SIAM: Garden of Smiles

*Pronounced more or less as Poom-ee-pone , a DOON-l-dade. There are several systems in use for transliterating Siamese into English. None of them is adequate to reproduce exactly the sounds of the Siamese, in whose language a final l, r and n all sound alike, se and ra at the end of a word are silent, t is pronounced like d, and b and p sound alike but have no exact counterpart in English. Phumiphon himself prefers the Sanskrit transliteration, recently gave orders that his own name be spelled Bhumibol Adulyadej. *The first five kings of the Chakkri dynasty (founded 1782) averaged approximately 30 wives apiece. Besides pleasing the king, ornamenting public functions and assuring the continuity of the dynasty, these ladies were highly useful in maintaining the authority of the crown. Most of them were the daughters of powerful feudal nobles, and their presence in the royal harem made them valuable to the king both as informers and as hostages against any possible disloyalty on the part of their families. One method of helping the king pick a likely mate, in the days before cameras made it possible for him to get a hint of her charms, consisted of standing the prospect in the hot sun until she perspired freely. The beads of sweat were then carefully mopped up with a square of cambric which was then sent on to the king for an adjudicatory sniff. Present Siamese law allows each man only one wife at a time, but many a Siamese goes ahead and takes another wife anyway. *Siam's royal family tree tends to grow inward. Seven of the nine Chakkri kings were the offsprings of marriages between half-brothers and half-sisters. Phumiphon's father, Prince Mahidol, who never became king, was the grandson of King Mongkut, of Anna and the King of Siam fame, on both his father's and his mother's side.