1929 Newspaper article describing Siamese Boxing and other Thai Sports

[jeffkantoku]

The 1929 newspaper article was written by American travelogue author James Saxon Childers who went on to write and publish the book "From Siam to Suez" in 1932, detailing his adventures in Thailand and some his time spent watching Siamese boxing bouts.

The book is in the public domain and available to view and for free download from the Internet Archive, here:

https://archive.org/details/fromsiamtosuez010141mbp

Edited April 14, 2025 by jeffkantoku
Corrected book title

[jeffkantoku]

The 1929 newspaper article was written by American travelogue author James Saxon Childers who went on to write and publish the book "From Siam to Suez" in 1932, detailing his adventures in Thailand and some his time spent watching Siamese boxing bouts.

The book is in the public domain and available to view and for free download from the Internet Archive, here:

https://archive.org/details/fromsiamtosuez010141mbp

His accounts of Siamese boxing begin in Chapter IV, starting on page 22.

And again in Chapter VI, starting on page 31.

In the Birmingham News newspaper article, he mentions that 2500 spectators sat or stood in the different enclosures around the Bangkok arena.  Any idea where it would have been located? 

Edited April 14, 2025 by jeffkantoku
Added more information

[jeffkantoku]

I am researching and writing an action oriented screenplay set aboard a three-island tramp steamer anchored off the unnamed coast of a country modelled after Cambodia (originally set in 1953, but as I’m developing it, transforming it more into a fable with a non-specific time period, so at a time between 1920 and 1953).

Two of the crew members on board are the Thanikul brothers, Siamese twins, but bodily-fused only metaphorically.  They are Siamese Boxers who box against each other in a make-shift boxing ring on the ship’s closed cargo hatch.

I’d love to know of any sources (books or articles) in English recounting the history of Muay Thai or Muay Boran from the period between 1920 and 1953.

Have any Thai sources about Muay Boran from that period been translated into English?

Any writers’ names I should know of that period who wrote about this martial art?

I just want to get a feel for the attitudes of the people of this period about Siamese Boxing, both the colonialists and the locals.

I remember seeing a live Muay Thai match in Bangkok at a small outside ring, somewhere in Bangkok in 1996, as a tourist when I was living in Japan in the late ’90s. Can’t remember exactly where that was.

Thank you in advance for any information you could provide!

Cheers,

- Jeff

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

 

This is a very interesting small section which may help explain a very fundamental difference between Thailand's Muay Thai and many other combat sports. Westerners in particular who favor hand-strikes have a hard time understanding Thailand's orientation to the body, especially the high scoring of knees and kicks to the body. This in part can be explained by a Siamese/Thai sense of the body which places the "self" in the torso, something many ancient cultures have and which we retain in thoughts like "he had 'guts'" or a "gut feeling". It seems that indeed the center of the person in Thai culture, his or her life-force is seen in the torso, and not in the "face" or "head", just as a matter of body mapping. But, here the wide-spread presence of malaria and the enlargement of the spleen (and liver) from malaria would even further explain the development of a kicking and kneeing fighting art, as these organs would be even more vulnerable...even by Childers account, life-threatening (never knowing if reports get exaggerated for foreign interests). The two aspects, the traditional centering of the life force in the torso AND the vulnerability of the spleen and liver may actually go hand in hand, one imagines. This is a very cool observation.

From material facts, even the effects of disease, an entire sophistication of attacks by knees and kicks may have developed, one not reducible to those specific vulnerabilities, as the aesthetic and the skills developed along their own paths. Notably, being able to control and protect the center of the body indeed likely unlocks many aspects of the spatial control of opponents, regardless of the vulnerability of specific organs. Malaria may have actually attenuated awareness which lead to high-order understanding of fighting itself.

Malaria may have been in Southeast Asia for 1,000s of years.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

As noted in private communication, this newspaper account seems like it captured one of the last fights in the Kard Chuek era in Bangkok:

It is interesting that the Childers newspaper article (1929) captures the time right went all glove-less fighting was reportedly banned by Rama 7 (1928) in Bangkok. The fight (possibly from 1928) was gloveless. He may have been reporting on one of the last gloveless fights of Bangkok (or, the decree was very unevenly enforced (more likely).

https://8limbsus.com/blog/modernization-muay-thai-timeline

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Not sure if Childers book (1932) is far more romantic and florid than his Newspaper report (1929), but there is some contradiction in descriptions of fighters who "quit" (just acknowledge the opponent superior).

The newspaper article:

 

The book:

the book then recounts the Newspaper report that there is no stigma in quitting...but then immediately reverses the moment of quitting, into death.

 

This is one of the problems with Western reports at the time (and even fight footage), they have a kind of compulsion toward the florid because they want to report their experiences as incredibly exotic, like nothing a "civilized" man would ever see. And...they just indeed experience everything as quite exaggerated, as they were in very alien environments and everything as disorienting.

This author seems to portray death as fairly common in the Kard Chuek ring, and it may have been (but he struggles to make coherent sense of the fighter who just sits down without stigma)...but by report King Rama 7 in 1928 banned glove-less fighting in response to a death in a fight at the city pillar, which seems like an unlikely reason if deaths were quite common...though speculating perhaps it was a "civilizing" moment, that particular death, depending on particular reactions from Western visitors?

In his newspaper article Childers claims to have watched two fighters suffer spleen injuries who later died in the hospital, in his book he seems to have turned one of these into a death that he watched happen in the ring, of a boy in his "first fight" (this seems quite dubious), a boy who he watched train, who wanted to come to America. The propensity for embellishment (if not outright fabrication) seems strong with this writer.

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

small note, it is interesting to see a 1930s account of an hour of shadowboxing:

It reminds me of Yodkhunpon's account of building his Muay Thai out of countless hours of shadowboxing, due to his lack of equipment or even explicit training in his rural village. The tale of endless shadowboxing goes back 100 years.