7 - Along the Margin: Some Other Minorities

Summary

Further to the ethnohistories of Old Bangkok's five major minority groups presented in the preceding chapters, this chapter deals with five of the city's smaller ethnic communities. Those groups — Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai Yuan, Sikh, and farang (Westerners) — are given relatively brief attention here because they constituted an often-peripheral presence, in terms of both their small numbers and physical location, and in most cases — with the notable exception of the farang — because we lack much essential historical information about them. Together, those five ethnic groups as of 1910 are estimated to have accounted for no more than 20,000 — 2.5 per cent — of Bangkok's total resident population of 800,000: 10,000 Khmer; 7,000 Vietnamese; 2,000 farang; and fewer than 1,000 Thai Yuan and Sikhs (Tables 1.3 and 1.5). Other than the Khmer, the bulk of those groups arrived on the scene relatively late. Nevertheless, each enriched the city's political, economic, and cultural evolution in ways that can still be observed today. They established new neighbourhoods and stretched the city bounds, introduced new products and handiworks into the urban market, enhanced the capital's cosmopolitan pluralism, and linked its destiny more intimately to distant lands and cultures. This chapter presents capsule biographies of those five marginal minorities, referring in particular to their origins, residential assignments, political positions, social status, economic specializations, and cultural legacies, as an auxiliary contribution to Old Bangkok's broader ethnohistory.

KHMER

Thai-Khmer relations at both the capital of Ayutthaya and later at Thonburi/ Bangkok proceeded along parallel lines — connections between the Thai and Khmer ruling elites, and Thai dealings with Khmer commoner communities. Repeated Siamese military incursions into Cambodia date back to well before the climactic conquest of Angkor in 1431 (Wyatt 1984, pp. 68–70). That Thai triumph and many further armed expeditions into Cambodia over the following centuries carried off large numbers of Khmer captives into Siamese territory. Select groups of captured commoners were assigned to the outskirts of Ayutthaya to farm premium rice for the royal granaries, and some of those war captives (or their descendants) in turn fled the Burmese attack of 1767 to end up at Thonburi.