The Tiger Balm Gardens or Haw Par Villa, built in the 1930s by overseas Chinese pharmaceuticals tycoon Aw Boon Haw, has been and remains a symbol of the positioning of Singapore's Chineseness. In the colonial era, it marked the success not only of one man but also of the Chinese migrant community. In the later period of nation-building, it was initially considered as a challenge to multiracialism and nationhood. However, as state policy shifted towards an ethnicized cultural identity as prompted by the rise of Asia as a major economic force, especially China, the Villa was renovated first into an orientalized theme park and then resuscitated as the repository of diasporic Chinese entrepreneurship. Amidst these state initiatives, the history of the Villa and its founder were sidelined.

Siam and the Semi-colonial Issue

The issue of Siam as a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation, mooted by Thai Marxists in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, has by the 1990s by and large been set aside by critically-minded academics for its inability to provide a lineage for the strain of capitalist mode of production that has emerged by the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the ‘semi-colonial’ as an analytical framework retains its force in confronting the assumed independence and an unreflexive racially based elite nationalism that has so defined Thai self-representations and public culture, but also in how Thailand is understood by others.

The establishment of the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall marks the PAP government's charting of a revolutionary, modernising genealogy of seismic proportions for the fashioning of a ‘Big Singapore’ as the political, economic and cultural focus of the Chinese diaspora. Such effort in reorienting history is problematic and the ethnicisation of national identity is contested, not least by Singapore's Chinese-language intellectuals.

The uniqueness of Siam in being the only independent Southeast Asian country in the age of nineteenth-century colonialism is a mantra that persists largely to this day. It held that it was the calibre of the Siamese monarchs in particular King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), the fifth reign of the present regnant dynasty, which saved the country from succumbing to the powerful and predatory west. By continuing his father King Mongkut's (1851–1868) foresight in adopting an open door policy by signing the Bowring Treaty (1855) and reforming the country's administration in conformity to their model of government, the king gained the recognition by the Europeans of Siam as a civilised country. As a tribute to the king's greatness, in particular for his benevolent rule and pivotal reforms, the ‘colloquial, affectionate, yet awesome’ title ‘Lord of Life’ (chao chiwit) was used by his subjects especially around this period, according to the royal family historian writing in 1960 who was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn. In 2003, another direct descendant of the king wrote that it was no less the ‘Lord of Life, Lord of the Realm, the fountain and embodiment of moral and spiritual power itself who recognised that survival in the face of colonialism necessitated engagement in diplomacy and internal reforms. By dint of such enlightened measures, the Siamese polity was transformed and strengthened. in political history, the emphasis has been on the efficiency and good governance made possible by the modernising administrative system.

Founded in 1979, the Thai popular monthly magazine Sinlapa watthanatham aimed to make history, art and culture into areas of contestation against long-established official interpretations, and thus encourage a broad-based readership to reassess their assumptions about Thai-ness. However, the question of magazine sales, the context of the economic boom, and the crisis that erupted in 1997 led the magazine to succumb to consumerism, as well as a conservative ideology.

The reign of King Chulalongkorn, conventionally regarded as the turning point in Thailand's political development, is also understood as offering a paradigm for social history. In particular it set down standards for appreciating courtly female behaviour which entailed political submission and passivity — attitudes championed by conservative elements during the 1970s. This article argues that palace women in fact did have their own understanding of the changing world and made efforts to better their lives by moving beyond what was prescribed for them.

This essay is an exploration of one aspect of the politics of gender representation in Thailand, namely, how the portrayals of Siamese women in Thai popular histories form part of the present-day shaping of gender relations. I argue that moving in tandem with developments in academic historiography, popular history since the 1980s has become a battleground for cultural hegemony.

Hitherto the preserve of antiquarians, popular history has caught the interest of the emergent middle class, who are intent on inscribing their reading of the past on the Thai cultural landscape. Where gender relations are concerned, the middle class has worked out a modern rationale for the traditional view that women are subordinate to men. However, critical scholars, alert to what they see as the perpetuation of the historical subordination of women through the medium of popular history, have sought to stem the tide by addressing their critiques of the middle-class interpretations to a popular audience.

Thin-films of Ni and Ti were formed by sputter co-deposition of Ni and Ti onto amorphous SiO2 and single crystal NaCl and Sapphire substrates. Films were characterized as follows: a) The chemical composition of the films was analysed by EDAX b) The gross morphology was examined by Scanning Electron Microscopy. c) The crystal phases were indentified by X-ray diffraction and Electron diffraction. Intermetallic NiTi has been identified in samples annealed in vacuo at 850°C. Annealing at 500°C in vacuum produced chemical separation of the Ni and Ti. This effect may be due to a narrow solidus region for the existence of NiTi and inhomogeneities due to uneven deposition of the Ni and Ti.

Analyses of Thai political economy since World War II have sought to define the stages of Thai social evolution from earliest times to the present and to determine whether or not the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the 1932 coup mark changes in the social formation and/or the mode of production. Over the past decade, as a consequence of political change in the mid-1970s, a new generation of historians has rejuvenated Marxist methodology, using it to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns, to dismantle the court-centered historiography, and to erect a new historical paradigm for the late twentieth century.

When King Chulalongkorn surveyed his realm on his second coronation in 1873 to mark the termination of the five-year regency at his coming of age, he saw much that was in need of reform. The king's assessment was that the monarch was but a figurehead; the existing framework of government was actually run by the leading nobility, foremost of whom were the regent and his family who wielded power based on their long dominance over the key administrative posts and the economic benefits that accrued from their official positions. From Chulalongkorn's viewpoint, the regent's family, which reached the pinnacle of its power during the regency of Chuang Bunnag (1868–73), dominated the bureaucracy, in effect controlled the administration of the country, and enriched itself with great facility at the expense of the king and the country. Through the political patronage that they extended to the tax farmers, the officials had assumed control of the tax farming system, the most pervasive method of revenue collection that was employed in the kingdom since the Third Reign. The germ of King Chulalongkorn's historic reform of the administrative system, restructured along rational, functional lines, thus lay in his desire to regain control over the government and economy, which had been gradually slipping out of the Crown's grip since the reign of his father, King Mongkut. The king was determined not to allow the situation to persist where substantial revenue from the tax farms was being channelled into the coffers of the leading noble families and the tax farmers themselves, to the detriment of the state.