The arch-nationalist king had more Chinese blood than Thai

Evidence

Why the change? Doubtless dramatic events immediately preceding and following his coronation in November 1910 had their effect. The previous June the police had had to be called out to suppress a general stike by Bangkok’s Chinese merchants (upwardly mobile children of early immigrants) and workers, marking their initiation into Siamese politics. The following year, the Celestial Monarchy in Peking was swept away by a heterogeneous assortment of groups from which merchants were by no means absent. ‘The Chinese’ thus appeared as harbingers of a popular republicanism profoundly threatening to the dynastic principle. Second, as the words ‘Jews’ and ‘Orient’ suggest, the Anglicized monarch had imbibed the particular racisms of the English ruling class. But, in addition, there was the fact that Wachirawut was a sort of Asian Bourbon. In a pre-national era his ancestors had readily taken attractive Chinese girls as wives and concubines, with the result that, Mendelianly-speaking, he himself had more Chinese ‘blood’ than Thai. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 383

Categorization

• QUESTION: Wachirawut’s own partial Chinese descent while pioneering anti-Chinese nationalism is a rich contradiction — how did he resolve the cognitive dissonance?
• XREF: The ‘assimilated insider becomes the fiercest exclusionist’ dynamic parallels colonial mimicry anxieties in Orientalism and the psychology of the colonized subject. — connects to: Modern Thai elites deny Cambodian descent from Angkor to justify contemporary bigotry — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 709

Related

• Modern Thai elites deny Cambodian descent from Angkor to justify contemporary bigotry (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Modern Thai elites deny Cambodian descent from Angkor to justify contemporary bigotry #corroborates (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 709