Notes of visits to Puket, Ghirbee and Trang
C.W.S. Kynnersley published this first-person travelogue in 1905, recording his February–March 1903 visits to the Siamese ports of Puket (Phuket), Ghirbee, and Trang on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. Writing from the vantage point of a British observer based in Penang, Kynnersley documents the rapid transformation of these states under Siamese centralisation, with particular attention to tin mining, administrative structures, and fiscal arrangements.
Summary
The account opens at Puket, where Kynnersley observes the dominance of tin mining over all other economic and civic activity. The harbour is silting up, the town site is entirely tin land, and the principal road has been diverted to accommodate a new mine. At the mining centre of Naito, six miles inland, he describes a large Chinese coolie population, a densely packed gambling farm, and a remarkable aqueduct on trestles built by Chinese miners to carry water to the workings. The road between Puket and Naito is described as the worst he has ever driven, and the author notes that cultivation has been entirely displaced by mining—rice, fruit, and provisions are all imported.
The middle section covers Ghirbee, where the Governor is in the process of relocating the town to a new site approved by Prince Dambong. Kynnersley is sceptical about whether residents will voluntarily move, and notes the area’s undeveloped potential: little cultivation, no tin, worthless lignite, but abundant game including elephant, rhinoceros, and tiger. The final and most detailed section concerns Trang, where Kynnersley examines the Siamese village administration in considerable depth—the hierarchy of Ampur, Kam-nan, and Phoo-yai-ban, the padi land tax, the market system at Tap Tiang, and the pepper plantations that give the state its reputation. He also records the telegraph line being extended from Kantan through Ghirbee and Punga to Puket, and the suppression of Chinese Kongsi societies.
Throughout, Kynnersley’s narrative is shaped by comparison with the Straits Settlements and Province Wellesley, and by a practical interest in infrastructure, revenue, and the conditions under which European and Chinese capital might operate in Siamese territory.
Key Findings
- Tin price at the time of visit was $97 per unit, up from approximately $60 at Kynnersley’s previous visit two years earlier, making previously abandoned mines profitable again (p. 7).
- Trang’s population was 59,000, comprising 12,000 Malays and Sam-sams, 4,000 Chinese, and the remainder Siamese; annual revenue was approximately $120,000 against sanctioned expenditure of $80,000, with the surplus (including an estimated $65,000 from the General Opium Farm) remitted to Bangkok (p. 15).
- Revenue breakdown: Gambling $25,000; Spirits $25,000; Customs $60,000; Land and other $10,000. Expenditure: Salaries $30,000; Roads $20,000; Buildings $20,000; Other $10,000 (p. 15).
- The padi land tax was 8 cents per rei (120 square feet); the pepper export duty was 60 cents per pikul (fixed by treaty) with pepper commanding $36 per pikul; the market at Tap Tiang was farmed for $100 per month (pp. 12, 15).
- The village administration comprised five Ampurs (each earning 100 Ticals per month), approximately 30 Kam-nans, and Phoo-yai-bans (heads of 10–20 houses) who wore five silver buttons as a badge of office; the only police force was 12 men at Tap Tiang and a few at Yong Setar (pp. 14–15).
- Thirty-three cannons taken from Kedah during the Siamese overrun were still piled in brushwood near the abandoned town of Kuantani; twelve junks built locally at Tha Chin were registered at Penang (pp. 12, 17).
Conclusion
Kynnersley’s definitive takeaway is that the Siamese western states, while fiscally self-sufficient and even surplus-generating, remain in a state of rapid and often chaotic modernisation driven by mining and central government intervention. The village administration is efficient and cheap, the people law-abiding, but infrastructure is rudimentary, corruption among lower officials is endemic, and the entire economic life of places like Puket is subordinated to the tin market. The author’s implicit argument is that these states possess considerable undeveloped resources—pepper, coconuts, timber, game—and that the Siamese system, while functional, is one of incremental and sometimes arbitrary improvement rather than planned development.
Context
- Kynnersley writes as a British subject with administrative familiarity with the Straits Settlements and Province Wellesley, and his observations are consistently framed by comparison with British colonial practice (e.g., the Malacca land title “extract,” gharries, the Forest Department model).
- The article draws on no archival sources; it is a purely observational diary. Its historiographical value lies in providing a contemporaneous snapshot of Siamese provincial administration, fiscal policy, and mining operations in the period immediately preceding the major constitutional reforms of the 1910s–1920s.