absolutelyBangkok archive · Being farang
Originally published May 26, 2008
Let’s talk modern anthropology. There are few things that raise Thai hackles more than hearing their beloved country branded by foreigners as a sex paradise. Blame Vietnam and R&D and desperately poor provinces where mom wants a fridge and dad a new truck. It’s all about economics, stupid.
The recently discovered journal of a 17th century Austrian merchant though offers that same lopsided view of Siam’s lewd ladies — as if Vietnam happened centuries ago. Old explorer Christoph Carl Fernberger von Egenberg, who arrived in the harbor of Ayutthaya in November 1624, suggests that Thailand and its women have long proved seductive to travelers.
Today we know: Austrian Christoph Carl Fernberger was Thailand’s first documented continental European seduced traveler so to say. If not Thailand’s first foreign punter who later fled the scene altogether. As Thailands newer reputation doesn’t date back to the Vietnam War, as many might imagine, when American servicemen flooded into Bangkok and Pattaya to dwell on girls, drugs and rock’n’roll.
In fact, as Austrian historian Helmut Lukas researched, that image can be trced back to the 17th century when junk merchants regularly passed through the kingdom. Christoph Carl Fernberger von Egenberg, Lukas claims, described Siamese women as “excessively lewd”.
Same same but different.
“They are always approaching the men and urging them to go with them into their houses and have sex with them,” the merchant wrote in his diary, which was discovered in 1972.
Fernberger arrived in Siam during the reign of King Songtham. He was 26 at the time. His accounts of his travels in the region, which include Siam and Pattani — he even traveled as far as to the Mariana Islands -, are almost unknown to foreign scholars. Many Austrian historians though believe Fernberger was the first of their countrymen to set foot in the two Southeast Asian harbor cities.
That first Austrian in Ayutthaya was impressed by the wealth of the kingdom and the wise rule of the Siamese king as well as his “open door policy” and strict law enforcement, says associate professor Helmut Lukas who talked about Fernberger’s diary at a Siam Society lecture organized in cooperation with Chulalongkorn University’s Center for European Studies.
Lukas however doesn’t agree with Fernberger’s lopsided perspective of the women in Ayutthaya: “Like any big port, Ayutthaya had a well-established prostitution ring catering to foreign seaman. But it would be wrong to assume that their behavior was indicative of Thai women of that era,” says Lukas, an academic with the Social Anthropology Research Unit, Center for Studies in Asian Cultures, at Vienna’s Austrian Academy of Science.
As an independent observer with no obligations to a trading company, Fernberger’s diary may offer an alternative perspective though to the often one-sided Dutch sources, the Austrian anthropologist believes.
“But his pages on the women in Ayutthaya were based on his impressions of a very limited area, which he wrongly extrapolated to the entire country,” Lukas points out.
Still, many Dutch merchants held similar views of the woman they took as their “wives” in Ayutthaya, according to professor Barbara Watson Andaya, author of the paper “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern Southeast Asia”
published in the Journal of Women’s History in 1998.
The Dutch in Ayutthaya “even referred to their “wives” as whores, sluts and trollops and the like,” writes the professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii.
While researching her paper, Watson discovered that other than several works covering prostitution, no historical investigation has been carried out into the changing attitudes toward sexuality in Southeast Asia, despite the fact that the “high status” of women is often cited as characteristic of the region.
Siamese women in the 17th century are also mentioned in the diary of French ambassador Simon de la Loubre, who arrived in Ayutthaya some thirty years after Fernberger.
The ambassador writes in his memoirs about a brothel in the capital of Ayutthaya, which was home to some 600 women from different levels of society, including the daughters and wives of the court’s noblemen.
La Loubre, who was in Siam during the reign of King Narai, also relates how prostitution tax, collected from those with permission to run brothels, was first imposed in this reign and that the largest brothel was run by one of the king’s noblemen.
Prostitution in the port city of Pattani is also mentioned in the journals of several 17th century foreign traders.
The Dutch merchant Van Neck, who arrived in Pattani in the early 1600s, describes the women at the harbor and their services.
“When foreigners come from other lands to do their business, men come and ask them whether they desire a woman. The young women and girls also come and present themselves, from whom they may choose the one most agreeable to them, provided they agree what he shall pay for certain months. Once they agree about the money (which does not amount to much for so great a convenience), she comes to his house, and serves him by day as his maidservant and by night as his wedded wife.”
For his part, the foreign trader had to agree not to consort with other women while the temporary wife was similarly forbidden to converse with other men. The “marriage” was deemed to last for as long as the man kept up his residence, “in good peace and unity.”
Fernberger, who arrived in Pattani in December 1624, wasn’t interested in hooking up with a woman at the harbor. His attention was on the female ruler with whom he had been granted an audience.
Pattani was under the rule of Raja Ungu, the third of four successive queens to take the throne. Fernberger describes her as an absolutist ruler who did not listen to any council.
In his diary he describes the royal entourage of 200 women. As a sign of royal power, she kept about fifty elephants and possessed some fifty men who she used for her sexual pleasure.
Lukas says the women of Pattani, and especially the queen, enjoyed many liberties.
“This proves that being a Muslim doesn’t mean being “macho” or a misogynist. The gender equality in the old Pattani kingdom sets an example for modern times,” he says.
But some of Fernberger’s accounts about the queen are much less credible.
Lukas smiles as he recounts Fernberger’s reason for leaving Pattani.
He writes that after being granted an audience with Raja Ungu, she provided him with a house and ten slaves. He later helped her fight the Siam invasion in January 1625 in which Pattani won the battle. The young Austrian describes how the queen expressed her gratitude by sending him a present and passing on a message that she would visit him at night.
But Fernberger got deadly scared. He wrote “a Malay colonel gave him to understand that the queen intended to make love with him,” professor Lukas laughs. “As he’d heard that men who had failed to meet her high expectations were ordered to be killed, Fernberger clandestinely sneaked down to the shore, boarded a small sailboat and went back to Ayutthaya. His stay in Pattani lasted 71 days.”
In the original German Fernberger had written:
“Denn ich lieber begehrte im Wasser zu sterben, als nach gehabter Unzucht auf Befehl der Königin” — which translates as:
“I rather preferred to die in the water than after done fornication by the order of the queen.”
Via The Nation
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