Agricultural landscapes have long been an important vehicle for postproductivist rural economies seeking to repackage themselves as places for tourism. Preservation activities, heritage operations, and commemorative routines are now intensifying their focus on the agricultural past to emphasize their distinctiveness and to shore up fragile local identities by conserving, celebrating and attending to past methods of cultivation, techniques of animal husbandry and other historic forms of land use. These places of agricultural history are labelled “cultural landscapes” by UNESCO's World Heritage sites programme, and include vineyards in Italy (Puleo 2013), rice terraces in the Philippine Cordilleras (Guimbatan and Baguilat 2006), as well as the pastoral landscapes associated with the English picturesque (Matlass 2005). Seemingly without controversy, the historic cultivation of tobacco is counted equally as agricultural heritage and often interpreted in ways similar to crops that are far more benign. Generic interpretive formulae for agricultural heritage such as “the taming of nature through dedicated hard work”, “working in harmony with nature”, “technological advancement” and “idiosyncratic local practices and architectures” are all familiar examples.

Tobacco heritage's unproblematized repetition of the “human harmony with nature” theme avoids the overwhelmingly destructive effects of this plant's cultivation. According to the World Health Organisation's figures, a hundred million deaths were caused by tobacco in the twentieth century and, they warn, if current trends continue there will be up to one billion deaths in the twenty-first century. It is not insignificant that eighty per cent of these deaths will occur in the developing world.1 So what are we to do with the historical spaces of tobacco cultivation and manufacture? What kinds of messages do we want to use these spaces to convey?

Most kinds of agricultural heritage is overt and highly visible precisely because it helps to enhance the value of the farmed commodities associated with it, as traditional, natural, pure and wholesome, for example. Tobacco is unusual in that stories of origins and links to the soil, so familiar in artisan products like wine, pasta, cheese or bread, are silenced by state regulations on advertising.

Widely recognized from school history books in Indonesia, the name Trowulan is most familiar to Indonesians as the ancient capital of the glorious Majapahit Empire. The official narrative of Indonesia's national history features the kingdom of Majapahit with the notion of archipelagic unity as one nation, “Nusantara”, through the Palapa Oath made by its first minister Gajah Mada. Recently though, historians have been increasingly questioning the appropriation of Majapahit in the nation-building narrative due to the mixture of myth and reality in the construction of Majapahit as the root of Indonesian nationalism. The reality of present-day Trowulan is that it resembles more a village than a city. According to the 2010 Census, the population of Trowulan was 68,154, which puts it far from being a “city”. It is under the regency of Mojokerto, which is about sixty kilometres from Surabaya, the second-largest city in Indonesia.

Majapahit buildings in Trowulan are now largely ruins. Except for those that have been appropriated and altered as shrines, residents of Trowulan are not using these ruins in their daily activities. Yet, they live with the ruins and often utilize them as resources, such as in producing new bricks (although the practice of using old Majapahit bricks to produce new bricks is unacceptable under official heritage preservation norms). The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Indonesia had proposed Trowulan as a World Heritage site, and it has been on UNESCO's tentative list since 2009.

Trowulan's Majapahit heritage has been subjected to the invention and reinvention of later societies according to their own agendas. Applying the term living heritage to Trowulan would therefore appear to be a contradiction, especially since there is no evidence that the current residents have continued through the generations the cultures of the Majapahit Empire. Yet, we argue that living heritage exists even in an ancient heritage site like Trowulan that has gone through many years of contestations and appropriations for political and cultural legitimacy. How does living heritage relate to the everyday realities of historical ruins? By bringing together the historiography and the voices of residents, scholars and heritage enthusiasts, we find that living heritage is by no means an idealistic practice.

Wushantou Reservoir and the adjacent waterways, known as the Chianan Canal, are located in Southern Taiwan, just beneath the Tropic of Cancer (Figure 12.1). They were constructed in 1930 by the Japanese colonizers who aimed to solve Japan's rice shortage by turning the 150,000 hectares of dry land into a sea of fields that would produce rice twice a year. The project took nearly ten years. The completion of the infrastructure transformed not only the regional landscape but also the colonial economy, as well as the livelihoods of the local farmers. At the time it was completed the reservoir was the largest in Asia and the third-largest in the world (Furukawa 2009, p. 104).

Today, some eighty-five years later, this Japanese-built structure is still in use, daily providing tons of water to local farmers. It has also become a site of outstanding cultural heritage in Taiwan — an island that was ruled by Japan for five decades (1895–1945). For instance, in 2001 the Chinese Civil Engineering Association selected Wushantou Reservoir as one of the ten most important historic constructions in Taiwan (Ding 2001). And, in 2009, Taiwan's Ministry of Culture selected it as one of the eighteen “Potential World Heritage Sites”.1 It is also a popular tourist site, attracting more than twenty thousand visitors a year (Taiwan Jianan nongtian shuilihui 2014, p. 66).

Heritage, as the literature suggests, is more concerned with the present than it is with the past (Lowenthal 1997; Harrison 2009). David Lowenthal (1997, p. x), for example, sees heritage as “not an inquiry into the past, but a celebration of it … a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day purposes”. The questions this chapter raise then are as follows: How did Wushantou Reservoir and the Chianan Canal — structures built by the Japanese colonizers — come to earn the status as representative cultural heritage in Taiwan? What does it mean for Taiwan to list these Japanese-era structures as its own cultural heritage? And what present-day purposes do they serve?

Influenced by transnational indigenous rights movements and heritage activism, indigenous peoples in Malaysia are actively engaging in the display and performance of their tangible and intangible cultural heritage. This has manifested in demonstrations of traditional crafts, customs and rituals, as well as the recent establishment of indigenous cultural villages, a form of living museum or open-air museum which aims to preserve the “living” traditions and customs of cultural peoples by exhibiting collections of buildings and expressions of cultural heritage in an openair setting. In this chapter, I explore how indigenous cultural heritage is being instrumentalized by different actors for different agendas, and the cultural politics of this instrumentalization, through a comparative study of two indigenous cultural villages in West Malaysia; namely, the Mah Meri Cultural Village on Carey Island and the Orang Seletar Cultural Centre in Johor Bahru.

A comparative perspective was adopted as I was drawn to the contrast between the two indigenous cultural villages, despite the fact that they were both established to showcase the cultural heritage of the indigenous peoples of West Malaysia. At the Mah Meri Cultural Village, which was established by the government and features a large tourism complex with modern facilities, the Mah Meri villagers felt disenfranchised by the development. In contrast, the Orang Seletar Cultural Centre, which features a small wooden hut constructed by the Orang Seletar villagers from modest funding provided by an international organization, the development played a significant role in the assertion of local indigenous rights.

The comparison of these two indigenous cultural villages offers insights into the workings of a state-initiated “top-down” heritage project represented by the Mah Meri Cultural Village, and those of a communityinitiated “bottom-up” heritage project represented by the Orang Seletar Cultural Centre. This chapter attempts to shed light on the implications of UNESCO's recent mandate for the instrumentalization of culture for development and the gradual decentralization of aid provision through intermediary agencies and entrepreneurs in the current age of neoliberalism. While UNESCO has a laudable mandate to integrate culture and heritage as part of human development strategies aimed at community development, the instrumentalization of culture for development seems to produce uneven outcomes.

Bangkok, the capital of Siam since 1782, served from the outset as the kingdom's ceremonial, administrative, commercial, and demographic centre — a primate city in every sense of the term. In speaking of its “premodern” phase, 1782–1910, covering the first five reigns of the Chakri dynasty, the city is conventionally referred to as Old Bangkok, or more formally, Ratanakosin. Thus, the 129-year time span from 1782 to 1910 may be termed the Ratanakosin period. As Ratanakosin, the city is often visualized as the walled and moated artificial island that still carries its name, but the physical contours of Old Bangkok reached well beyond those confines to incorporate the densely populated urban periphery. From the very outset, the Bangkok conurbation expanded progressively in area and population, attracting a diverse citizenry representing a multiplicity of ethnic communities while expediting Siam's growing prosperity and accelerating modernization. Yet, until the rise of the absolute monarchy and nationalism in the decades crossing into the twentieth century, Old Bangkok retained much of the feudal political and social alignment that had in former centuries characterized the ancestral capital of Ayutthaya. This introductory chapter briefly surveys Old Bangkok's spatial design, political structure, social organization, and ethnic diversity in their historical context as background to the five historical studies of the city's principal ethnic minorities that follow in Chapters 2 to 6, plus the five summary ethnohistories of lesser communities contained in Chapter 7. In fact, the present chapter can be considered to add yet a further ethnohistory in its discussion of the role played by Old Bangkok's Thai ruling elite and Thai commons in the city's nineteenth–twentieth century modernization.

RATANAKOSIN, THE JEWEL OF INDRA

FROM CHINA TO SIAM

The thickly populated, culturally dynamic Chinese littoral extending from Taiwan to Hainan follows a great southwestward-bending arc toward the Southeast Asian landmass. Along that thousand-kilometre seaboard have resided for millennia a string of Chinese ethnic minorities — the Hokkien, Taechiu, Cantonese, Hakka, and Hainanese — commonly referred to as Chinese “speech groups” in recognition of their most prominent individuating culture trait. Over the course of innumerable generations up to the nineteenth–twentieth centuries they were gradually but never fully absorbed into the dominant Han culture. It was only in the past century or so that the cultural distinctions among those various ethnic subspecies, most readily distinguishable in terms of habitat, dialect, and mutual antipathies, were sharply attenuated under the compulsions of Chinese nationalism, Communist ideology, and rampant industrialization.

Among that regional cluster of ethnic minorities, the Taechiu (or Teochew, Chiuchow, or Chaozhou, among other transliterations) historically occupied a comparatively inconsequential position. Inhabiting the resourcepoor, flood- and famine-prone Chaoshan Plain and Han River delta, a lonely prefecture straddling the borderlands between southern Fujian Province (the Hokkien heartland) and central Kwangtung (the Cantonese cradle), they may well have been among the region's autochthonous lowland peoples, pressed by later intruders into that relatively inhospitable ecological zone. Considered impoverished country bumpkins by their more sophisticated Hokkien and Cantonese neighbours, they eked out a living as peasant agriculturalists, sea-salt farmers, fisherfolk, food processors, and coastal traders (Chang 1991, pp. 29–31). Their intrepid maritime skills, coupled with their stubborn defiance of imperial Chinese rule, earned them a lasting reputation in government circles as recalcitrant smugglers, pirates, and renegades (Antony 2003, pp. 19–53; Supang 1991a). As one early nineteenth-century Western observer candidly noted:

FROM KHAEK ISALAM …

In former centuries, Siam's Muslim inhabitants may have accounted for well over a tenth of the kingdom's total population, depending on how far down the Malay Peninsula the Siamese realm is calculated to have extended; one knowledgeable Western resident in the mid-nineteenth century reckoned Siam's “Malay” population at one million, about 17 per cent of the kingdom' total estimated population (Pallegoix 2000, p. 2). The kingdom's retracted southern border following the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909 caused its Muslim population to shrink appreciably. As a result, their number is today believed to account for less than a tenth of the total citizenry. In the absence of official census data by religion, a 1988 estimate of the kingdom' Muslim population multiplied the country's total of 2,600 mosques by a rule-of-thumb figure of 2,000 people per mosque to arrive at a national Muslim population of 5.2 million, or around 9 per cent of the kingdom' total citizenry. For the Bangkok Metropolis, the equivalent figures were 155 mosques and 310,000 Muslims, accounting for 6 per cent of the capital' residents (Thailand, Ministry of Culture, Department of Religious Affairs, Muslim Affairs Bureau n.d. (1988?)). Two decades later, those figures had risen to 174 mosques and 348,000 Muslims, or an estimated 6.1 per cent of the capital's total population (Thailand, National Muslim Center, Office of the Islamic Committee of the Bangkok Municipality, n.d. (2011?)).

Among the Thai populace, the Muslim minority has traditionally been referred to collectively — sometimes pejoratively — as khaek isalam, literally “Muslim guests” or “strangers” (Scupin 1998, p. 148; Keyes 2008–09, pp. 21, 27; Winyu 2014, pp. 3, 16), a term that carries subtle exclusionary connotations implicit in a sense of Otherness (Thongchai 2000a). Perhaps that Otherness may arise from the fact that the great majority of the kingdom's Muslims have historically been domiciled in the South, with only a secondary presence concentrated in and around Bangkok. It has even been rather fancifully suggested that the name “Bangkok” (originally Ban Kok) may derive from a centuries-old designation, “Ban Khaek” (Bajunid 1992, p. 25), referring to an early intrusion of those Muslim “strangers” into the Thai heartland.

More than half a century ago, upon my initial encounter with Bangkok, I discovered a labyrinthine city of joyous confusion, the exotic Orient in all its enigmatic splendor. From my well-situated home base on Worachak Road I first explored, always on foot, my neighbourhood from Wat Saket to Wang Burapha and then gradually stretched my reconnoiterings across an ever-expanding urban terrain, reaching from the Grand Palace and Sanam Luang to Sampheng's raucous waterfront. Wandering the city's dusty byways I sought to find the order behind the clutter but was stymied at every turn. In the process of negotiating the baffling metropolis I found that many locals faced as much difficulty as I in directing me to my destination. Few street signs — and those few only in indecipherable Thai — were available to guide my way, and house numbers were aligned in no apparent sequence; even a reasonable city map was unavailable. Only many years later was I able to acquire my first reliable Bangkok street-guide (Tanya 1984), which still occupies its cherished place on my bookshelf as a memorial to those bygone days. That unforgettable experience inspired me, in my abiding conviction in the innate rationality of mankind, to continue to the present day my search for the logical underpinnings of Bangkok's apparent spatial chaos.

Similar dissonance met my efforts to identify the guiding principles of Thai culture and society. A clear sense of easy acquaintance, happy camaraderie, and calm self-effacement overrode less affable undertones of nationalist sensitivity, class prejudice, and an elemental dialectic of seniority and servility. Bangkok's social cacophony was a pervasive presence. From dancing the ramwong (a formerly popular Thai dance form) at a sumptuous charity ball where the capital's elite flaunted their wealth, to sharing bamboo-joints of khao lam (steamed sweetened sticky rice) and tin cups of nam tan sot (watered palm sugar) at a roadside stall with a gang of sam-lo (three-wheeler) taxi drivers was tantamount to crossing civilizations. Yet all were Bangkok natives, and proud of it. Searching the city's few English language bookshops for clarification of that jumbled scenario, all I could find was an assortment of esoteric monographs on the “loosely structured” Thai social order (Evers 1969), elaborating on a curiously chaotic theory of the amiable incongruities of Thai life so evident all around me.

OF LOVE AND LOATHING

Relations between Siam and the Lao states of the Mekong watershed soured during the Thonburi period (1767–1782). Whether that was primarily due to the dynamics of Burmese influence in the Lao country, the newly found might and exuberant expansionism of the Thonburi regime, or personal animosities between Thonburi's King Taksin and King Si Bunyasan of Vientiane remains a moot point. What is beyond dispute, however, is the political decline of the Lao states following the 1707 fragmentation of the kingdom of Lan Chang into the rival states of Luang Prabang, Vientiane, and Champasak, which deeply affected the capacity of the Lao to withstand pressure from their Siamese, Burmese, and Vietnamese neighbours. The result was a process of growing humiliation for the Lao at the hands of their Thai ethnic cousins (Wyatt 1994b). A respected pair of Lao scholars has succinctly expressed the lingering sentiments as a “Lao-Thai saga of love and loathing” (Mayoury and Pheuiphanh 1994, p. vii).

The roiling tensions between Thonburi and the Lao states led, in 1778–1779, to a powerful Thai military campaign against the Mekong riparian states, culminating in the conquest of the Lao capital of Vientiane and the capture and transport to Thai territory of large numbers of war prisoners (chaloei soek), including many members of the Vientiane royal family and its entourage. Si Bunyasan and several of his sons managed to escape the besieged capital into Vietnamese sanctuary. But his eldest son and viceroy (the uparat, nearly always the king's senior son or younger brother), Nanthasen, and other members of the royal family were caught and carried off to Siam along with masses of war captives and other booty, including the Phra Kaew and Phra Bang Buddha images, the chief palladia of the ancient Lao kingdom of Lan Chang. That conquest of Vientiane and its subordinate principalities marked a historic transition of the Lao states from political independence to tributary status to Siam, immortalized, to the lasting chagrin of the Lao, by the installation of the Phra Kaew Buddha image at Thonburi, Siam's spiritual centre.

Ethnohistory unites ethnography and history. As ethnography, this book is the product of several decades of on-site interactive observation of local communities, is based on inductive methods of data gathering and analysis, and adopts a holistic, multifaceted approach to an account of Old Bangkok's spatial, political, and social order. As history, it is retrospective in outlook, takes a narrative form, and relies on a diversity of time-worn data sources, including unstructured oral histories, surviving primary-source documentation, and the scattered physical remnants of the Old Bangkok cityscape. In both its ethnographic and historical guises, the book seeks to place its subject in broad perspective by ranging somewhat more widely, now and again, across space and time than the urban landscape of Old Bangkok per se.

Beyond ethnography, the book ventures into the rather more rarified reaches of ethnology. As interpretation naturally follows observation, so is ethnology the child of ethnography. While ethnography is conventionally defined as rigorously objective single-society observation, description, and explication, ethnology delves more profoundly and expansively into the mysteries of the cultural landscape “to reconstitute the deeper structures out of which [the surface patterns] are built, and to classify those structures, once reconstituted, into an analytical scheme” (Geertz 1973, p. 351). Thus, ethnographic research is by inclination empirically small-scale and expository, whereas ethnology tends to take on conceptually large-scale and interpretive dimensions, emphasizing generalization, abstraction, and comparative analysis, exploring broad cross-cultural themes and theories.

The ethnography–ethnology distinction is useful here as an opportunity to explore briefly several ethnological themes that infuse the book' ethnographic discussion: Ethnicity, a means of identifying and differentiating socio-cultural groups; feudalism, the political form of premodern, ethnically diverse, emerging states; the plural society, which historically served as the organizational mode of Southeast Asia's port-cities; and the mandala, the spatial template upon which that world region's traditional political systems, and particularly its urban social orders, were imprinted. Each of those themes is itself a contentious concept, subject to long-standing scholarly, ideologically tinted debate. Yet, their conceptual plausibility is enhanced by the fact that they are closely linked, and mutually reinforcing. Jointly, they hold considerable explanatory power.

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.

Adozen years after Vasco de Gama's epic voyage round the Cape of Good Hope to India's Malabar coast, the Portuguese in 1510 established a strongpoint at Goa, which thenceforth served as the linchpin of their eastern empire. Alfonso d'Albuquerque, the second Viceroy of Goa, extended the Portuguese presence further east a year later by leading a naval squadron across the Indian Ocean to seize the wellsituated port of Malacca. Discovering that Malacca was a distant vassal of Siam, he immediately dispatched an envoy to Ayutthaya (by Chinese junk) to inform the king of Siam of the Portuguese coup de main. The envoy was well received at the Siamese court and was pleasantly surprised to find that no objections were raised against the Portuguese initiative. Returning to Malacca by the overland route from Ayutthaya to the Andaman coast, he officially apprised the Siamese vassal ports of Tenasserim and Martaban of the new Portuguese presence and friendly intentions. And so, Portuguese relations with the Siamese kingdom started off on the right foot (Bidya 1998, pp. 29–76; Campos 1959; Silva Rego 1982).

A second Portuguese mission visited Ayutthaya in 1512. After a twoyear stay during which the envoy explored trade opportunities for the Portuguese Crown, he returned to Malacca and then Goa accompanied by a Thai embassy. In 1516, Malacca dispatched to Ayutthaya yet another ambassador, who managed to negotiate a treaty of “friendship and commerce” between the kingdoms of Siam and Portugal, the first Siamese compact with a European power. The treaty specified that the Portuguese would be permitted to set up trading posts at Ayutthaya and other Siamese ports, that they would supply Ayutthaya with guns and powder, and that they would be allowed to practise their religion openly and freely. The Portuguese settlement that subsequently emerged at Ayutthaya was headed by a series of captains-major (capitanães-mor), appointed — with the concurrence of the Siamese authorities — by the Estado Português da Índia, instituted in 1505 and headquartered at Goa. In practice, the Estado pursued a hands-off policy. Ayutthaya's Portuguese settlement was left largely to its own devices and, much to the liking of the Siamese authorities, frequently carried out its mercantile activities in defiance of Portuguese royal orders (D’Ávila Lourido 1996, p. 76).

OLD MON AND NEW

Over the course of the past millennium, a succession of Mon (or Raman) migrations crossed the Tenasserim divide from their Irrawaddy delta heartland in present-day Burma to settle in Siam's Chaophraya watershed. The earliest known instance of such migration created the fabled Mon kingdom of Dvaravati, centred along what centuries later came to be the western rim of the Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya (Dhida 1999). Each new migration encountered earlier well-established Mon communities at their journey's end. In many cases the encounter raised tensions between the old and new settler groups, and in each case the newly arrived groups, or “New Mon”, became, in due course, established communities, or “Old Mon”, who were to face yet newer bands of Mon immigrants in their turn. The distinction between Old and New Mon thus historically presented a “moving target” in the history of Mon migration into the Chaophraya watershed and their interaction with Thai civilization.

Ramanya Desa (Land of the Mon) is remembered as one of the great early civilizations of Southeast Asia. At its height, the configuration of Mon states collectively termed Ramanya Desa reached from the Irrawaddy basin and Andaman littoral over the Tenasserim hills across the Chaophraya watershed, from the Bay of Bengal to the Gulf of Siam. Over a millennium ago the Mon people adopted Theravada Buddhism as the cultural foundation of their vibrant civilization. Having absorbed and adapted much of their lifestyle from South Asia, the Mon in turn contributed greatly to the cultural evolution of their Southeast Asian neighbours, including the Khmer, Thai, Lao, and Burmans. But the halcyon days of Mon hegemony withered away many centuries ago under the mounting pressure of Thai, Shan, and Burman southward expansion, leaving a reduced Mon empire long known to the Thai as Hongsawadi (Mon: Haṃsavati; Burmese: Bago; English: Pegu). Subsequent centuries of Burmese depredations upon the Mon heartland radiating from Pegu to Yangon (English: Rangoon), Satem (Syriam), Sutham (Thaton), Molamloeng (Moulmein), Maotama (Martaban), Tawai (Tavoy), and Tanao-si (Tenasserim) left a much-diminished culture zone (Dhida 1999; South 2003, pp. 49–77).