9 . American Missionaries
Oct 10, 2004
The first group of Christians to visit Siam were Catholic missionaries
from Portugal who arrived in the old capital Ayutthaya. Protestant
Dutch traders followed them in 1598, then the British began pursuing
business deals in 1612.
The Catholics were once again on track when King Louis XIII of
France sent missionaries to the court of King Narai in 1662.
They met with no success proselytising monarch and his courtiers
but were allowed by King Narai to establish two churches and a religious
school, the first school for commoners in Siam, to spread Christianity.
Most of the 700 students were boys from the families of Chinese
immigrants.
By the time of Ayutthaya’s collapse, there were an estimated 5,000
Christians in Siam. Most were Chinese and Portuguese.
In the Rattanakosin period that followed, the Protestant missionary
movement found a foothold in Bangkok in 1828 under Karl Gutzlaff,
a Prussian Lutheran. He was succeeded in turn by John Taylor Jones,
the first American Baptist missionary on these shores. He settled
in Bangkok in 1833.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions began
sending their emissaries in 1834, and the next year brought Dr Dan
Beach Bradley, the most famous of them all in Thailand's history.
Bradley was the first foreign physician to settle in Bangkok, and
he was keen on both the medical sciences and engineering. The first
surgical operation in Siam, and the first newspaper, were his initiatives.
The Protestant missionaries from America arrived in Bangkok with
a strong will to create a better world, and that meant that besides
teaching people to be good Christians, they wanted to spread knowledge.
The Catholic proselytisers in Siam, led by Jean Baptiste Pallegoix,
were busy teaching their faith to some 4,000 souls in the city and
3,000 elsewhere in the country, according to the French preacher’s
chronicles. Pallegoix was King Rama IV’s English and Latin tutor
and a talented inventor, photographer and linguist. Nevertheless,
he had little influence as a purveyor of the “new knowledge”.
But Dr Bradley and his fellow American Baptists were meanwhile
shaking Siam with the new revelations of science and technology.
Their role reached its peak while Rama IV was on the throne. During
the first five years of his reign, they performed many tasks for
the court and even made proposals to the monarch about state bureaucracy.
Female missionaries including the wives of Dr Bradley and his colleague
Dr House were invited to teach English to the ladies of the royal
court.
Their considerable influence gradually faded, however, after the
King began listening more to hired foreign counsellors, whose realms
of interest lay beyond “mere” religion.
Nithinand Yorsaengrat
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