Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 74, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 March 1919 — HAS BROKEN ALL TRADITIONS [ARTICLE]

HAS BROKEN ALL TRADITIONS

Present King of Slam Only One of Hla Royal Line, to Refus* to Establish Harem. It Is a curious fact that while women of the lower classes in Siam have always enjoyed the greatest freedom, participating and competing with men In the business and pleasures of life, the ladies of the royal household have been kept In the background, appearing at only the most private social gatherings and never at public or official functions. As ail former sovereigns had in their harems the cream of the aristocracy of the country, and, as they inevitably felt a hesitant chivalry about exhibiting their “wives” in public, they barred all women of rank from sight. The sovereign is expected to have in his harem a member of every influential family in the country, for it Is considered that in no other way could he be in such close touch with the people of his kingdom. Polygamy lias, therefore, been considered an obligation of royalty. But, curiously enough, the present reigning monarch is a bachelor, the first and only bachelor who has sat upon the throne of his fathers in twenty-five hundred years. And thereby hangs a tale, for marriage by a Siamese sovereign iias meant not the simple taking of one wife, or a dozen, or oven a mere hundred, but the wholesale adoption of a thousand or more. ’ The young king’s father and his father’s father, and each of the long line of kings preceding them, had many wives. His father had between seven and eight thousand. And, when the young crown prince returned from his long stay in Europe—he had passed a third of his life there —lie was told by ills royal father that there had been selected for him a number of court beauties from which lie could'take his choice of a hundred or two for his harem. But the prince would have nothing to do with this wholesale acquisition of a husband’s holdings. “When I marry,”" he declared to his‘astonished father, “it will be to one wife and to no more, and she shall be the one queen of my heart and the one queen of my realm.” —From “The Land of the White Elephant,” by Frederick Dean, in Asia Magazine.