Khaw Sim Bee's premature death in 1913 at the hands of an assasin, allegedly torn by jealousy over Sim Bee's advances towards his wife, marked the end of an era in the family politics of peninsular Siam. Sim Bee was the youngest son of Khaw Soo Cheang (1797–1882), a Hokkien immigrant who rose to the governorship of Ranong and founded the Khaw dynasty in Siam. Through his position as High Commissioner of Monthon Phuket, Sim Bee came to dominate the political and commercial life of the region. The man who King Vajiravudh ranked “as a personal friend who will be sincerely mourned by me as a personal loss” headed a family that was equalled by few others in the kingdom.
Western accounts from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries abound with descriptions which portray the king of Siam and the Siamese nobility as the foremost merchants in their land. According to these accounts, rulers monopolized the foreign trade to and from their kingdom, much to the detriment of Western mèrchants attempting to gain an economic foothold. Captain Henry Burney, while negotiating a commercial treaty between Great Britain and Siam in the 1820s, noted that “the Siamese Government have no idea of what is called ‘a free and unrestricted trade’….” British commercial interests sought, moreover, the removal of all these restrictions, but found “the jealousy and mistrust which the Siamese entertain towards Europeans” a major stumbling block.
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