10. Dept store, steamboat introduced

Oct 11, 2004

In 1824, Scottish merchant Robert Hunter became the first Western trader to settle in Bangkok. Shuttling between Thailand, Singapore and London, he was the man who five years later set the conjoined brothers Chang and Eng on their road to worldwide fame as “the Siamese twins”.

Hunter rented a tall building in front of present-day Wat Prayoon in Thon Buri from Chaopraya Borommahaprayoonwong, where he lived and where, in 1826, he opened Morgan & Hunter, the Kingdom’s first department store. Here he sold imported products, including fabrics from India and textiles and medicines from the West, quinine among them.

Hunter was much concerned about profit. A chronicle by Kromluang Wongsathiratsanit asserts that he even sold opium from China, a drug that Siam had clearly asserted was unwelcome.

It was Hunter too who, in 1844, brought the first steamboat into the Chao Phya River. When King Rama III declined to buy the old vessel because the price was too expensive, Hunter threatened to ask the British government to send warships to Siam. The furious monarch abruptly sent him into exile, from which Hunter was unable to return until Rama IV was on the throne.

In any event, within a few years the Chao Phya was full of steamboats carrying goods imported from the West. They came to symbolise the New World, but importantly, their arrival prompted Prince Chudamanee – Rama IV’s brother, who would become the Second King later in the Fourth Reign – to develop his own trading vessels.

In 1833, the Prince and his aide, Jamuen Waiworanat (Chuang Bunnag), with help from an American missionary and the engineer John H Chandler, built a junk. Then, on July 4, 1848, they launched a 20-foot, Western-style steamboat based on the British model.

Chandler also helped the Prince establish a machine tool plant, and later became an agent in the machine trade between Siam and Great Britain.

Nithinand Yorsaengrat

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