The Dutch consular services in Bangkok (1860-1942) – part 1.

From the Bangkok Calendar 1868

Due to the simple fact that a Dutch embassy was not formally opened in Bangkok until after the Second World War, the consular services formed the main diplomatic representation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Siam and later Thailand for more than eighty years. I would like to reflect on the not always flawless history of this diplomatic institution in the Land of Smiles and the, at times, quite colorful Dutch consuls in Bangkok.

After Siam had opened itself up to economic development and free trade on April 18, 1855 by concluding the Bowring Treaty with the British, it was not long before the Dutch also took an interest in Siam again. This in itself was not surprising, because this was not only in line with expectations, but also tied in again with a long historical tradition. After all, the Republic of the United Provinces was, after Portugal, the first Western power with which the Siamese court had established official diplomatic relations at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Relations, which were crowned with a mission sent in 1608 by the Siamese monarch Ekathotsarot to the governor, Prince Maurits. The first of its kind in Siamese history. For more than a century and a half there were intense contacts between the two nations, but after the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767 and the bankruptcy of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) in 1799, these were completely broken.

In December 1860, after almost two years of prior bilateral consultations, the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation was concluded between the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Siam. In this treaty, the Netherlands formally recognized the sovereignty of Siam. In return, the Netherlands was granted the right to open its own permanent diplomatic representation in the form of a consulate in Bangkok. Dutch nationals who stayed in Bangkok or were in transit fell under the jurisdiction of this consulate from now on. In this way, Siam officially granted extraterritoriality to the Dutch. They were thus allowed to try their own compatriots for offenses committed on Siamese territory or in Siamese territorial waters. The treaty also gave the Dutch the right to practice free trade and to settle in Bangkok and the surrounding area. The Dutch consul was authorized to issue passports to Dutch citizens with which they could travel freely in the interior. The import and export taxes were fixed and could only be levied once. And Dutch traders were given the right to do business with individual Siamese without the mediation of third parties.

Although at that time hardly any Dutch businessmen or companies were active in Siam, the establishment of a Dutch consulate proved to be useful, especially as a point of contact and reference for the Dutch companies in the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia who might be interested in exploring then opening up the Siamese market. This link with commerce immediately became clear with the appointment of the North German merchant Paul Johann Martin Pickenpack as the first and otherwise unpaid consul of the Netherlands in Siam. Together with his brother Vincent, he was, despite his young age, one of the senior businessmen in Bangkok. On January 1, 1858, together with his trading partner Theodor Thiess, he had founded the first German firm in Siam. But the Pickenpack family had already built up a small but fine business empire on the Malaysian island of Penang, where, coincidentally or not, a number of Dutch companies were also active. Paul and Vincent were not only co-owners of the American Steam Rice Mill, the largest foreign rice mill in Bangkok, but also developed many activities in banking, insurance and as ship brokers. At one point they even started to carry out construction work for the Siamese government with German engineers hired by them. Paul Pickenpack also turned out to be a devil-do-all on a diplomatic level. After all, he not only represented the Netherlands, but also the German Hanseatic cities and Sweden and Norway.

Consul Pickenpack

His most important diplomatic achievement was probably the preparation of the historic journey that the brand new and underage Siamese king Chulalongkorn made to the Dutch East Indies. Historic, because it was the first large-scale foreign trip ever by a Siamese monarch. The young king, who was fascinated by the Western world, initially intended to sail to Europe, but Si Suriyawongse, the then regent of Siam, thought that was just a little too risky for his pupil. Sometime in the mid-1870s, the court circles made it clear to Paul Pickenpack that, in addition to a visit to Singapore, which was under British rule, the king would also like to visit the Dutch East Indies. Pickenpack immediately contacted the government in Batavia, which was immediately seized by a slight panic. Not only did the High Lords in Batavia not know how to receive this monarch according to protocol, but they were also frightened when Pickenpack made it appear that Chulalongkorn might be accompanied by a retinue consisting of a thousand people… Who would that pay? In February 1871, the governor-general was given the go-ahead by the Minister of the Colonies and instructed to receive the monarch in accordance with his rank and to make the unavoidable expenses for it. Preparations were hastily started because, according to the Dutch government, it was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that they wanted to do everything they could to maintain the fragile balance of power in the region on the one hand and to strengthen its trade interests on the other. A few months later, Paul Pickenpack was able to accompany the king on his trip to Batavia. However, the Dutch consul did not stay with him, but returned to Bangkok almost immediately after the arrival of the Siamese delegation in the Dutch East Indies.

However, the dealings of the first Dutch consul were not without scrutiny and he clashed quite a few times with the Siamese authorities. For example, Pickenpack was accused of conflict of interest a few times. But also theloose' The life course of the Pickenpack brothers apparently caused problems, as witnessed by a number of complaints that arrived in The Hague. In those early years, things were rather informal in the consular service, with Vincent regularly replacing his brother when he was on a business trip. When Paul decided to return to Europe in 1871, Vincent replaced him – despite the objections expressed by the Siamese government – ​​as acting consul until the spring of 1875.

In the 15 years that the Pickenpack brothers looked after the Dutch - and of course their own - interests, the consulate had always been located in the company buildings of the firm Thiess & Pickenpack and later in those of Paul Pickenpack's company. The new Dutch consul, Willem Hendrik Senn van Basel, was apparently best friends with the Pickenpacks. Not only did he allow the consulate to continue to exist peacefully in Paul Pickenpack's company building, but he also moved into his home, at “lack of suitable accommodation” in Bangkok….

Senn van Basel was 34 years old when, at the insistence of the then Minister of Colonies, Mr. W. Baron van Goltstein, by Royal Decree of February 18, 1875, was appointed salaried consul of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Bangkok. He had everything to make it in'the East'. Huybert Senn van Basel, his great-grandfather, had been chief merchant of the VOC, Receiver-General of the King's Finances and Domains in the Dutch East Indies, member of the Council of the Indies, and alderman of Batavia. His uncle, Baron Jean Chrétien Baud, was not only a former Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, but also a former Minister of the Navy and the Colonies. He himself was a former senior civil servant in the Dutch East Indies and he spoke Malaysian And yet less than two years after his appointment in Bangkok, he was honorably discharged and he disappeared silently from the consular service and from Siam… What was the reason for this very short career?

Senn van Basel had arrived in Bangkok on May 24, 1875 after an eventful sea voyage and had presented his credentials to King Chulalongkorn on June 5. Just as had happened to his predecessors, the Pickenpack brothers from Hamburg, he was already accused a few months later of self-enrichment and of cheating in providing proof of Dutch citizenship to persons who were not entitled to it. In concrete terms, the whole thing revolved around the Chinese traders from the Dutch East Indies and the Siamese who were used by the latter as mediators and negotiators. These Siamese were only too happy to be recognized as Dutch subjects because in this way they believed they could escape the high Siamese taxes and, just like the Dutch, have trade privileges. Senn van Basel is said to have accepted gifts from a number of them and asked to borrow money. I leave it open whether this was really the case, but it is striking that after the arrival of Senn van Basel, the number of Chinese who enjoyed Dutch protection suddenly increased spectacularly from 15 to 174…

It was therefore not really surprising that senior Siamese government officials began to question all these Chinese people, who suddenly 'Dutch blood flows through the veins….' The consul - just like the Pickenpacks - may have been the victim of all kinds of scheming or Siamese intrigues, but the charges against him apparently weighed heavily enough for the Dutch government to open an official investigation into possible malpractice or abuses. In the spring of 1877 this resulted in a tightening of the modalities. From then on, all Chinese traders who claimed the protection of the consulate and who wanted to do business in Siam had to prove that they were born in the Dutch East Indies. Moreover, they had to demonstrably have resided there for at least six years without interruption. This special arrangement came into force in May 1877 and was to be maintained until 1903.

Despite this tightening, Senn van Basel's position in Bangkok turned out to be untenable. He had made himself very unpopular and in August 1877 he applied for and received an honorable discharge. Perhaps this was due to one gentlemen's agreement where no one lost face. Shortly after his discharge, Senn van Basel returned to the Dutch East Indies where he began to write down his memories of the exotic and alluring Siam. This one still worth reading Sketches from Siam appeared as a serial The Indian Guide – State & Literature Magazine which rolled off the presses in Amsterdam from 1879 under the final editing of G. Van Kesteren. Senn van Basel's pen fruits proved so popular that they were already bundled in 1880 into a booklet of 122 pages with the same title, which was printed and published by JH de Bussy in Amsterdam.

David Banks Sickels

The sudden departure of Senn from Basel led to another diplomatic vacuum. Apparently, in the Netherlands it was not possible to immediately move a new consul from the polder land to the Far East and the Dutch consulate was – temporarily – taken over by the American consul, the former war correspondent and author David Banks Sickels and his vice-consul JW Torrey. However, the latter soon came into conflict with the Chinese traders who operated under the wings of the Dutch consulate. In early March 1878 he spat his bile about this situation in a sharp letter to the Dutch consul in Singapore, the British trader William Henry Macleod Read. He would not have to complain much longer because he apparently did not know that a few weeks earlier, with a Royal Decree of February 2, 1878, no. 22 J. Salmon, had been appointed consul of the Netherlands in Bangkok.

This former naval officer and former consul in Aden apparently did not want to start his new assignment unprepared. Before landing in Bangkok, he first made a stopover in Batavia, where he not only took the time to thoroughly study a suitcase with documents left behind by Senn van Basel, but also held meetings with the Chamber of Commerce in Batavia and the Semarang Trade Association. From these exploratory conversations, he learned that hardly any Dutch people traded in Siam, but that it was mainly Chinese – largely from the large Chinese community in Semarang – who were involved in this. Just like his predecessor, after his arrival in Bangkok, he soon had to deal with the protection of the interests of the Dutch-Chinese nationals established in Siam. The migration of ethnic Chinese to Siam boomed during that period and, as we saw earlier, had led to restrictions. To avoid this, a number of these Chinese followed a route that first led them to the Dutch East Indies and from there to Siam. In that period, the number of crimes committed by these Chinese and their Siamese accomplices increased to such an extent that J. Salmon felt compelled, with the permission of the Siamese and Dutch governments, to launch a so-called 'Chinese council' configure. This was an advisory board of four ethnic Chinese, which supervised the actions and activities of the Chinese, who were registered as Dutch subjects at the consulate. However, its establishment had little effect, as the 'Captain', an ethnic Chinese trader from Java, withdrew all power.

Between July 1878 and December of the same year, Salmon had to act in 81 cases involving these Chinese. In the first two months of 1879 alone, the consul reported no less than 31 such criminal cases… The consul indicated in his correspondence that these cases took up a disproportionate amount of the precious time. Almost inevitably, the workload and climate began to take their toll. It's starting to sound a bit like a hackneyed tune, but apparently it all became too much for this Dutch consul. In October 1879 he asked - in vain, incidentally - for permission to take a convalescent leave in China. Two years after his appointment, in February 1880 to be precise, J. Salmon had to leave Bangkok because of a serious nervous breakdown. Apparently this created another problem because again in The Hague they did not have one, two, three replacements ready. Only more than four months later, on 12 June 1880, Pieter Simon Hamel from Zeeland was appointed acting consul by Royal Decree no. 18. A year later he was formally, by Royal Decree of 16 May 1881, Nr. 25 Appointed Consul General of the Netherlands in Bangkok. By the same Royal Decree, the unfortunate J. Salmon was honorably discharged from service.

Hamel, a former teacher from Breskens, had been consul-general in Elmina on the African Gold Coast - now Ghana - where he tried for a while to recruit African mercenaries to enlist in the KNIL or to work as laborers on the plantations in Suriname. Because the British these 'negro recruitment' seen as a disguised form of slavery, Hamel had to shift his field of action to Ivory Coast and Liberia, but he was not successful anywhere. He arrived in Bangkok in early October 1880 and immediately announced his intention to put things in order in a letter to the Foreign Minister:As far as I have been able to determine, the prestige of the consulate has been damaged by abuses, mostly of a legal nature. I will do everything I can to rectify this, but I must proceed with caution….He immediately suggested thatChinese council' to dissolve. According to his information, there were only two other Dutch nationals in Bangkok besides himself. He also counted 212 Dutch-Chinese traders under the protection of the consulate with 250 assistants and 265 Malays who could also count on the consular services. He wrote about them that hardly a day passed without problems between them and the Siamese. For every matter, no matter how silly, the consul was informed. This in turn led to lengthy investigations and extensive correspondence in English, Siamese or Malaysian, which, in his view, unnecessarily increased the workload. Moreover, due to the high level of corruption in the country, he was obliged to turn directly to the Siamese government or the king with great regularity… He decided to ease tensions with the Siamese authorities and reduce consular charges by increasing the number of Chinese traders drastically reduced from 212 to 112 under the protection of the consulate.

The energetic Hamel had clearly not been idle and at the end of November 1880 submitted a memorandum to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in The Hague with the proposal to elevate the consulate to consulate-general. Not, as he explained in his accompanying letter dated November 23, 1880, out of personal ambition, but because in earlier years most European governments had been represented by trading consuls and the title consul was therefore the idea in the eyes of the Siamese authorities “miss’ completely excluded and that this character was accorded only to consuls-general and equivalent senior diplomatic officials. In other words, it mainly had to do with status and upgrading. Two things that King Chulalongkorn and his entourage turned out to be very sensitive to. This was also the reason why the main Western consulates, such as the French, English and American, were upgraded to consulates-general in the same period. As a result, in July 1881 the Dutch consulate in Bangkok was also elevated to consulate general. This demarche was not without significance because it confirmed the increasing importance that the Dutch state and the Dutch business community were beginning to attach to the economic added value that Southeast Asia could offer. Siam was increasingly seen as a sales and transit area for goods from the Dutch East Indies. Direct trade between the Netherlands and Siam may have been virtually non-existent, but that was no longer the case for trade relations between the Dutch East Indies and Siam. Hamel had calculated that exports from Bangkok to Batavia in 1880 accounted for a turnover of 1.500.000 dollars, while imports had a value of 60.000 dollars. 72 Dutch ships had set sail for Bangkok that year, while 102 ships had set sail from Bangkok to Batavia…

This increasing importance was also manifested in the strongly expanded occupation of the Dutch consular services. By the autumn of 1881, the staff of the Dutch diplomatic mission in Bangkok, in addition to the consul general, consisted of a special interpreter who also served as secretary, a first interpreter with a clerk subordinate to him, a second interpreter and a bailiff. The latter was in turn assisted by a police officer and a prison guard.

Around 1883, however, there was also talk of bringing together the consulate-general in Bangkok and the consulate in Singapore under one name. After all, they wanted to make consular services in Asia more efficient and, above all, more cost-effective. Consequently, it was proposed that a vice-consul should be appointed in Bangkok and a consul-general in Singapore, who would occasionally visit Bangkok for inspection. This proposal was made for two reasons: First, because the number of Chinese and Malay nationals, who were under the protection of the consulate-general, began to decline sharply, as well as the number of Dutch-Indies nationals, who settled permanently in Siam. Second, because Siam's tropical climate clearly had a wearisome effect on Europeans. After all, most Dutch representatives had to leave Bangkok for health reasons.

At the beginning of June 1887, Hamel, suffering from severe fevers, left for the Netherlands. In 2014 the book 'Tropic years. In the footsteps of PS Hamel, Consul General in Africa and Asia' by his descendant, the journalist Hans Walraven. In the same month of June of 1887, a memorandum was published by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs in which the question was asked whether the high costs of keeping the Dutch consulate – general in Bangkok – about 17.000 guilders open per year – still outweighed the – disappointing – benefits…. Perhaps this was the reason why another diplomatic vacuum arose because as acting consul general, the French consul general, Camille Le Jumeau, acted as count de Kergaradec until the vacancy for a new Dutch consul general was filled. This Breton naval officer had previously been the French consul in Hanoi. He did not ask the Dutch government for compensation for his services and the surviving correspondence showed that he believed that the Dutch representation in Bangkok should not be disbanded and that its costs should be covered by the income. He therefore insisted that his successor should put his money where his mouth is.