I have been conducting research on prewar Thai railways and commodity flow systems for the past four years. As there are very few primary sources on the subject in Japan, I have spent a total of about one year in Thailand, collecting documents primarily at the National Archives of Thailand. As a result of the considerable investment of time and labor, I was able to discover several types of sources. In this article, I would like to provide an overview of the materials I have gathered thus far.
The Annual Report on the Administration of the Royal State Railways are extremely important documents in understanding railway operations and economic conditions of prewar Thailand. It was published on an annual basis from 1897/98, when the first government-run railway started, to at least 1947. The contents include account sheets, traffic reports, the construction of new lines, track maintenance, rolling stock repairs, and various other subjects. What attracted my attention were the statistics on freight transport. These statistics specified how many tons of which product were delivered at which station. For example, for a given year, the statistics would indicate clearly how much rice was shipped from which station, and how much was dropped off at which station. If we construct a time-series from this data, it would be possible to see the changes in freight transportation for the forty-odd years after the railway first started operating.
I had some experience using this source before, and other works had indicated that this source was housed in the National Archives. However, I discovered that the National Archives did not possess the Annual for every year. Moreover, for the issues from the second half of the 1920s on, the thickness of each volume meant that the bindings on many of the issues were badly deteriorated. Photocopying was not permitted for the issues in poor condition. Consequently, for those issues that could not be photocopied, I reproduced the contents by hand. For example, in the 1927/28 issue, the freight transport statistics alone included some 50 items and 300 train stations, but I wrote out 5 years worth of these statistics. In some respects, I was fortunate to be able to look at these materials.
I heard from other researchers who visited the National Archive after me that due to the fact that many issues of the Annual had deteriorated even further, it was not possible to even read these issues. The deterioration apparently occurred as a result of the copies they had made of the issues I had requested. At the National Archives, in addition to the Annual , there are increasing numbers of documents which cannot be used as a result of poor states of preservation. Unless they microfilm the materials or improve methods of archival preservation, eventually, all the documents will deteriorate. The budgetary constraints on the National Archive make it difficult for the Archive to significantly improve its archival preservation standards. Japan is apparently throwing money at Thailand under the "New Miyazawa Plan": it would be nice if some of these funds were directed toward the preservation of these valuable documents in the National Archives.
The British Library, as it turned out, also possessed issues of the Annual. Prof. Suehiro Akira of the Institute of Social Sciences, Tokyo University, who researches technology formation in Thai railways, had obtained copies of the Annual from the British Library. After looking at Prof. Suehiro's copies, I found out that the issues that were missing at the National Archives were not missing in the British Library. As Prof. Suehiro had not made copies of the statistics I was working on, I went to London to look for these materials. To my disappointment, although I was able to track down where the materials were supposed to be housed, the originals had been lost during a large-scale move. I have yet to find any information on their present whereabouts, but I intend to continue the search when I visit London next.
Loss and damage are the great enemies to archives. The first time I encountered the Annual was in the Public Information Division of the State Railways of Thailand, the successor to the prewar Railway Bureau. Although the staff said, "We don't have old Annuals," after searching, they discovered in one cabinet three years-worth of issues, from 1934-35 to 1936/37, and the 1947 issue. I made copies of the freight transport statistics, but when I went 1-2 years later to the same office and asked the staff to look in the same cabinet to copy the rest of the pages, the issues could not be found. As the existence of the 1936/37 and 1947 issues had been confirmed only at this office, it was quite disappointing. As the 1947 issue was No. 51 and the 1936/37 was No. 40, I at least confirmed that the Annual had been published every year, even during wartime. At this point, all I can do is pray for no more loss and damage to the Annual, and continue to search for the missing ten years-worth of issues, wherever they may be.
The location of the most of the primary sources on railways have been identified in previous works. The documents in the National Archives are generally divided by individual Ministries. The most frequently used among these are the papers of the Royal Secretariat Department(Krom Ratchalekhathikan) and the Cabinet Secretariat Office(Samnak Lekhathikan Khana Ratthamontri). The former covers the years before 1932, and the latter covers the years after the coup d'etat of 1932. Both are collections of reports and applications from various Ministries to the King or the Prime Minister, and replies to these documents. The former is divided into three periods, the rule of the Kings Rama V, VI and VII, and is further subdivided by Ministry of document origin, then Department of origin. Thus, papers related to railways can be found by looking at the Ministry file (e.g. Ministry of Communication) which oversaw the Railway Department operations. (However, the Railway Department Annuals are placed under the Ministry of Finance files due to prior cataloguing arrangements).
I had no idea where materials for my other research topic, commodity flow, might be stored. In fact, I did not know whether such materials existed at all. Especially since I wanted to find out about regional commodity flow, I decided to start by looking at the reports of the provincial cities (Bai Bok Huamuang) in the Ministry of Interior files in the Royal Secretariat Department papers. These reports were organized by cities. The volume of these reports varied considerably by cities. The materials were categorized by year, but beyond that, there was no further subcategories. Under each year, the reports were arranged in order that they were sent. Under such conditions, I was forced to look at all the documents to find the types of materials I was looking for.
Previous works on regional or local history had always used these documents, but there was most likely no one, not even among Thai scholars, who had looked at these reports for all the cities. Of course, I was looking for specific information, so I did not read all the reports for all the cities closely. Nevertheless, there were 85 cities, most of them with one box of documents, but some with seven overflowing boxes of documents. Many of these materials were handwritten, and as the paper was coated (one reads the coated originals), the letters were even more unfocused and unclear than might be expected. The only reason I was able to go through the reports of all 85 cities was because I was in Thailand for a long-term period.
Despite all my efforts, I was still unable to find the materials I was looking for. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Most of the reports dealt with robbers, criminal court cases, or taxes to be sent to Bangkok, but nothing to do with commodity flow. Some interesting materials did come out the reports. For example, in 1885, King Rama V levied export-import tax on inland border cities at the same tax rates as those for Bangkok, and ordered each city to send the tax collection tables to Bangkok. The cities which followed this order calculated and sent in detailed export-import tax collection tables. Champasak, which was a vassal state of Thailand at the time, sent in detailed collection tables of Stoeng Treng (presently in Cambodia), which was under its control. All goods going to and from the the Northeast of Thailand, Laos and Saigon came through Stoeng Treng, a city on the Mekong River. Thus, the tax charts for Stung Treng were extremely valuable sources for looking at the commodity flow via the Mekong River.
Similar tax collection charts were kept on the coastal cities on the Malay peninsula. Some of these tax charts were also contained in the Ministry of Interior tax-related files. As I wanted to show that prior to the construction of the railways, commodity flow between Bangkok and peripheral areas under Thai control had been limited, it was very important for me to grasp the commodity flow between the regions in Thailand and areas outside of Thailand. These tax charts were useful in this regard. Among the principal areas for which I found tax charts were Luang Phrabang (presently in Laos), Stoeng Treng (presently in Cambodia), Takuapa (Southern Thailand), and Kelantan (Koto Bharu, presently in Malaysia). For some reason, there were many tax charts from areas which were under Thai control at the time but later fell out of Thai hands. The Kelantang tax chart was written in Arabic, with an accompanying Thai translation. The tax charts and reports from the North and Northeast were also written in regional script different from Thai script, an indication of how unintegrated the Thai kingdom was at the time.
As Thai territory was shrinking rapidly during this time, the fact that the archives from the time of King Rhama V contained materials sent in from cities such as Luang Phrabang and Stoeng Treng which are now not part of Thailand is not unnatural. However, many of the documents related to these types of cities are marked "Classified" and cannot be seen. The titles and index numbers of each document related to these cities are printed in the archive catalogue, but have "Classified, not open to viewing" written by them in hand in red ball-point. Clearly, these sources were labeled "Classified" considerably after they were sorted.
Currently, these cities belong to other countries, so it is unclear why these documents would be marked "Classified." Admittedly, there is a high probability that even if I were able to go through these documents, I would not find the information I was looking for. Nevertheless, at the very least, I would prefer to have the opportunity to check whether this is in fact the case. As the trade and commodity flow of these former outlying areas of Thailand remains an area I am most interested in, I can only wait and hope for the day when these documents will be declassified.
As noted above, the most commonly used sources are those of the Royal Secretariat Department and the Cabinet Secretariat Office. In addition to these two collections, there are archives collected and organized directly by the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Agriculture, and other individual ministries. These documents are not well organized, and as a result, it is difficult to find out what is contained in them. As the indexes and catalogues of these archives are not very detailed, these materials had not been used very much thus far. As I was in Thailand for an extended period this time, I was able to look at these sources as well, and discovered several important documents.
The archive I targeted was that of the Ministry of Agriculture. As in the case for other Ministry Archives, the index categories for this archive was not very detailed--for example, under one category, there were 1,000 titles listed, which can hardly be said to be a user-friendly system of categorizing. I started by looking documents which appeared to be relevant to my research. There were many different types of sources contained in these archives, but I concentrated on rice price reports on each province. The rice prices for the various regions were reported in the official Government Gazette until around 1912. I noticed that the rice prices in the North and the South were very high. I looked for sources that would confirm my deduction that with the diffusion of railways, the commodity flow would improve, resulting in a standardization of rice prices.
However, the going was not easy. There were tables which listed rice prices for various regions, but for the Central Chaophraya River Basin, there were no rice prices listed for the key areas in the North and the South. The same format sheet was used every year for the rice price tables, and as the sheets had printed on them "Rice Cultivation Reports for 6 Inner Circles and Phitsanulok Circle" (Raingan Kan Thamna Monthon Channai 6 Monthonkap Monthon Phitsanulok), it may be possible that rice prices for other regions were not considered important, although reports on cultivation area and harvest amounts seemed to have been sent in from areas outside of the 7 circles. Each year seemed to have the same information categories, so I assumed that there would be no exceptions.
However, to my surprise, I found rice prices for areas other than the usual 7 circles only in the records for March 1925. Since I had not come across any other sources which listed rice prices for the whole country pre or post 1925, this was quite a serendipity. I do not know the reason why such data was collected just for 1925, but as this source indicated a decline in rice prices in the North and the South, I was able to obtain at least some empirical evidence, although hardly definitive, to support my hypothesis on rice price standardization. It would appear that prices in the North dropped from the fact that rice could be transported by rail into Bangkok, resulting in an overall increase in rice production. In the South, the decrease in rice price probably stemmed from the fact that rice, which had previously been imported through Burma, came to be transported from other regions within Thailand in by rail. I was initially unable to find statistics for rice imports in the South, but again by coincidence, I found one document in the Ministry of Agriculture Archives which recorded rice import volumes in the South for the latter half of the 1920s. My research was largely based on such fortuitous finds.
One more discovery was related to rice transport on the Chaophraya Delta canal network. This was a record of the amount of rice, divided by region of origin, carried on ships which passed through each of the floodgates in the Chaophraya Delta canals. The extant years for this source were limited to 1930/31 and 1931/32, but it helps clarify how much rice was shipped into Bangkok on the canals. At this stage, I am sorting the statistics, and intend to organize it into an article. In addition to researching rice transport by rail, our understanding of domestic rice distribution conditions in Thailand should improve even more through analysis of rice transport on waterways.
I had not expected to find these various sources when I started my archival research. I've been asked by many people whether I went because I knew that these sources existed, but the truth was that I had no idea that such sources existed when I went. Admittedly, it was a less than ideal research 'plan' but at least I was able to collect several important documents of sufficient quality. As I was able to find so many more sources than I had expected, my hopes for more discoveries are rising. For researchers, it is far more efficient to know which document is housed at which archive, but I have come to enjoy this veritable treasure hunt for documents in the various archives. I find myself looking forward where I will find what new kinds of documents.
(Yokohama City University, Faculty of Humanities and International Studies )