Thread: Memory Lane (In my own language)

Prince Pramote was a son of King Rama II with one of his Royal Concubines and a half-brother of King Rama III and IV. During the reigns of those two Kings, he was responsible for a lot of duties assigned by the Kings.

One of them was the chief of the Division of ‘Acrobats’. The officers under this Division were all Vietnamese who lived in Bangkok whose responsibility were to master and perform various kinds of terrifying acrobatics.




This Division was one of the five under the Department of Entertainment which were directly under the care of the Kings. They were existed during the first four reigns.

(Note: The photo of the Prince shown above was one of the very first few photos, left to today, ever taken in Siam. It was taken in the late reign of King Rama III, mid 1850s, when the Prince’s age was around early 30s. The process of taking photos around that time was called Daguerreotype. It is too bad that King Rama III still believed in superstition otherwise we could see what and how he looked like from his photos)