Vajiravudh
Vajiravudh invented Thai nationalism, gave his subjects surnames, and faced the first attempt to overthrow the monarchy. He was educated at Sandhurst and Oxford and came home more literary than military. He wrote plays, translated Shakespeare into Thai, and published political journalism under pen names, sometimes arguing with himself across two newspapers. His father had built a state; he set about building a nation to go in it. He fixed the flag, promoted the formula of nation, religion and monarch that Thai schoolchildren still recite, made primary education compulsory, and in 1913 required every family to adopt a surname, personally composing thousands of them. His nationalism had an edge: he wrote essays attacking the Chinese merchant community in terms borrowed from European antisemitism. In 1912 a group of junior officers and doctors was arrested planning to replace the absolute monarchy with a republic or a constitution. He commuted every death sentence. The grievances - promotion by birth, a court that spent while officers were unpaid - were not addressed, and the same grievances produced 1932. He took Siam into the First World War in 1917 on the Allied side and sent an expeditionary force to France, which was a calculated purchase: Siamese troops marched in the victory parade in Paris, Siam sat at Versailles and joined the League of Nations, and the unequal treaties began to be renegotiated from a position no gunboat had granted. He also raised a royal paramilitary corps he preferred to the regular army, spent heavily on it and on the court, and left the treasury empty for a brother who inherited a depression.
- Lived: 1881 CE – 1925 CE
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
