From Suez to Siam

Subhatra Bhumiprabhas

The Nation

Historian Charnvit Kasetsiri was gazing at the Red Sea from the shore at Aqaba in Jordan. The ship carrying King Rama V - King Chulalongkorn - to Europe in 1907 passed this way as it entered the Suez Canal, he said.

Charnvit's current mission was to show a group of Thai journalists the links between the Islamic world and Southeast Asia, and this place was one of the defining locales.

1380> It was a morning lesson, over breakfast, ahead of our cruise across the sea to Egypt. The ferry from Aqaba took about two hours to reach Nueibaa, where an Egyptian guide and driver were waiting with a bus.

We were now in the land of the pharaohs, but it was another five hours' drive down the Sinai Peninsula to our first destination - Isamailia, the capital of the Suez Canal Region.

The drive was a combination of beautiful, natural scenes - sandstone, the white desert and the sizeable mountains of granite - and tufts of Bedouin encampments looming out of "The Arabian Nights".

"Precious stones and turquoise have been found along this route," the guide said.

Geographically, Sinai is a triangle of almost 61,000 square kilometres, with the Gulf of Aqaba and the Egypt-Israel border on the east, the Suez Canal on the west and the Mediterranean to the north.

In the early evening we arrived in Ismailia, named after Ismalilia Pasha, who was the khedive of Egypt in the 1860s, when the canal was being dug.

"Ismailia's mother was an Egyptian slave," said Songyote Waeohongsa, the scholar leading our excursion. His grandfather was Muhammad Ali, regarded as the founder of modern Egypt.

The dynasty he established ruled Egypt and Sudan until the 1952 Egyptian Revolution.

The city of Ismailia sits on the canal's west bank, 120 kilometres from Cairo. Here in 1859 they started digging the waterway that would link the Mediterranean and Red seas.

The people who did the digging were little more than slave labourers, but they got the job done in eight years, just in time for Ismailia Pasha to visit Paris as a hero and be received by Queen Victoria in London.

Khedive Ismailia opened the canal in November 1869, in an extravagant and lavish ceremony attended by many of the crowned heads of Europe.

"The Emperor of Austria and Empress Eugénie of France were there," said Charnvit, and then he again reminded us that there was a linkage with Southeast Asia. "This was in the second years of King Chulalongkorn's reign."

At the same time the canal was inaugurated, a highway was built to link Cairo with the new city of Ismailia, where an opera house was built.

"The famous opera 'Aida' was composed to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal," Charnvit pointed out.

Ismailia himself commissioned the opera from Giuseppe Verdi, but it wasn't ready in time for the opening, instead premiering at the Cairo Opera House a year later.

In Verdi's moving tale, the Ethiopian princess Aida is captured and made a slave in Egypt. A military commander, Radames, decides that his love for her outweighs his loyalty to the pharaoh, and reveals an escape route by sea for Aida and her father, the king of Ethiopia.

"The Suez Canal made it easier for the Western powers to reach Asia," Charnvit said, noting that, by the 1880s, France had occupied Indochina. In 1893 French warships were threatening Siam via the Chao Phya River.

And thus Rama V travelled to Europe in 1897 and 1907, through the Suez Canal. On the latter trip he ratified a treaty with France, by which Siam ceded Siem Reap, Battambang and Srisophon in exchange of Trat and Dansai.

History runs through the Suez Canal, Charnvit said - all the way to modern Thailand.

1380>The excursion "Tracing the Muslim World" trip was organised by the Foundation for the

Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project, Toyota Foundation Thailand and Toyota Motors Thailand.

It was in preparation for a symposium on "The Islamic World and Muslim in Southeast Asia" to be held on November 28 and 29 in Nakhon Si Thammarat. See the programme at http://tinyurl.com/6edyfc or call (02) 424 5768 or (02) 433 8713.