Prince Devawongse Varoprakar

Prince Devawongse Varoprakar (born Nov. 27, 1858, Bangkok, Siam [now Thailand]—died June 28, 1923, Bangkok) was the foreign minister of Siam from 1885 to 1923, whose policies enabled the kingdom to survive as an independent state.

The 42nd child of King Mongkut, Devawongse was the younger half brother of King Chulalongkorn. After only a smattering of formal Thai and English education in schools his half brother organized in the early 1870s, he began his government career in the king’s personal secretariat. He demonstrated a natural flair for foreign affairs, and Chulalongkorn named him foreign minister in 1885. Devawongse then established Siam’s first modern bureaucratic ministry, with a Western-style system of organization.

The chief characteristics of Devawongse’s foreign policy were genial accommodation and a determination that Siam should be treated as an equal by the Western countries with which the kingdom earlier had signed unequal treaties. He was able to escape the most aggressive imperialist pressures only by conceding large tracts of territory in Laos and Cambodia to France (1893, 1904, 1907) and on the Malay Peninsula to Great Britain (1909). Skillfully using a series of Belgian and American advisers, Devawongse devoted his last two decades in office to ending Western extraterritoriality in Siam, an effort that proved successful in the months immediately following his death.