As a boy, I was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes.footnote1 He took drugs, of course—very shocking—but he was extremely clever. I was struck by what he said to Watson, who was rather dim: ‘When you’re searching for the solution to a problem, don’t look at what you can see. Look at what you can’t see.’ When I became a scholar and a teacher, the first thing I would tell my students was: ‘Look at what’s in front of you, but think about what is missing.’ And then some very interesting things start to happen. In the struggle for political power in Thailand between the Reds and the Yellows—which has been going on for fifteen years, getting hotter and hotter, more and more violent, with huge mobilizations and heated oratory—I noticed something that was missing.

The language used by both sides is very ugly. For example, Yingluck Shinawatra, Thailand’s first female prime minister, was always called a prostitute by the Yellow Shirts, who said she was very stupid and just a puppet for her brother, Thaksin.footnote2 The labels applied to men are equally harsh: reptile, idiot, gangster, homosexual, traitor, coward, dirty dog, corrupt, uneducated—all kinds of things. But there is one word that doesn’t appear, even though it’s rather mild: jek. This is the old expression for an overseas Chinese. If you are in the Thai countryside, you will see signs that say ‘nice jek restaurant’, and nobody is upset about it, although the rich, bourgeois Sino-Thais don’t like to use the term. So why is it not part of the political discourse? Strikingly, another term has become very popular in the last thirty years or so: lukchin, which means son or child of a Chinese. Students and intellectuals who belong to the Chinese diaspora have begun asking to be referred to in this way. Thailand is full of minorities, fifty or sixty at least, but they never call themselves child of this or child of that.

Journalists and scholars, both foreign and local, have put forward a number of explanations for the hatred and the violence of Thai politics: it is a struggle between dictatorship and democracy, conservatives and populists, monarchists and republicans, honesty and corruption—or between one class and another. These explanations are partial at best, and none of them captures the whole truth. Another theory speaks of Bangkok arrogance pitted against the rest of the country, which certainly has something to do with it. But in itself this cannot explain the most striking aspect of the whole political struggle, which is the regional distribution of support for the Reds and Yellows. The south is completely in the hands of the latter; Bangkok is also solidly Yellow; but the north and north-east of Thailand are Red strongholds. There is no explanation in terms of class conflict that can truly account for this polarization, and it has nothing to do with democracy either. Commentators do not talk about this regional dimension, even though it has been evident for a long time.

An encounter during a visit to Thailand encouraged me to think about this question. I was travelling to the airport in Bangkok; the taxi driver was an elderly Chinese man from the local Chinatown. We began talking about the political situation, and I asked him who he supported. He said, ‘Of course, I support Thaksin’, the leader of the Reds. Was it because he liked his policies, his attempts to provide greater social support, health care for the poor and so on? ‘No, the reason I support him is because he is a Hakka like me. We Hakkas are the only honest people in Thailand today. We work very hard, we had the courage to fight against the Manchu, we didn’t torture the feet of our women, we’re not pretentious.’footnote3 I then asked his opinion of Abhisit Vejjajiva, the leader of the Yellow camp, whom he dismissed as a ‘goddamn Hokkien’; members of this group were lazy and not to be trusted in their dealings with others. My driver was equally hostile to Sondhi Limthongkul, another very important political figure.footnote4 ‘He is Hailamese. Those people are so dirty, they never even wash; they’re ignorant, stupid and cruel.’ At this point I plucked up the courage to ask him about the King: ‘He is a Teochew, and they are opportunists who always suck up to people more important than them. They are cowards, who only came here because they could not land in Vietnam or Indonesia or the Philippines.’ Finally I asked him what he thought about the rural Thai. ‘They are nice people, but they are quite different from the Chinese; they are happy as long as they have good food to eat, plenty of alcohol, and plenty of sex. They have no politics.’ ‘Doesn’t this mean’, I said, ‘that your view of Thai politics is like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms—the classic Chinese novel of feuding warlords.’footnote5 He agreed that it was. So the four main players in Thai politics all came from one or another of the Chinese diaspora groups, and my taxi driver hated three of them, but not his fellow Hakka, Thaksin.footnote6 This led me to wonder about the identity of the overseas Chinese in Thailand, and where exactly they fit into Thai society.

The story begins towards the end of the Ming dynasty, when the last and bravest enemies of the Manchu started to flee from places like Guangdong and Fujian in southern China. They knew they had lost the battle and could anticipate what punishment would be meted out to them, so they left the Middle Kingdom altogether. The Cantonese mostly worked their way down the coast to Vietnam; the Fujian or Hokkien people went further, to Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines; the Teochew followed them. The Hailamese and the Hakka came a century later.footnote7 Of course, we know very little about what the people who left China at that time actually thought about their own identity, as most of them were illiterate. There is an illustration of this from the early days of Spanish colonization in the Philippines. Fujian traders went back and forth between Manila and Guangdong, making a good profit from their journeys. The Spanish asked them who they were, and the traders replied, ‘We are sengli’. In their own language, that simply meant traders or merchants. But the Spanish thought it was their ethnicity, so well into the nineteenth century they referred to the traders as sangleyes, until someone pointed out that they should change the word to chino. If those people simply identified themselves as traders and said nothing about being Fujian or Chinese, that suggests that they had little sense of belonging to a larger group; their identity merely encompassed their families, their local villages and so forth. It took a long time for that to change.

The exodus from China was followed by another very important development. The modern history of Siam begins in 1767, nine years before the United States declared their independence from Britain. In that year, a huge Burmese army sacked, looted and burnt the ancient capital of the Ayutthaya kingdom. Much of the vanquished realm then fell under Burmese occupation, and Siam went through years of chaos and devastation. The whole native aristocracy of the old regime was obliterated. In time, a militarily gifted Sino-Thai, known today as Taksin the Great, began driving the Burmese out, making use of experienced Chinese sailors who had settled in south-eastern Siam. Taksin is still greatly venerated in Thailand, but he proved to be rather cruel and paranoid once he had declared himself king. After a reign lasting fourteen years, he was overthrown in 1782 in a palace coup by one of his generals, and executed along with all of his kinfolk. The general who replaced Taksin founded the Chakri dynasty, which has lasted to this day; he made Cambodia into a Siamese vassal state, and is known to posterity as Rama I.

Taksin had been the son of a Teochew man and a local woman, and his replacement was also of Teochew stock. This was the only example anywhere in Southeast Asia of an overseas Chinese becoming the local monarch; Taksin actually applied several times to Beijing for recognition, but the rulers of China were very reluctant to grant it to him, because they did not like the idea of a Chinese king outside the Middle Kingdom itself. He did everything he could to encourage his fellow Teochew to come to the new capital, which was a port city where trade expanded very rapidly. This capital was effectively the forerunner of modern Bangkok. Having a king of their own marked a huge advance for the Teochew, who had previously been regarded by the other Chinese communities as small and insignificant. They became the dominant group among the overseas Chinese in Siam; they married into high families, and were given important jobs at the Court. Well into the nineteenth century, the Chakri monarchs continued to use a red seal that came from the Chinese Zheng clan for important state documents.footnote8 Only with the rise of nationalism did it become embarrassing to admit that the king might be an immigrant, and the Chakri began to conceal the Sino-Thai origins of their dynasty.

The Hokkien, who, like the Teochew, had been concentrated in Chanthaburi, close to the modern Thai–Cambodian border, now began to move towards the west coast of southern Thailand, attracted by the growth of mining in this region. They also spread further south, into Penang and Singapore. Events in China precipitated further waves of emigration in the nineteenth century. The colossal Taiping Rebellion led to tremendous violence, especially from the generals who were sent to crush it, and caused a huge upheaval throughout southern China. It was at this time that the Hakka began to come, hoping to escape from the Manchu. They settled at first as farmers in an area west of Bangkok, near the Indian Ocean, thinking they would be safe there from anything that the Manchu might do; later they moved to western Thailand. The Hailamese travelled in the same direction, but went right down to the south. Although they were the poorest of all these groups, the Hailamese had one great advantage: they were immune to tropical diseases. Thailand’s southern area is still controlled today by Hokkien and Hailamese, and all the leaders of the Yellow Shirts come from this region. Periodically the Manchu would announce that anyone who had left China and wanted to come back would be summarily executed if they returned, so there was little incentive for them to do so.

The most important of the overseas Chinese in Thailand, who had close ties with the monarchy, managed the country’s trade and reaped the benefits from a monopoly held by the Court. But in 1855 the British arrived in Bangkok and issued a flat ultimatum to Rama IV, ordering him to break up the royal monopoly. This particular diplomat, John Bowring, is best known outside Thailand for having coined the slogan ‘Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade’. The Court’s trade monopoly was broken, which made things difficult for those Chinese who were used to working under royal patronage. It was also at this time that Britain forced open the southern Chinese ports in the Opium Wars. Colombia’s role in the contemporary drugs trade is nothing compared to the scale on which the British operated: all down Thailand’s western shore, as far as Penang and Singapore, the major import was now opium from British-ruled India. A new system had to be devised for handling the trade, based on tax farmers, who would be given the right to extract as much tax as they could from the local population, in return for a fee which they paid to the ruler. Of course, they would have to be very wealthy to pay for the license in the first place, but once they had it, it could be very lucrative indeed. The overseas Chinese who got hold of these tax farms also needed a lot of labour, tough young men to protect their territory and make sure that the boss got everything he expected. The opium trade was so successful, at least for the Court, that from the 1870s until the mid-twentieth century, year on year, about 50 per cent of the state budget came from opium.

During the reign of Rama V, which lasted from 1868 to 1910, there was a policy to encourage the immigration of poor, illiterate Chinese to work on commercial sugar plantations, or to build port facilities and a new transport network of roads and railways. The King’s policy closely followed the path of the British in Malaya and the Dutch in Sumatra; he was shrewd enough to realize that by importing workers from outside the country, he would avoid disturbing rural, semi-feudal Thai society too greatly. As a result, the country’s first working class was almost entirely Chinese, and it remained this way until World War Two. Initially, the Chinese were not allowed to consume opium, but for lonely, desperate young men working on construction projects, it was hard to resist such temptations. It was also a clever way for the bosses to keep their wages inside Siam; there was a tax farm in alcohol, a tax farm in prostitution, a tax farm in gambling. Most of these young men, if they did not die quickly, ended up very poor, and their money went into the pockets of the tax-farm organizations. There was a struggle over the control of opium among the secret societies that people in Thailand call ang yi, whose bosses would use some of the young men from their own groups as muscle, to beat or kill anyone who threatened the various tax farms.footnote9 Since there was always friction between the boss in one place and the boss somewhere else, there was an incredible amount of violence as these secret societies fought one another, even burning down each other’s towns, right up to the end of the nineteenth century. These were very dangerous groups of people, accustomed to fighting with every conceivable method. The whole phenomenon was only brought under control by one of the British policemen who had already organized the suppression of secret societies in Singapore. Officially the ang yi more or less disappeared; in reality they persisted, and would surface again during the Great Depression.