Santa Cruz

Kudi Chin and the Santa Cruz Church.

From Prof. Edward Van Roy’s
“The Portuguese in Siam: a quinquacentennial retrospect”

The largest of Bangkok’s Portuguese settlements is clustered around the Santa Cruz Church, overlooking the river not far downstream from the old Thonburi citadel. The settlement is popularly referred to as Kudi Chin, a name that commemorates an old Chinese shine nearby.

Its population today stands at 1,550, a doubling of its size as of the mid-nineteenth century (Pallegoix, 2000: 405; Kriengchai, 2007). At the settlement’s founding in 1768 it was likely no more than 400 to 500. That population was reduced by perhaps a third when a dissident faction split off in 1772 to form a new settlement downstream at Ton Samrong. (See note in the end of this text)

Despite that disruption, Kudi Chin remained Siam’s premier Portuguese settlement throughout the Bangkok era (Francis, 1999: 9–22). Until the founding of Assumption Cathedral far downstream in 1821, it served as the residence of Siam’s Catholic bishop (Assumption, 1995). An unbroken line of French priests officiated at the Santa Cruz Church until 1942, when the first Thai pastor, Ansalm Sangiam Ruamsamu, was installed. Since then all the officiating priests at Santa Cruz have been Thai (Kriengchai, 2007).

“The land the King gave these Christians was formerly considerable, but the river undermined it every year” (Pallegoix, 2000: 407). That increased the residential crowding along the riverside, with the community’s vegetable gardens and fruit orchards pressing from behind. Succumbing to one of the periodic scourges afflicting villages built of bamboo and attap, the entire settlement, church and all, burned down in 1833, and it was not until 1845 that the rebuilt church was inaugurated. As of 1852 it was described as a fine brick-built sanctum that had replaced the former “low and swampy shed where the altar had become a shelter for snakes” (Pallegoix, 2000: 407).

It was rebuilt again, along more elegant European lines, in 1913–6. The architectural style and artistic motifs of that still-standing structure, including the central dome and interior frescos, offer a faint evocation of the Anantha Samakom Throne Hall of Bangkok’s Dusit Palace, built around the same time, suggesting that the Italian craftsmen recruited by King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910) for the construction of that palace played a role in this project as well (Francis, 1999: 13–4).

Over the course of the nineteenth century a number of Kudi Chin’s residents pursued careers in the Ministry of Trade and Foreign Affairs. Others entered the import-export trades or engaged in the mechanical arts as gunsmiths, nautical engineers, watchmakers, architects, and the like. In addition to arms manufacture, arms dealing via Macao (apparently in close concert with the Portuguese consul) appears to have been a lucrative pursuit for the merchants of Kudi Chin. During the 1830s and 1840s the Siamese government, much absorbed in military campaigns against Vietnam to the east and Muslim insurrections in the south, actively sought Western firearms.

Robert Hunter, a British trader who had received permission to establish a residence along the river directly adjacent to Kudi Chin, collaborated with a leading local Portuguese arms dealer called Joseph by the English (though José in his own community). Hunter did much business with the court and was awarded the title of Luang Awut Wiset Prathet Phanit (awut referring to his association with armaments, phanit to his commercial role). In 1844, however, he was expelled from Siam for opium smuggling and other transgressions, and Joseph was left on his own (Moore, 1914–5). By 1851 the main arms trafficker was the Kudi Chin firm of Messrs Joaquin and Joseph. Apparently Joseph had taken on a new partner with the expansion of his business following Hunter’s expulsion in 1844, and in 1855 he was called on to serve as the principal interpreter at the Bowring negotiations (Battye, 1974: 56, 96). Robert Hunter had another important association with Kudi Chin. In 1825 he married Angelina Sap, a descendant of Constance Phaulcon (16??–1688) and Marie Pinar de Guiomar, scion of a leading family of Ayutthaya’s Portuguese community.

(Phaulcon, despite his problematic status as a Greek adventurer initially in English employ, had risen to ministerial rank in the government at Ayutthaya, ultimately suffering execution in the dynastic overthrow of 1688. Some years later his widow was appointed mistress of sweets (khanom) and fruits (phonlamai) in the royal kitchen. Several generations later Jean Chi, the mestizo immigrant from Macao remembered as a saviour of Ayutthaya’s Portuguese community at the time of the Burmese conquest of 1767, married her granddaughter, the great-grandmother of Angelina Sap (Turpin, 1997: 98). Hunter thus married into the very heart of Siam’s Portuguese community. And carrying that tradition further, the son of Robert Hunter and Angelina Sap, Robert Jr., around 1844 married a daughter of Pascoal Ribeiro de Albergaria, Kudi Chin’s leading citizen, (Hudson, 1983).

Robert Hunter, Jr. (c.1826–65) in turn became a leader of the Kudi Chin community. He was sent to England for his education and upon return was appointed secretary and interpreter to Chaophraya Si Suriyawong (Chuang Bunnag), minister of military affairs and the south. In that capacity he served as a liaison officer in the hosting of the Bowring mission of 1855. Following promulgation of the Bowring Treaty that year he was appointed Bangkok’s harbormaster, with the title of Luang Sura Sakon. His house stood in front of his mother’s home along the Kudi Chin waterfront, upstream from his father’s former residence, which had been converted to the State Guest House for visiting embassies.

Yet another remembered nineteenth-century personality of the Kudi Chin community was Francis Chit or Chitrakhan (1830–1891). He was a lifelong member of the Santa Cruz Church, with his home standing along the riverbank near the church. As a young man he helped introduce to Siam the latest techniques of photography and was recruited as official court photographer by King Rama IV (r. 1851–68). In that capacity he received the title of Luang Akhani Naroemit. Beyond his official duties, he set up a photography workshop in 1863 in a raft-house on the river in front of his Kudi Chin residence. In the 1880s he relocated his shop to a rowhouse along Bangkok’s fashionable New Road, becoming the city’s first studio photographer. Among his other business ventures he operated Bangkok’s first gas works, located at the Sao Chingcha marketplace, founded in time to illuminate the coronation festivities for King Rama V in 1872.

( Talat Noi and the Holy Rosary Church. The dissident faction that separated from Kudi Chin in 1772 established a new settlement on the opposite bank of the river well downstream at Ton Samrong. Initially, that settlement was referred to as Rosario, after its church. In the twentieth century the neighborhood came to be known as Talat Noi (the Small Market) in contradistinction to Sampheng, the neighboring Chinatown, which was sometimes called Talat Yai (the Large Market). The Holy Rosary Church (Rosario) was not built until 1787, after the services of Francisco de Chagas, a Dominican friar, had been secured from Goa through the good offices of the governor of Macao (Mendonça e Cunha, 1976: 143). The original congregation was only 137; by the mid- nineteenth century it had grown to 350, and as of 1901 it had reached 700 to 800 (Pallegoix, 2000: 405; Joseph, 1997: 24). The admixture of many Chinese congregants over the subsequent century complicates any later assessment of the Portuguese population at Talat Noi.)