Thailand’s Bestseller in 1999
Boats in Mid-Ocean is a sensitive exploration into generations of the author’s maternal family in China and its mid-19th Century migration to Thailand. The vivid and often poignant narrative, draws readers into the Wanglee family’s struggles, successes and tragedies in its gradual assimilation into the Thai social fabric. At the dawn of the 20th Century, the family played multi-faceted pioneer roles in Thailand’s nascent but vitally important businesses - rice trade, shipping, banking, and insurance – and emerged as one of the prominent and elite business dynasties of the country.
Among the more dramatic and tragic episodes are those of its entanglements with wartime politics during World War II when imperial Japan used Thailand as the springboard in the invasion plans of Burma via the infamous Death Railway. It was a time of conflicting loyalties when double-faced games of intrigues were played for variegated reasons - survival, patriotism, financial gains, political necessities, and even humanitarianism. As president of the Thai-Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the then scion of the family played a Schindler-like role when the Chamber was forced to ship rice to Japanese garrisons in Malaya and to recruit Sino-Thai to build the Death Railway. The mystery of his assassination at the end of the war remained unsolved.
The portraits of the women, Thai and Chinese, are complex and filled with both humor and pathos. At least in the first three generations, the husbands traveled back and forth between Thailand and China, each had a set of wife and children ensconced in each of the two countries they called home.
“…Apart from the author’s personal reflections interwoven into the narrative, the book has a substantial bibliography and appendix. As a result, what started out as a family history has turned into a combination of quasi-social documentation and personal narration by a writer with a gift for storytelling and an elegant prose style…” (Bangkok Post, February 4, 1999)
The narrative is interspersed with colorful anecdotes and fascinating collection of maps and old photographs
Publication Data
Author’s Name : Chamnongsri (Rutnin) Hanchanlash
Editor: Phimpraphai Phisanbut
First Published in 1994 Cremation volume for Suwit Wanglee.
10th Published in August 2019 by Sino Port Company Limited.
Excerpt From Chapter 1
Qianxi - The Sleeping Village
The small rural village once known as Qianxi[1] breathed the air of a tranquil past encapsulated by the softly undulating horizon of hazy mountains that rose in all directions beyond the surrounding paddy fields.
As I looked around at the bright fields and listened to the tongue of my forefathers without understanding a word, I felt the faint stirring of an unexpected sensation – an incipient and almost grudging sense of pride in that once-resented Chinese ancestral blood flowing in my Thai veins.
Like other traditional Chinese villages, Qianxi had a square-shaped pond at its center. With all the houses built in the traditional Chinese style, it seemed as though this sleepy little village had been nodding dreamily for half a century. Only the outer edges had awakened to the calls of modern times – a shiny new school building at the fringe of the village, the joint outcome of Chinese government support and the financial donations of several Thai-Chinese families who had sprung from the seeds of Qianxi’s inhabitants of a bygone era.
I had followed my Wanglee nephew to Qianxi for the official inauguration of the new school building in the month of September 1994. It was the very first time in my life to walk on Chinese soil.
My mission was to gather whatever information I could in order to write what I had thought would be a brief and probably boring history of my maternal family for the cremation book of my cousin, Suvit Wanglee. A month earlier, Suvit had crashed his private plane into a northern Thai mountain range while traveling to a regional meeting in his role as chairman of the Thai Chamber of Commerce.
Strangely, he was the third leader in three consecutive generations of the Wanglee clan to have died while chairman of the Chamber of Commerce and Thailand’s second oldest commercial bank – each in the month of August with decades in between.
Qianxi is situated in Chenghai[2] District on the eastern part of Guangdong Province, which is on the coast of the South China Sea. In the old days, the Northern part of Guangdong was populated by the people of Chaozhou[3]. Due to frequent flooding, the inhabitants of this region faced great difficulties making a living, a condition greatly exacerbated by the bursting of the Hanjiang River’s dams which swept across farmland and took away countless lives. Frequent storms and earthquakes also wreaked havoc in this area.
With a large deep-water bay, well protected from the wind, Chenghai was an important trading post linking Guangdong and Hokkian Provinces, as well as linking Southern China and the countries in Southeast Asia. Important ports in this district were Zhanglin and Shantou. From the middle of the 18th to the end of the 19th century, Zhanglin was the most important port. After 1900, the maritime center shifted to Shantou which was thirty kilometers away. The lives of the people of Chenghai were inseparable from the sea. They were skillful sea captains, always taking risks, going on dramatic seafaring adventures.
The District of Chenghai boasts of a unique historical association with Siam[4]. One of its natives, named Zheng Yong, found a place for himself in the history of Thailand as the father of the warrior who freed Siam from her shackles within less than 10 months after her ignominious defeat and subjugation by the Burmese in 1767. In the first half of the 18th Century, this Zheng Yong, an adventurous ne’er-to-do-well son of a Chaozhou farmer in a Chenghai village, made his way across the seas from his poverty-ridden village to the golden-spired capital of the Kingdom of Siam, Ayuthaya (1350-1767). He married a local woman and rose from poverty through business – gambling, according to some. Whatever he did, Zheng Yong must have done it with considerable success and honesty, for he grew to be a well-respected citizen and earned the trust of the Siamese authorities who appointed him the holder of the government gambling monopoly.
In 1764, the Burmese army besieged Ayuthaya and after three years broke the Siamese defenses and occupied the city, looting the magnificent capital of four centuries and reducing its fabled resplendence to ashes – it was said that death ravished Ayuthaya which went on burning for a full month. Zheng Yong’s son Taksin (Zheng Xin), gathered groups of freedom fighters and set out to weaken the Burmese occupation forces with guerilla tactics before finally routing and pushing them back. Victorious, he ascended the throne in 1768, establishing a new capital in Thonburi on the left bank of the Chao Phraya River, ruled the shattered country, reviving its morale and unity and kept the Burmese at bay for 14 strenuous years before his tragic demise in 1782.
Not surprisingly, many of King Taksin the Great’s soldiers who braved battles to win back Siam’s independence were Chinese Chaozhou immigrants from Chenghai. Any visitor to Chenghai today can visit a gravesite containing the royal attire of King Taksin, built in honor of the Siamese king in 1784, as well as a splendid statue of King Taksin himself.
My ancestral village of Qianxi is situated across the river. The forefathers of my mother’s family have moved there from a village called Xi Wei[5] since the 17th Century. From the names of the two villages, we can safely deduce that the Chens moved from the lowlands or the often-flooded area of Xi Wei to the highlands of Qianxi.
Almost all the Qianxi villagers considered themselves blood relatives. Understand- ably so, because it turned out that no less than eighty percent of the villagers still used the family name ‘Chen’ as had my great-grandfather who, with his Manchu-style pigtail and shaven forehead, had sailed his Chinese junk up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok in 1781 to establish a Siamese base for the expanding shipping and rice trade which his father had begun in Chaozhou.
Today, at the fringe of the village of Qianmei, there is the “Hamlet of the Chens of Qianxi”. Our interpreter has translated the name of the hamlet as “the Wanglee Hamlet”. Deservedly, for it is the product of the administration of Chen Cihong, Founding Father of the Wanglee Family. It was he who encouraged the purchase of land around the existing village so friends as well as retainers could build their houses. And it was his personal funds that went into the building of roads, bridges, schools, and pharmacies for public use. This was how Cihong was known to live his life and conduct his business – strictly based on the principles of Confucianism.[6]
From the Hamlet of the Chens of Qianxi, I was taken to the former port known as Zhanglin which had been around from the time of the Ming Dynasty in the 15th Century – the port that had witnessed the laborious rise of the Wanglee forefathers from indigence to success.
Prior to the opening of Shantou Port in 1860, Zhanglin was an important port from which the Chaozhou merchants set off their journeys. Trade activities increased during King Taksin’s reign accelerated during the first three reigns of the Rattana- kosin (Bangkok) Era which began after his death in 1782. During King Taksin’s days, Chaozhou traders and immigrants came to be known as “the Royal Chinese”.
A researcher of Thai Khadi Institute, Thammasat University, has the following to say about this matter:
“It was perhaps not King Taksin’s intention to favor the Chinese Chaozhous over the other Chinese as his partiality would cause a rift among the Chinese communities, especially when he depended on their support. The Chaozhous, inevitably, enjoyed a higher status than the rest as the king himself was half Thai and Chaozhou. Another point is the contribution of Chaozhou troops in King Taksin’s military initiatives against Burma in the towns along the East Coast. Furthermore, the King had maintained a strong relationship with the Chinese emperors in order to consolidate his authority in Siam. These political situations had turned the spotlight on the Chinese Chaozhous, thus attracting more and more immigrants to Siam.”
The Chaozhous continued to set sail from Zhanglin until the popularity of the Chinese junks gradually faded. The opening of Shantou Port in 1860 marked the end of Zhanglin.
Very close to the deserted old port lies “Xinxingjie”, a small village peppered with ghosts of inns, once filled with seafarers wanting a night’s rest before their voyages. The number of Thais of Chaozhou descent whose ancestors once stayed in these inns probably runs into tens of thousands including, of course, the Wanglee clan.
When China was defeated in the second Opium War, the Treaty of Tiensin[7] was signed in 1858 whereby Western Imperialist powers designated Shantou as a free deep-sea port. Western steam-powered ships, whose greater efficiency of steam engine contributed to the rise of Shantou and the decline of Zhanglin, gradually replaced the Chinese junks. This process must have been gradual for I was told that Chen Cihong continued to operate his commercial ventures with Siam by Chinese junks from Zhanglin up to the 1870s.
Changes had been wrought not only by human factors, but nature had also played a cruel role in the desolation of Zhanglin. The Hanjiang tributary that two hundred years ago used to flow into the ocean here had silted up over the years. Only a hundred years ago, the locals assured me, the depth of the river mouth was three times the height of a full-grown man. Now it is no more than a shallow blackened stream. As a testimony to the fact, they pointed to the observation tower from which the people could monitor harbor traffic in those proud departed days.
Another testimony was a monument erected to mark the place where “hongtou chuan” or red-headed ships of the Chaozhou people departed for Siam. There the coastal area had over time become an inland one, the sea having receded as much as eight kilometers due to the tremendous amount of sand persistently brought in on the wind.
The passage of time, the progress of man combined with the hand of nature, had transformed Zhanglin from a brisk, lively nucleus of import-export and merchandise distribution with hundreds of ships plying its harbor into a sad and time-worn village. The only signs indicating the arrival of the passing of the 20th century in Zhanglin were tangles of power lines along the alleys and the occasional television aerial on top of house roofs built over a hundred years ago.
[1]When China adopted communism as its political ideology, the name Qianxi which means “higher part of the river” was changed to a more poetic name of Qianmei or “beautiful part of the river”. In this particular chronicle, I shall use the name Qianxi when speaking of the village in former times when it was known as such.
[2] “clear water of the ocean”
[3]The word Chaozhou or Tae Chew refers to a city in Southern China as well as an ethnic group of Chinese people in that region with their own distinct language and culture.
[4] I shall use “Siam” and “Siamese” when speaking of my country in the pre-1939 days prior to its official name change to the present day Thailand. The name “Thailand” will be used when pertinent to the context of time.
[5] “Lower end of the river”. Today, Xiwei is called Jumei which means “beautiful dwelling”.
[6] Wealth accumulation, wealth management on the public’s behalf, wealth consumption and distribution.
[7] Disputes over trade privileges continued between the Chinese authorities and Western powers although the treaty had already been signed. The treaty was therefore suspended and further conflicts and negotiations ensued. It was not until 1860 that the treaty actually became effective.