WIMAYA (e-ISSN: 2272-3760)   Vol.02/No.01, January-June 2021 

 51 

Book Reviews 
 

Siam Mapped. Honolulu: University of Hawaii 
Press. By Thongchai Winichakul. Honolulu: 
University of Hawaii Press, 1994, xvi + 228 pp. 

ISBN 0-8248-1337-5.  
 

Siam Mapped is an exceptional 

monograph which unraveled territory, 

practices, nationalism, and ‘geo-body’ as key 

points of Thailand’s cutting-edge 

development. The author accordingly 

scrutinized the intellectual and knowledge 

shift, especially in topography, geography, and 

map making in Siam or nowadays Thailand 

amid the early nineteenth to the dawn of the 

twentieth century. It was the period when 

traditional conceptions and values of territory 

and space were frequently contested from the 

growing colonization across the Southeast 

Asia. 

  The indigenous understanding of 

space rested heavily on Hindu-Buddhism 

cosmology that buttressed the rule and 

legitimacy of local elites. In this way, 

conventional maps in Southeast Asia rarely 

represented correct topographical or spatial 

setting. In contrary, Western ideas of boundary 

and outline served different purpose based on 

scientific measurements and observations to 

illustrate earth’s surface. These two distinct 

sets of knowledge were customarily debated 

amid the early nineteenth century when 

colonial expansion reached Siam.  

  Despite the fact that Siam was the only 

country that remained non-colonized in 

Southeast Asia, it was not immune from 

colonial regulatory design and technical 

information. Such novel practices accelerated 

and served as apparatuses and models of 

Siamese bureaucrats to dispatch their 

modernization scheme. As of the late 

nineteenth century, Western ideas of 

topography and mapping uprooted the 

indigenous ones, which subsequently 

reshaped Bangkok elites’ perception on 

political space and coexistence with 

neighboring entities. As such, it permitted 

Siamese officials to dispatch appeasing 

campaigns toward its former tributary states.  

  The expansionist schemes had aimed 

to incorporate as many neighboring states as 

possible regardless of cultural or ethnic 

difference. Topography played a crucial role in 

this plan as those claimed lands were 

demarcated and recognized within Siam’s 

territory. Any challenges of such claims would 

be silent. In the last two decades of the 

nineteenth century, Bangkok hired British 

engineers and topographers then dispatched 

them with Siamese commissioners marching 

toward all frontiers – northward to Lanna 

kingdom and northeastward to Lao states.  

This scheme plunged Siam into direct 

confrontation vis-à-vis imperial powers – 

Britain and France. In this regard, Thongchai 

reveals that rather being a victim and passive 

actor, Siamese elites orchestrated their own 

colonial projects and confidently, with newly 

learned Western technics, stood firm against 

two mighty European powers. However, such 

confident soon plummeted in the contestation 

with France, who resorted to gunboat 

diplomacy and forced Siam to relinquish all 

claims beyond the left-bank of Mekong River 

or nowadays Laos.  

The aftermath of confrontation with 

France left a huge, traumatized scar in Bangkok 

elites and Thai historiography. They fabricated 

humiliated defeat into “loss territories” and 

treated Siam as a victim of a ruthless colonial 

power. The failure of expansionist scheme was 

translated into the acute sacrifice of organs to 

save the heart of Thai national body. 

Nevertheless, topographical and 

geographical technics could not facilitate the 

ambition. It eventually forged up Siam as a 

geopolitical entity. Siam had been mapped and 

possessed a place in world map. Thongchai 

illustrates that it creates a ‘geo-body’ of 



WIMAYA (e-ISSN: 2272-3760)   Vol.02/No.01, January-June 2021 

 52 

nation, which simultaneously exhibits two 

dimensions – firstly, the space of “we-self” vis-

à-vis European colonization and neighboring 

countries. Secondly, the otherness or enemy of 

the state both external and internal one. Map 

is not just an object that represents spatial 

relationship between each country and others, 

instead a political means which emphasizes 

nationalism. In addition, Thongchai dauntlessly 

challenges Thai nationalism typically deemed 

to be long-time inherited value as a recently 

constructed political ideology through 

technical knowledge of mapping. 

Although the work is published almost 

two decades ago and the central point of the 

book circles around Thailand and Southeast 

Asia, its contribution extends far beyond such 

themes. For the scholar of International 

Relations, this monograph can be a decent 

companion for a nuance understanding of 

many sticking usually treated as inherited 

issues like border disputes or international 

conflicts based on disputed historical claims. 

Overall, Thongchai illustrates that the idea of 

nation conceived through process of 

knowledge production amid the colonial 

period instead of the antiquity. This 

exceptionally thought is not a supreme truth 

but can be challenged and contested from 

other perspective. 

 
 
Pran Jintrawet 
Ph.D. Candidate 
Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies 
Waseda University, Japan 
pentuijin@gmail.com  

mailto:pentuijin@gmail.com