Mongkut
Mongkut spent twenty-seven years as a monk before he was king and died of malaria caught while watching an eclipse he had calculated himself. He was passed over for the throne at twenty and entered the monkhood instead, which saved his life and gave him an education no Siamese king had had. He learned Pali, Sanskrit, Latin and English, corresponded with missionaries and read western astronomy, and founded a reformed monastic order that stripped out what he judged to be superstition. He came to the throne in 1851 with a clear view of the position Siam was in. Burma had been dismembered by Britain in two wars and Vietnam was being taken by France. In 1855 he signed the Bowring Treaty, which opened the country to British trade, capped import duties at three per cent and gave British subjects extraterritorial rights. It was an unequal treaty and he signed it deliberately, then signed a dozen more with other powers so that no single one could claim a monopoly or a pretext. He hired foreign advisers, began printing, permitted commoners to look at the king, and employed an English governess for the palace children whose memoirs later produced a musical he would not have recognised. In August 1868 he predicted a total solar eclipse visible from a stretch of coast south of Hua Hin, to within two seconds, and invited the French scientific establishment and the governor of Singapore to watch it with him. He was right, and the demonstration was the point: a Siamese king beating European astronomers at their own calculation. He and his son both caught malaria in the marshes there. Mongkut died six weeks later; the son survived and became one of the great reforming monarchs of Asia.
- Lived: 1804 CE – 1868 CE
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
