Word: phumiphon
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...Clouds Gather. Chumphot, Phumiphon and many of their countrymen had been strongly influenced by the West. For good & ill, Siam was changing, yet it remained outside the main patterns of transition through which its neighbors were passing. Unique in many ways, Siam was most important in the fact that it had escaped any serious contact with Western imperialism. India had been unified by imperialism and its cultures had been left more or less intact under a veneer of Westernization; its rulers in independence were trying to bring old & new together. Burma's ancient way of life had been...
Siam's virtues and defects were still largely its own, not a bastard product of two civilizations. Phumiphon's never-never land was a land of what-might-have-been, a jewel of (almost) unblemished Easternism shining on the junk heap of the wrecked empires. Like a jewel, Siam was temptingly easy to pick up. The Communist imperialists who had taken China might turn Siam's way any time...
...from Brookline. Phumiphon had been born in 1927 in a Cambridge hospital while his father, Prince Mahidol, half-brother of Prajadhipok,* studied medicine at Harvard. The first years of Phumiphon's life were spent in the suburban atmosphere of Brookline, Mass. A few years later, after his father's death, he had moved with his mother, sister, and elder brother Ananda to Lausanne, Switzerland. Six years after that childless King Prajadhipok abdicated in favor of his nephew Ananda...
...Phumiphon went home to Siam with his brother. Ananda, Siamese remember, was a strange young King. Full of Western ideas, he refused to talk to visitors who sat on the floor below _ him Siamese fashion, insisting that they sit on chairs level with himself. Since shyness is a Siamese characteristic, the visitors often found themselves unable to talk in such a presumptuous position; King and subject would sit in silence, both blushing. Siamese tell of Ananda's visits to little villages near Bangkok. He would summon up all his courage, walk up to an old woman and ask, "Grandmother...
...Phumiphon was desolated. Wandering about the palace grounds, he saw a guard turn a group of peasants away from Ananda's funeral urn (in which his remains were folded into the traditional fetal position), because the peasants were not dressed in proper mourning. Brusquely Phumiphon ordered the gates opened to them. Two months after Ananda's death, Phumiphon left "to resume his studies" in Switzerland. Two million tearful Siamese lined his road to the airport, casting jasmine flowers under the wheels of his car. Ananda's funeral was postponed four years until Phumiphon got back...