place. As the armies of Setthathirath marched northward through districts and provinces left to their own devices by the hastily withdrawing Indians, they tried to integrate the armed groups that could be reasoned with and subdue those with criminal or Republican inclinations. Both options proved expensive and difficult, and the date of French withdrawal from Lan Xang was postponed further and further. Independent in theory but heavily indebted in practice, Lan Xang was destined for tough times. Its prospects looked up after the full reunification of the country in 1918 but worsened dramatically when…
[1] Lan Na.
[2] Hanoi.
***
Esteemed brothers and sisters, let me tell you a story.
After the Great War and its associated uncertainties ended, my family decided to move. For the first ten years of my life, I’d lived in a myo [1] not too far from Kyaukse, but now we were moving to the river delta lands of the south, within a stone’s throw of Yangon. What did we hope to find there? Well, less people, for one. Upper Burma was and is a crowded place— what did the last census say, almost half of the population lives in the dry zone?— and that meant rents were going up. A century ago, a thugyi wouldn’t get value out of his tenants through rent, he’d get it through interest on the loans that those tenants invariably took out in order to pay for seed for the planting season, or new tools, or a marriage or funeral. Simpler times, as you can imagine.
We, we loaded up the cart and followed the Indian-built wartime infrastructure— newly paved roads, sturdy bridges, and the like— all the way to our new home, and found an unpleasant surprise. In our old myo, the thugyi took around 30% of our crop as rent payment. In this new one, the rent payment had gone up from 50% to 70% during the time that we’d been traveling. Well, we couldn’t very well lug all of our possessions and hopes back to Kyaukse, could we? We decided to accept the increased rents— after all, the land around Yangon is productive. My father explained it to me as giving away a bigger piece of a bigger cake. At the end of the day, it’s possible to end up with more cake then if you’d given away a smaller piece of a smaller cake. That was the best that we, as tenants, could hope for.
For a number of reasons— rent among them— we left the delta behind after five years. We didn’t go back to Kyaukse either, we were too poor to get our old land back. Without two silver pieces to rub together, we found lodgings in the homes of some relatives here in Mandalay and started to rebuild our lives.
Now, the word thugyi is probably more familiar to you as “chief” or “landlord,” and the thugyi are certainly both of things. But the word itself means “big man,” and this is the reason why they could jack up rents for us and other families of the sinyètha (“commoners”) and kappa (“outsiders, migrants”), just as he could for the families who’d worked his family’s land for centuries. But this societal “bigness” only explains the landlord’s ability to raise the rents if he so chose. The reason why he did it, my father soon learned, was because the landlord had gotten into debt with some Bengali bankers. And all of a sudden, the thugyi was a small man indeed. Like any of us, he feared his creditors. But why did he fear them? What would happen if he didn’t pay his debts? Well, then the royal court would find out. But why did the royal court care? Because it needed to present an image to financial stability to the world. It needed to keep up its credit rating in order to keep sourcing foreign loans for palaces and occasionally-helpful public works projects. But, going back to the thugyi, why did the court’s opinion matter to him at all? It mattered because the court had an army bigger than his community police force, and that army grew more powerful every day by hiring foreign officers and buying foreign-made arms. There were plenty of both lying around after the Great European War wound down, and both were paid for with the tolls and fees that the court charged people for using the infrastructure that the Indians left behind, and that the court eagerly nationalized after the 1917 revolution brought the Gurkani dynasty down.
My time in the river delta was my first glimpse at a great neo-feudal web of force and obligation. National elites sat atop regional elites, who in turn sat atop everyone else. It was this web, this tower, that gave the old Kingdom its structure. Versions of it tie together all states, for there is ultimately no variety of state institution other than the extractive kind. Extraction was built into the very structure of the society in which I was born, and extraction is accomplished through force. Force, however, is expensive. What pays for force? Why, only extraction of the surplus value of human lives and livelihoods.
And so the wheel turns on and on, like some sad parody of the Dharmachakra.
The solution, I realized over the course of my studies, was for the state as we knew it then to change, and change drastically. The trick was to move from the hierarchy that allows people to ruin others’ lives to stave off the ruin of their own, and towards a system that emphasized individual responsibility and a civic spirit. And lucky for me, I was hardly alone in this realization. I existed within a vast tradition of critique that preceded me, that directed me and my life’s work, and that may very well succeed me.
If you are wondering why I started the National Union of Peasants and Emancipated Slaves in 1930, then that is the reason. It it also what led me to oversee the transformation of the Union from a Mandalay study circle to a national movement. It led me to allies, like Sao Hso Hom over there. Head of the Shan Regional Syndicate! Everyone, please, give him your applause after I’m done prattling here. Without him, I would be Chairman of only half the country.
The promise of the Union of Burmese Communities, which has been the world’s only truly Anarchist state for ten years at this point, is simple: When you load up your cart and leave behind everything you’ve known, you will be heading somewhere better than the place that you left…
(Editor’s Note: Htet Aung was Chairman of the Union of Burmese Communities from 1939 to 1952. Among Anarchists— for the man’s Unitarianism was nominal at best— his stature and fame make even Kubilay seem insignificant. The theories and practice of the Burmese state became famous as they were rediscovered after the end of the Great Asian War, and still remain influential in minority-rights and national liberation movements around the world. Shirts with his face on them can be found in places from the Maya regions of Centrovespucia to downtown Dakar, and it is safe to say that he has become an icon of progressivism in general.
Three years after this speech, Htet Aung was dead. Sao Hso Hom, the influential former leader of the Revolution in the Shan lands and Zinme, engineered Htet Aung’s overthrow with the collaboration of troops led by Saikat Chaudhuri, the General-Overseer dispatched from the UIS. Forming an alliance with the “statist” wing of the Burmese Unitarian Party (an unlikely alliance, considering that he was a Shan and the statists tended to be Bamar supremacists), Sao Hso Hom led a reluctant country headlong into the Great Asian War.)
***
Archived broadcast of the Changpuek Serial, which styled itself as “the number one Sengupta serial on what’s new and old in Ayutthaya City” during its heyday in the Forties and early Fifties. This broadcast is an interview between Amara Atsawanon, the hostess of the serial, and Sarit Pramot, the founder and owner of the Suwannaphum Casino.
PRAMOT: ...and then the poor soul retched all over the roulette table! Absolutely appalling and very costly, but good practice for our sanitation team.
ATSAWANON: That’s… an interesting look into the perils of running a business. Now, we did ask you beforehand if you were fine with talking about politics. We trust that you’re still willing to offer to answer some questions about the upcoming Diet elections?
PRAMOT: Of course! I’d have brought it up myself if you didn’t let me. Politics is very important to me, as a man of business and a son of Ayutthaya.
ATSAWANON: Is that so? Tell us more.
PRAMOT: With pleasure. Here’s the thing— you’re around twenty-five, right? Twenty eight, maybe? Well, I’ve been voting for the Progressives for over thirty years and I’ve never regretted it. Well, almost never. That scandal that brought down Paramet Raengtawan in the ‘20s… nasty stuff. Gambling with your pocket change is one thing, but the national treasury? Whatever else the man did for the country, that was a dunderhead move. He probably got to thinking that he’d be better off if he didn’t let his brother have his crown back, eh? Either way, the Progressives sure bounced back from that mess. They found a new leader, started delivering on their campaign promises, and haven’t let down democracy since— and they’ve been almost too kind to commerce. Lowering taxes, investing in education, easing travel restrictions and visa requirements for foreign talent— the works.
ATSAWANON: The Protectionists have tried to show that they’re serious about economic growth as well—
PRAMOT: I’ll have to stop you right there. Hey, audience— I might make you a little angry, but the Protectionists are liars. King’s men, to a man. They followed Sanphet— not the current one, I mean Sanphet X— to Surin, and followed him right back to Ayutthaya after they realized they wouldn't be shot at anymore. Since then, they’ve been trying to bring back the little Buddhist, royalist, absolutist heaven that apparently existed before Raengtawan started trying to modernize the country. Hmph! If such a heaven ever existed, I never saw it. Yes, the Protectionists will try telling you that they love the common folk, unlike those “elitist urbanites” in the Progressive Party. Well, the common folk love employment, and there’s only one party that will give you that. And no, it isn’t the damn Boys In Blue. The fact that I even have to clarify that is frightening, but that’s the way things are now, isn’t it?
ATSAWANON: It’s true that more and more people are feeling like the two main parties are faces of the same elite, and turning to alternate options. The Unitarians in particular have found increasing support among working-class immigrants. Has this led to tensions in your business? Labor agitation, for instance?
PRAMOT: Not really. First of all, I pay my employees a fair wage. Even the sanitation team members earn enough to come home to a proper meal. Second, I don’t just hire Burmese and Khmers, even if the Khmers are definitely worth hiring. All the refugees from the revolution there speak French. Some are even trained as waitresses and hostesses, and hold themselves up to French standards! The foreign customers love it, and so do the native sons— and daughters, I suppose. Ah, I’m going off topic. The point is, I don’t just hire our neighbors. I’ve also got Indians keeping the books for me. Tamils and Punjabis mostly. A lot of talent and education in those heads, and very little love for Unitarian nonsense. The Punjabis, especially— a lot of them ran to Afghanistan and Persia after the revolution in India, and then they had to run again after those places got invaded. The government knows what I’m talking about— they recruit the Indians too.
ATSAWANON: I’m glad to hear that— especially the part about paying a fair wage. I won’t name names, but there’s plenty of hardhearted employers who might take your advice to heart. Also, I’m sorry to inform you that we’re almost out of time. Any closing remarks?
PRAMOT: Sure. I guess what I’d like to leave with is that I’m hopeful about this country, I really am. As passionate as I am about the elections, somehow I get the sense that things will be alright in the end, even if the Protectionists take the whole Diet. Who’s their party leader now, Kit Kongsangchai? I don’t agree with him, but he seems like a real upstanding guy, a man of character...
***
Albert Maignan, “Green Muse” (1895). A poet succumbs to the influence of absinthe.
Why opium? Because it fills a niche, and always has.
In the 1500s, the kingdom of Pegu decided to clean house. It reformed its sangha, or Buddhist monastic community, by ensuring that every monk could trace his educational lineage to the old religious masters of Ceylon. It sought to encourage piety in the general population as well by cracking down on social ills. In time, the Burmese kingdom of Ava, to Pegu’s north, was swept up in this revivalist tide, and its king then banned the consumption of alcohol. Seeking substitutes, parts of the population turned to pickled nuts, betel leaves, and opium.
A large portion of Southeast Asia’s population is composed of mountains and hills, upon which rice cannot grow. Some of the locals made do, using wet-rice agriculture to exploit the soils of the valleys between the range, but they never achieved the productivity of the lowland river plains. While the river valleys— the Irrawaddy in Burma, the Chao Phraya in Ayutthaya, the Red River in Vietnam, the Mekong in the Khmer lands— became national and imperial core regions, the highlands and their people remained peripheral, like Lan Xang, or else never gave rise to permanent and independent kingdoms. (One may look to the fate of Zinme and the Shan principalities to verify this for oneself.) However, the tribes of the hills were never quite isolated from the world. They conducted trade with each other, of course. And though they did not share the cultures of the lowland peoples, they learned their languages and interacted with them as well. Coming down from the mountains or waiting for lowland peddlers to make their way up, they bought all the necessities of life, and even luxuries like jewelry, rifles, and aluminum cookware. How did they achieve this quiet prosperity? Poppies bloom in altitudes above 900 meters above sea level. They prefer climates that are generally warm, like Southeast Asia’s, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find them in jungles. It is in dry and comparatively cool climates, like those of the mountains, where the red and white petals of poppies are most likely to fall away and reveal a seed pod filled with milky sap.
Opium and its derivatives are noted for intense euphorising properties. The doctors of the early modern era freely prescribed it as a painkiller, even administering it to women in childbirth. Around the beginning of the 1800s, physicians caught onto the fact that the stuff was dangerously addictive, and switched to two derivatives of opium sap: codeine and morphine. Codeine proved useful for dealing with respiratory illnesses [1], and morphine assumed the mantle of the West’s favorite painkiller. However, as patients who built up morphine tolerances soon discovered, both could be addictive.
In 1874, the research and development department of France’s Lys Pharmaceuticals tossed morphine and acetic anhydride into a cooking stove. After several hours, they created an acetylated form of morphine, which the head of the department dubbed “efficin” [2]. Finally, the medical community believed that it had found the wonder drug. Efficin appeared to be the best opiate yet. It was more effective than codeine in combating coughs and colds, and bested morphine as an analgesic drug. By the 1890s, however, clinical studies had started to show that efficin also had “habit-forming effects,” but by that point there were few alternatives to it. And so it came to be that during the Great European War, efficin-based medications with increasingly high concentrations of the active ingredient saw widespread use on the battlefield. In a sense, the war was the world’s largest clinical trial, and its results were even more conclusive than those of the studies done in the 1890s. Once reports surfaced of former soldiers using hypodermic needles to take in efficin intravenously, governments started to crack down on the drug. Over the course of the 1920s, most of the West outlawed the manufacture and sale of efficin. Prominent Asian countries like China followed suit in the 1930s, but by that time it was already too late. The secret to making the drug was well out of Lys Pharmaceuticals’s bag.
A graph of efficin seizures in Germania. Note the initial drop in seizures as the legal market dissolves, and the subsequent recovery as the illegal market asserts itself.
[1] This is why it’s in cough syrup.
[2] Codeine and morphine have Greek etymologies, but “heroin” is a brand name with a German etymology. Since Bayer isn’t the company that popularized heroin in TTL, I think there’s basis for giving it a different name. I made up “efficin” after learning that “efficace” means “effective” in French.
***
The Royal Palace in Luang Prabang, 1936.
King Visoun is not here today, Sisavath noted. His stomach illness must be more severe than we thought. Unaccompanied by any royal presence, Regent Armand Jonquet was making his way down the hallway to his own office, surrounded by aides and dignitaries. The whole entourage had just left the chambers of the Privy Council and, once inside Jonquet’s office, would apply the king’s seal to the treaty that placed Lan Xang within the East Asian Security Association. All the while, Sisavath would guard the door.
Not that assassination was really a concern anymore. It was, once. In the terrible summer of 1923, when the old King Setthathirath died of a stroke and the carefully-rebuilt country shattered again, almost anything seemed possible. His son and successor Visoun II had only been one year old at the time, and it fell to Setthathirath’s old advisors and allies to govern in his place. To put it simply, they failed. In a year’s time, around half of them were dead, assassinated by the hired killers of the Republican insurrectionists in Vientiane. The remaining half learned to hire some killers of their own. Jonquet had been one of them.
General Thierry Joxe nearly slipped on the teakwood floor, and the Regent’s hand shot out to catch him. Once it become clear that the old man was all right, the entourage continued on, their relieved laughter led by the General himself. Even Sisavath broke protocol with a quiet smile. Once the General had led not laughter, but armies, and the Kingdom loved him for it. Had Joxe been younger and possessed of a more diplomatic personality, he might have had Jonquet’s job. Not that Joxe complained much— he wanted very little part of the stress that came with finding contractors for provincial irrigation schemes or convincing the Chinese to run power lines between Kunming and Luang Prabang.
Sisavath put his hand on the teakwood door’s silver-plated handles, preparing to pull it back. As he turned back to the group, he found himself at eye level with the Regent, who motioned silently toward the door.
It was 1926, and we were in Xiangkhouang Province.
“Gents, I’m going to go hunting,” Major Jonquet explained. “This province is around pacified anyways, I think that the Republicans have already run. They’re in the habit of doing that, now that victory’s no longer certain. Don’t look for me until sundown. And you, come with me.”
“Me?” I asked. I’d only just joined the royal army, and didn’t want to get singled out for anything this early.
“Yes, you. Bring your gun, obviously. We’re heading to the Nam Et river.”
Some time later, we were in the thick of the hills, with trees obscuring everything more than five feet away. Our sight thus impaired, we fell back on our hearing. The trumpeting blasts of a hornbill echoed all around. Wild cats made rustling noises as they padded around, and otters broke the surface of the water as they plied the streams for fish.
“What’s your name?” Jonquet finally asked.
“Sisavath, sir.”
“I’ll hear no more ‘sirs’ from you, Sisavath. I’m no English knight. Plus, I’m only two years older than you at most.”
“I’m twenty-seven years old.”
“Three years, then. ‘Armand’ will suffice.”
We finally found the stream that the otters had been hunting in, and decided to follow the current to the river.
“What will you do when this country is at peace again, Sisavath?”
“Probably go back to my family’s land. They don’t need me there— my brothers can do all the work between themselves, and I send my salary home to make things easier— but I’m not sure where else I’d go.”
“That’s a depressing kind of clarity. But it’s clarity, which is more than I ever had after I came back from the Netherlands. You’ve probably never been to the Netherlands, but… it’s this delightful little country, you see, flat as a plate. Every building looks like some storybook illustrator drafted its plans—”
“—and you helped put it to the torch,” I finished.
Armand blinked. “How right you are. Sometimes I forget that the war paid a visit to this continent too. But like you said, I didn’t enjoy my time in the Netherlands. And after living like that for four years, your roots start to rot through. Sometimes your roots are strong enough for you to find some stability, maybe start living normally again. Sometimes they snap, and you’re flying away like a sapling in a storm.”
I thought about that. My uncle Phouthone had said something similar, but in the end he’d found his way back to the family lands. His right arm, though, had stayed buried in Savannakhet.
“After the war, I floated around Paris for a bit. Some of my friends went into the bodyguard business, making sure some industrialist or politician didn’t get bumped off by a rival. I didn’t try it. There wasn’t anyone I really wanted to guard. After a while, your king’s boys found me in my apartment, I’d been unemployed for around eleven months, and they asked if I wanted to take a little trip. They’d tracked me down through one of my old trenchmates.”
“Colonel Joxe?” I asked, not really expecting to be right.
“The same. To be honest, I felt a little offended that they’d found him through me. I never even liked the man that much.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t live the kind of lifestyle that he’d approve of. You’re more likely to find me having fun at a cabaret than flipping through a catechism. The less money I’ve got, the more likely I am to spend it on messing around with a girl.”
“I’m not familiar with the kind of lifestyle you’re describing, but that doesn’t sound very…”
“Rational? Yeah, it wasn’t. I never got much out of it either. Sure, it was fun for a little. For five hours, I could take the tram with a girl or walk around the city and feel relaxed, feel confident. Then the sixth hour would ruin it all, and make me wish I’d never bothered. Sisavath, do you think about girls much?”
“Well, marriage isn’t solely my decision, there’s other factors involved. But even with that… no, I can’t say I do.”
Armand snorted. “I refuse to believe that. You seem like a pretty thoughtful person. I doubt there’s anything that you haven’t considered to some extent.”
“You think too highly of someone you barely even know, Armand.”
“Nonsense! Why, I—”
The leopard crossed into a clearing around ten feet in front of us. We stopped dead in our tracks as it circled around, sniffing at the grass while opening and closing its great jaw. Even the hornbills seemed to hold their tongues as the cat sat on its haunches, and finally turned to look at us with its great grey eyes. At the sound of a rustle from farther ahead, it bounded off.
Armand peered at me. “I thought you’d shoot it.”
“I thought you would,” I replied.
And suddenly, as if we were completely alone, we gave ourselves over to laughter.
It was 1936, and the signatories-to-be of the EASA accession treaty filed past Sisavath and into the office. If the Regent remembered the day in Xiangkhouang, or the days and nights that followed, he gave no sign.
***
A map of the four occupation zones of Thailand.
The wartime governance of Southeast Asia was generally carried out through a system of General-Overseers in each country, who assumed control over the country’s armed forces, an occupation force of Indian units, and military infrastructure but didn’t interfere much with the civil service and bureaucracies. I say “generally” to point out the case of Ayutthaya was… anomalous. Almost all of Ayutthaya’s neighbors had some manner of grievance with it, typically concerning the proper placement of borders. These grievances were quite old— in the 1700s, the Burmese king had marched against Ayutthaya [1] with a massive army of elephants and musketeers. After making a few minor conquests, however, the royal host was forced to turn west and face Imperial India, which sought to turn Burma into a protectorate. To appease these neighbors— many of whom were already Unitarian states— the Unified Indian State relieved Ayutthaya of almost half its territory.
If one actually believed that Htain Lin had any role whatsoever in running the Provisional Government that he was the nominal Chairman of, one might have asked him if he’d ever seen a map. To be sure, the “Provisional Government of Greater Tenasserim” did include the Tenasserim coast, and the Burmese-plurality regions to the west and north of it. Its capital was Dawei, the “Little Mandalay” of Ayutthayan travelogues. Gangs of Bamar nationalists and more disciplined military police from Burma kept order in the towns and on the roads, and ensured that every tot found his or her way to the new Burmese-language schools. And yet the governors of Tenasserim, like children who cannot color within the lines, extended their control well past the zones of traditional Burmese settlement and immigration, and took in several provinces with outright Ayutthayan majorities.
The Mekong Union’s occupation zone in the east faced similar problems. Chairman Chan Sim, ever the Khmer nationalist, had made his acceptance of a General-Overseer in his country contingent on an Indian promise to let Prey Nokor annex some Ayutthayan land. Lucky for Chan Sim, this promise didn’t prove too problematic for the Indians— they might simply have overthrown him otherwise. In the end, the Mekong Union got its occupation zone. It included the great temples at Angkor and Preah Vihear— whose position within Ayutthayan borders had been a serious annoyance for Khmer nationalists since before the French colonization— and the Khmer-majority province of Battambang. However, the final occupation zone extended from Champasak in the northeast to Chanthaburi in the southwest. It even included Surin, the provisional capital of Sanphet X’s government during Paramet Raengtawan’s usurpation of the throne.
Ayutthaya had never been particularly forgiving to its minorities. Regardless of which party had a majority in the Diet, the government generally pursued an assimilationist policy toward minorities that made light of their historic claims to their lands while overestimating the proportion of the minority population constituted by recent immigrants. Ayutthayans forgot, and still like to forget, that they themselves are the descendants of Tai conquerors who arrived in the region in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This has led some Unitarian apologists to argue that the Burmese and Khmer collaboration with the Indians during the Great Asian War was justified. What these apologists like to ignore, though, is that both occupation zones were Ayutthayan-plurality. What to do with all those Ayutthayans? What to do with me, the little twelve-year-old from Chanthaburi?
The answer, as it always is with Unitarians, was de-nationalization.
My Khmer name is Samnang Soun. I forgot what the last name means, but the first name means “lucky.” It wasn't all bad, and neither was the occupation at first. The secondary school that the occupiers set up was a great deal better than the one I would have otherwise gone to. We learned about engineering and science through hands-on projects. I made a Dainamese friend, Tiến Đại. The occupiers had granted his family some land on the outskirts of the town. It was only after everything was over, though, that I started to think about what I’d gone through. I had a facility for acquiring languages, so I avoided the savage beatings that speaking Ayutthayan within earshot of the wrong guardsman could earn you. The temple my parents made offerings to was shut down, so we had to travel around twenty miles to find one that was still open. Upon walking inside, we found an enormous portrait of the Supreme Patriarch of Khmer Buddhism on the wall, flanked by two guards watching for vandals and rebels hoping to use the temple as a refuge from the law. My school’s engineering projects, I later learned, were part of a large wartime operation known simply as the “Labor Mobilization Project.” The aim was to create a workforce that could assemble guns and repair vehicles for armies that were millions strong. I and my classmates were to be part of that workforce, and we actually did see some service toward the end of the war. And though I still love Tiến Đại and write to him when I can, we both know what his family was doing out in Chanthaburi. To avoid the sentiment that the occupation zone was solely a Khmer venture, Chan Sim decided to encourage Dainamese migration to the zone as a way of giving that restive minority a stake in his megalomaniacal project.
In hindsight, I count myself lucky that I did not live in what remained of my country. The Union of Ayutthaya, assembled from the corpse of the interwar Kingdom, was the location of some of the most savage repression in all of wartime Southeast Asia. The coalition of “intellectuals,” and thugs who governed the country in the Indians’ name presided over a regime of force— forced confessions, forced labor, forced disappearances. From the darkest of places, though, shone the brightest of lights. The Khmers didn’t like us looking at Ayutthayan-language texts, but they couldn’t stop us from practically memorizing the Manifesto of the Army of the Ayutthayan Nation, which promised, over the course of some ten bullet-pointed clauses, to make things right again. The manifesto was signed with a number of names, but the biggest one was that of Thaksin Thammasak. We heard a lot of that name over the course of 1957 and 1958. Some said he’d raided an Indian weapons arsenal in Lopburi, and followed it up with an ambush of an Indian brigade near Nakhon Ratchasima. Others said that he’d captured Ayutthaya City itself after defeating an entire army with the power of Muay Thai. We didn’t believe those others, but we understood their general sentiment.
It’s important to remember that the rebel’s name, Thammasak (ธรรมศักดิ์), was a corruption of Dhammasakti, a Pali phrase. It means “righteous strength.” Symbolically speaking, it was a perfect name, and one we used to say with such reverence...
[1] In OTL, this campaign continued on, and ended the Ayutthayan Kingdom.
***
A village in Phetchabun Province, Ayutthaya, December 1956
The sun punished Ramsay’s unprotected head as he made his way to the hovel at the end of the hamlet’s central (and only) dirt road. Next time, he assured himself, he’d buy one of those conical hats the locals wore.
And there most definitely will be a “next time,” Ramsay thought as the guard at the door pulled it back, and gave him a look at the four people inside. Two were guards like the one at the door. One was a man with long blond hair— Christ, it goes near down to his waist!— reclining in a rocking chair located near the right wall and angled toward to the door. The most impressive piece of furniture in the room was a large wooden desk, the color of milk chocolate, near the center of the back wall. A young, pale-faced Ayutthayan sat behind it.
Little Milkface seems to be the head of this operation, eh? Good, I like my kingpins young. More fun to talk to. And more gullible. Ramsay was an old hand in the alley guilds [1], and he knew how to deduce this sort of thing. The four bodyguards who accompanied him to Ayutthaya were all guildsmen too.
“Mr. Fremantle,” said the Ayutthayan as Ramsay and his bodyguards entered.
“The same,” Ramsay replied. “And I suppose that you’re Kaeng Som, though I doubt that’s your real name.”
“It’s something very dear to me. Over there in the chair is… well, we call him the Farang—”
“And you really shouldn’t,” the blond one butted in. He seemed in his late thirties and remarkably fit for that age, but somehow Ramsay didn’t feel comfortable dismissing him as hired muscle. “I’m Swedish, you all know I’m Swedish, and yet you call me ‘Frank’ all the same. Although I suppose the term is closer to ‘Frenchman’ nowadays…”
“That’s neither here nor there,” Kaeng Som laughed. “Over here, any man whose skin is white and whose hair isn’t black is a farang. Even you, Britannian.”
“Now there’s a thought to give my young Catholic wife nightmares,” Ramsay said sagely. “Good thing I have a younger Japanese wife as a backup. Now, to business. I’ve seen your assets already, your men showed me around earlier. I must say, I’m impressed with you, lad. Running an efficin refinery out in his wilderness while the biggest war in history rages around us… it’s a commendable effort, and I’ll commend it. I’ll also buy up your whole warehouse for seven thousand thalers a kilogram.”
Kaeng Som’s right eye twitched. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you. Care to repeat yourself?”
“Seven thousand. Remember, I’m wading through fire to come here, and I’ll have to wade through it again and again if I and my associates across the Pacific are to do regular business with you. All right, I’ll concede that it’s not as bad as all that. India has an army of literal millions. Do you think all of them are good little Unitarians, or that even the good little Unitarians wouldn’t want a stake in my business? I’ll find my way in and out just fine, and I’ll clear a path for your efficin as well. With all the duties I’ve taken upon myself, I ought to pay you even less. But I’m being generous here because I want to see your little enterprise grow. Consider it an investment.”
The Ayutthayan leaned forward, and his Swedish friend stopped rocking. “Mr. Fremantle, my parents came from a village near Lampang that’s been selling opium since before the Great European War. You see this desk? It's teak, imported from Burma. You think me a novice, but would a novice even live long enough to buy something like this? I know what kind of prices the colons in Indochina used to bargain for, and none of them were as low as seven thousand thalers per kilogram.”
Well, now it’s my bloody turn to be offended, Ramsay thought. “And where are those colons now? Probably breaking their backs on Chan Sim’s plantations, aren’t they? In case you haven’t noticed, the world’s changed since your nan hawked her poppies to amputee soldiers looking to turn a profit back home. Speaking of poppies, Southeast Asia isn’t the only place where you can find them. They also grow in a little country called East Turkey. I’ve heard my associates say you can by a kilo of product over there for five thousand.”
“If so, the Turks are idiots. In any case, Europe generally doesn’t recognize the existence of the East Turkish state. If the continent’s authorities— and I know as well as anyone else that they’re working together now— find out you’ve been flying to Southeast Asia and back, you can escape with an excuse or two. Say that you’re a Western Dragon, looking to take the fight to the Unitarians. If they catch you flying out of Gaziantep, with what excuse will you keep them away from your cargo hold?”
“At least the Turks actually have a state.” And now it’s my bloody turn to laugh, too. “At least they have a government capable of keeping law and order while the businessmen do their business and count their profits in the sanctity of their homes. I wonder when one of those will pop up in this forsaken country?”
A carefree grin spread across Kaeng Som’s face, throwing Ramsay off guard. “Is that your concern? Well, Mr. Fremantle, listen close, for I tell you true— I will have an Ayutthayan state for you, very soon. It will be recognized by the West, and it will be free to trade with all the world. If you still wish to invest in my ‘little enterprise,’ I’ll accept any offer above twelve thousand thalers. And I’d prefer that you pay it in weapons, not bills.”
[1] The “alley guilds” are Britannia’s bodies of organized crime. They grew out of bands of dislocated and disenfranchised Irish and Scots in London and York, who banded together with their poor English counterparts to protect themselves and embark in lucrative, if typically illegal, money-making ventures with similar organizations in other parts of the British Isles and the overseas colonies. Consider them a TTL Mafia, which has started to branch out after the collapse of the Britannian Empire and the steady opening-up of its various constituents to the world around them. The Oceanian alley guilds are perhaps the most political, and help collect taxes on behalf of the Stassen government.
***
A seaside resort in Hai Phong, 1957
Yusuf Hussain, the General-Overseer of Vietnam, sloshed his drink around in his glass. Cheap local rice wine, yes— but he didn’t seem to have the appetite for much else nowadays. As the knocks rang out on the door of his office— a predetermined sequence, changed every week— he called out his permission to enter, and regretted it just as quickly.
“Lieutenant General Sharma,” Yusuf greeted the visitor. Oh, my sweet darling Narayan, he thought. What madness sends you scuttling into my office on this otherwise fine day?
“General Hussain,” Narayan replied with a brusque salute. “Pardon my asking, but have you read my report?”
Oh, that’s what it is. To “democratize the military-feudal structure,” as old Nijasure put it, Lucknow had mandated all leaders of any unit larger than a platoon to send weekly reports to their higher-ups, which included information on what resources were available to the unit and suggestions on how to use them. For the most part, Yusuf liked reading these reports, but reading Narayan’s always made him pine for the Mughal rules of discipline— the ones that let a commanding officer take a cane to any subordinate who thought he could make intelligent suggestions to his natural betters. “Yes, Lieutenant General, I did read your report, and while doing so I chanced upon your intriguing suggestion to shut down all boat traffic along the Vietnamese coast, including that of fishing vessels.”
The anticipation practically coated Narayan’s face. “So, what did you think?”
He’s hopeless. “Lieutenant General, I spent almost the entirety of yesterday in negotiations with representatives from one of this country’s ultra-nationalist parties, which had once been quite influential in the National Assembly and still command respect from the population as a whole. In return for their cooperation with the war effort, I promised that I would look into granting them control of China’s Guangxi Province, which apparently belonged to some Vietnamese emperor or another a thousand years ago. The point is, we finally have an ally here. Now how do you propose I tell our new friends that they can have Guangxi, as long as they swear off a significant portion of their diet for an indefinite period of time?”
“You can tell them that many boats, including fishing vessels, have been apprehended while smuggling supplies of illegal contraband from the Gang of Seven,” Narayan replied, “some of which has already made its way to the upstarts holding out on Hainan. Others have been apprehended while carrying shipments of opiates from the pockets of resistance still remaining in Ayutthaya. Under such conditions, victory will not be swift. If this nationalist party truly loves their nation and desires its peace and prosperity, they will make whatever sacrifices necessary to ensure conditions amenable to a quick victory.”
“Narayan, let me ask you a question. Do you have eyes?”
Narayan was taken aback. “General?”
“Try poking around your face with your fingers. Don’t poke too hard, though, you’ll put them out—”
“I have eyes, General. They see you, seated at your desk.” A note of testiness had crept into Narayan’s voice.
“Excellent. Did they also see the docks that you must surely have passed by on your way here? Did they see the hulking cargo ships rusting away at port, or the unemployed dockworkers and sailors begging on the streets because they have no other occupation anymore? The shipless captains, whose former vessels are now manned by Indian crews and floating around Borneo? Did your eyes, on their periodic visits to Hanoi, see entire streets of banks closed down, and their former clerks setting up tents for their families on the lawn of the Stock Exchange? Narayan, this country wasn’t exactly the financial heart of Asia. t was more like the financial pancreas— a bit peripheral maybe, but still an important organ that benefited from its connections to larger systems. However noble our intentions, we have severed those links. After this war is over, it’s going to take a lot of blood and treasure to get this country back on its feet again, and the absolute least that we can do until then is not test their patience with—”
If Narayan was testy before, he was on the road to genuine anger now. “General Hussain, these smugglers will not deal with themselves. Some of them have been operating since before the Great European War, and they have only grown wilier in the decades since. They are no trifle, and if we give them leeway we will suffer for it.”
“I ask you, you ape-faced dotard, what do you call it when the Viets stick their bamboo spears up your rear while the Momos [1] tear down your front lines? I don’t consider that ‘amenable to a quick victory,’ or any other kind of victory the military academy ever taught me about.”
Narayan’s face was a tandoor— stone outside, fire within. “I see that you are not currently in the mood to discuss matters any further. I will consult with my colleagues, and we will return in a few days with a revised draft of my plan that takes your criticisms into consideration.”
Yusuf sighed. “My ancestors were jihadis and ghazis, Lieutenant General, and even they may not have been as hungry to subjugate and conquer as you... or those associates that you’ve so kindly mentioned. Now leave me, please, and shut the door on your way out.”
Narayan complied with the request. At least he still has the capacity to do that, the mad dog. Or “dogs,” rather, Yusuf corrected himself. Narayan had a whole pack of them. He might have roped the other Lieutenant Generals into his scheme. Perhaps even all of them.
Yusuf had met Narayan’s type before in the Academy. Bull-headed men whose blood ran blue. They brown-nosed their way to the top and stayed there by forging connections— talent, or even competence, were purely optional. Narayan himself had never been that threatening— he was just a noisy fool, that was all— but with friends behind him to egg him on…
They will tear me apart to achieve their goal. No wonder he “saw me seated at my desk”, he was probably wondering how to get my uniform re-fitted for that runty frame of his. Well, good luck to you, Narayan Sharma. I hope you don’t regret whatever you’re about to do.
The bottle of rice wine was empty. Yusuf flung it at the door.
[1] A momo is a kind of dumpling from Tibet and Nepal. The term is here used as a slur for Chinese people.
***
Archived broadcast of the Hidalgo Digest, a world news program which aired on Visiones, the national television network of Spain, between 1949 and 1972.
[Intro theme plays, and on-screen text reads: THE WAR IN ASIA, FEBRUARY 7 ‘57. Text fades to reveal a worm’s-eye view of a burning jungle, which then pans to a view of three Indian planes flying overhead.]
NARRATOR: The war in Asia, which has raged since the Ayutthaya Crisis of 1956, has promised and delivered worse atrocities than any known in the history of mankind. Our intrepid reporters bring ill tidings from the provisional Nusantaran capital of Surabaya, in which they and the various Sultans of the archipelago now reside in order to escape the Acehi-Indian air and naval raids on Banten and the stalwarts who have stayed behind to help defend it.
[The video switches to one of a demolished mosque. Men in white cart away rubble.]
NARRATOR: The riots in Malaya, which we reported on during our previous broadcast, recently took a turn for the worse. The Indian occupiers, upon discovering a stockpile of weapons in a mosque in the city of Klang, have cracked down on religious practice throughout western Malaya. An initial report of mass executions of Islamic imams could not be corroborated, as the only source for that particular report was a Malayan fisherman who washed up on the northern coast of Java, dehydrated and starving. Though he has since been nourished back to physical health, his ordeal has left him with a tenuous grasp on his mental faculties.
[The video switches to one of Armand Jonquet surveying a military parade.]
NARRATOR: The Sengupta channels set up by the Indian Army throughout the occupied territories of Southeast Asia have declared that Armand Jonquet, the Regent of the Kingdom of Lan Xang, was killed on January 31 near the border with China. The “White Rajah” of European and Asian media fame had waged a campaign of resistance in the thick jungles of his adopted country ever since the first Indian encroachments on its soil. King Visoun II, speaking on behalf of the Government-in-Exile of Lan Xang, denies the reports but with the added corollary that “if these stories are proven true, then our country has undergone a profound loss. Though of foreign extraction, he was ever a soldier of Lan Xang, and I will thank him forevermore for his efforts.” Yes, it truly has been a grim few weeks in Southeast Asia, rounding off a very grim year. And yet for all this terrible news, it appears that there is yet reason for hope.
[The video fades away, replaced by a picture of a smiling Thaksin Thammasak, taken in his university years.]
NARRATOR: In past reports, whose deliverers have somehow braved the South China Sea’s natural and artificial obstacles to reach Lusang and the world, the resistance army of Mr. Thaksin Thammasak has declared its willingness to fight on behalf of his nation’s government-in-exile until his last breath, and— if he is still alive by then— to receive its representatives warmly when they return to their homeland. Not much is known about him, except that he came from a family of little means and that, through talent and the support of an older sibling, he traveled to Ayutthaya to enroll in the Royal University. There, he majored in chemistry and political science and secured a job in the civil service. It is believed that he had been at this job for around six years before the Ayutthaya Crisis flared up. Whatever the case, he appears to have escaped the clutches of the Indian Army, and the resistance he leads has grown from a ragtag band to an organized force whose strength is now estimated in the low thousands, and which from its moving bases in the Ayutthayan jungle doggedly harries the Indians with the ferocity of millions...
***
A village in Chaiyaphum Province, Ayutthaya, January 1958
The kids looked up at Thaksin, their evident confusion ranging from mild to severe.
“Is there a problem?” Thaksin asked.
“Mom said you’d be over two meters tall and have muscles like an ox,” said the taller girl. “You arms wouldn’t be as big as Dad’s were, though.”
“Well, she was wrong about that. Anyways, what are you doing out here? It’s dangerous, and there’s things here you probably shouldn't be looking at—”
But the kids were already peering behind him. The members of the village’s garrison littered the ground, their indigo-blue uniforms daubed with mud and blood. The boy, the smallest of the children, sniffed. “We’ve seen worse.”
No doubt you have, little one. “Well, sure, but it doesn’t exactly get more pleasant the more you look at it… Look, I’ll make you an offer. Turn around and go home right now, and I’ll get you some ice cream when I come back here. It’ll be soon, I promise, though I can’t say exactly when. Or better still, go home for your mother’s sake. She’s probably worried sick about you three—”
But the siblings had already taken off, laughing about ice cream. No doubt they’d tell all the other kids, but that was fine. Thaksin could afford enough ice cream for all of them, and maybe even the adults. And maybe a basketball court too, after this war is over.
For now, though, there was bookkeeping to do. The whole garrison of Indians, thirty strong, was dead. It was essential that none of them escape. These men were about to be transferred to another village, and like many Indian units in the process of transferring they would have looted everything of value from their old posting before moving on to the next. By intercepting them now, he might be able to fool the Aankhein into thinking that their friends been ambushed while on the way to their new posting. The villagers might be able to avoid blame. Unlikely, but not unheard of.
Ten of Thaksin's own men were dead, and thirty injured to varying (mostly minor) degrees. The survivors combed the dead, ally and enemy alike, for valuables that didn't belong to the villagers. Anything that couldn’t be carried in one’s hands or on one’s back found a place in the storage holds of the automobile convoy.
The men said their goodbyes and bundled into their vehicles, but after driving out of view of the village Thaksin bid them all to wait. After around fifteen minutes, a man with long blond hair climbed into Thaksin’s car, and the convoy continued on.
“Good of you to find me here.”
“As if you expected less of me,” replied the Farang. “Anyways, there’s been a raid on the facilities in Phrae. The refinery’s trashed, and all the product’s gone. At first I thought Somthao’s gang did it, or that new rebel— Green Nonsi, that’s what he calls himself— but the locals say otherwise. No doubt we’ll find Phrae’s inventory in the veins of the General-Overseer.”
“I look forward to the prospect,” Kaeng Som replied with a carefree smile.
