Franco-Siamese Crisis
France sent gunboats up the Chao Phraya in July 1893 and took a third of Siam's territory. The pretext was the left bank of the Mekong. France had taken Vietnam and Cambodia and asserted that its new possessions inherited old claims to Lao territory that Siam had held for a century, and manufactured incidents on the frontier to establish them. Two French vessels forced the river bar at Paknam on 13 July under fire from a Siamese fort and a boom, and anchored with their guns trained on the royal palace in Bangkok. The ultimatum that followed demanded the whole left bank, an indemnity of three million francs, and the punishment of Siamese officers. Siam appealed to Britain and discovered the limits of its position. London had no wish to fight France over Laos, wanted a buffer between British Burma and French Indochina, and advised acceptance. The kingdom lost some 143,000 square kilometres and paid the money, and French troops occupied Chanthaburi for a decade as security. Further cessions followed in 1904 and 1907, and territory went to British Malaya in 1909. Siam kept its independence, which is the fact usually cited, and the price is worth stating: roughly half the territory it had claimed, extraterritorial rights for foreigners, and a fiscal autonomy it did not fully recover until the 1930s. Chulalongkorn's modernisation of the administration, the army and the schools was accelerated by the humiliation. Thais commemorate 13 July as the Paknam incident. Britain and France settled the matter between themselves in 1896 by agreeing to guarantee the independence of the Chao Phraya basin. Siam survived as a state because two empires found a buffer more convenient than a border, which is a different thing from surviving by its own strength.
- Year: 1893 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
