Identifier: kingdomofsiam00cart (find matches)
Title: The kingdom of Siam..
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Carter, A. C. (from old catalog)
Subjects:
Publisher: N.Y. and Lond
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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iamexports timber and grows maize, millet, sugar, to-bacco, and fruit, yet her rice production preponder-ates so entirely, and her commerce, politics, andsocial conditions are now, and have always been, soprofoundly influenced by rice, that all these lesserproducts amount, by comparison, almost to noth-ing. The European, whose idea of a staple food isformed from a knowledge of the part played in theeconomy of his own country, can only vaguelyimagine the importance of rice to the Siamese. Itconstitutes not merely the principal, but almostthe sole food of every one, from the highest nobleto the lowliest plebeian: horses, cattle, dogs, cats,and all other domestic animals live on it; it is usedfor making beer and spirits; it enters largely into allceremonials, and the superstitious observances inconnection with it provide the people with theirmost frequent occasions for holiday-making. Theonly recognized means of investing money is, or wasuntil the recent introduction of European banking,
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>z o tA u Aofriculture 155 ^^5 the purchase of rice-fields; the nobility is gradedaccording to the (now purely nominal) grants ofrice-land conferred by the king; dealings in rice andthe ownership of rice-land are the causes of most ofthe civil litigation in the law courts, and the resultof the last, or prospects of the next, rice harvest,make the most absorbing topic of conversation atall times. It is rice which forms the cargoes of thethousands of boats ever passing up and down theriver Menam ; which supplies the grist of the numer-ous mills of modern Bangkok (the furnaces of whichare fed with rice-husk), and which is carried away inthe ocean-going steamers always to be seen loadingin the port; finally it is from rice that the Govern-ment derives, directly, almost the whole of itsrevenue. Every step in the process of rice cultivation de-mands, in common with most of the ordinary occur-rences of Siamese life, the observance of more orless elaborate religious ceremonial, for no one

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