Abstract:
This thesis aims at exploring travel experiences and the cultural encounter in King Chulalongkorns travel writings. The writings are revisited as the literature of cultural encounters. The writings cover the Kings experiences during his travels to the areas within his sovereignty, colonies of the Europeans, and Europe. The contents touch upon people from different walks of life, travel routes and royal duties. King Chulalongkorns travels enable him to express his views towards the interplay between: the King and his subjects, Siamese local people and ethnic groups, the city and provincial areas, Siam and European colonies, and the West and the East. These travel writings illustrate how Siamese elites see themselves through the journeys across their familiar world, peripheral world, and the civilized world. The encounter between Siam and the outside world reaffirms King Chulalongkorns fluctuated sovereignty depending on where the King visits. The Kings travel accounts are formed by journal writings and royal letters. His particular style is the marriage between Siamese writings in archival forms and in Niras genre and styles adopted from the Western life writing genre: diary, journal, memoir, chronicle, and letter. The key features of King Chulalongkorns travel writings are the routine writing, the specified travel time, the collection of knowledge and facts intermingled with the Kings observations. King Chulalongkorn turns the cultural encounter into literature by means of lucid writing with systematized information and reliable sources. The Kings signature as an author includes the emphasis on the Otherness with foreign words, the Kings personal lexicon and expressions, humor, tones, reflections, audience-specific derivative words, and belle-lettres style with figurative language and pieces of poetry. The aforementioned styles help translate the cultural encounter into refined literary writings.