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  Cruising down the Meklong on that steamy summer day in 1824, Hunter would stumble upon a so-called golden opportunity. A sportsman fond of sailing and hunting, Hunter often took his friends in his boat and went on shooting expeditions to the swamps along the bold, rocky coast of western Siam. On that day, after bagging enough ducks and snipes, Hunter and friends set sail for home in Bangkok.5

  With the sun gone, dusk set in swiftly. A half-moon hove into view on the far horizon, faint as a partial thumbprint on a windowpane. One by one, lanterns appeared in front of the floating houses and torches blazed on junks, dappling the brackish river with flickering reflections. Standing by the gunwale, Hunter suddenly saw something moving in the water: Like a mysterious creature crawling out of Greek mythology, two bodies naked from the waist up, two heads and four arms, swam in perfect tandem like one body. Amazed, Hunter drew his boat closer to the two-headed, Hydra-like creature, which by now had effortlessly climbed into a little dinghy. In the dim light, against glimmering reflections, Hunter was astonished to find that the creature was not some amphibious reptile but in fact two teenage boys, connected by a band of flesh at the bases of their chests.6

  Eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico once said, “All barbarian histories have fabulous beginnings.” The story of the Siamese Twins is not necessarily one that contains much barbarity, unless we believe, perhaps rightly so, that the nineteenth-century obsession with abnormality—that insatiable desire of humans looking at other humans as monsters—reveals something disturbingly barbaric. Nor does an adventurous, curio-seeking Scotsman’s so-called discovery of a pair of conjoined twins rise to the level of a fable. But the chance encounter certainly set the stage for two of the most fabulous showmen the world would ever see.

  2

  The Chinese Twins

  No place south of China is the rendezvous of so many Chinese junks as Siam.

  —Charles Gutzlaff, Journal of Three Voyages Along the Coast of China (1834)

  On a rainy day in May 1811, Chang and Eng were born in a small houseboat at the fishing village of Meklong. Their father, Ti-eye, was a fisherman from southern China; their mother, Nok, was half Chinese and half Siamese. Like a neatly packed bundle, the twins came out of their mother’s womb with the head of one between the legs of the other. Unwrapping the package, the midwife was shocked to discover that the babies were tied together by a piece of flesh at the sternum. Nok had borne four children previously and would produce three more in the coming years—a total of nine kids, all of whom, except the twins, had normal births.1

  As the rain hissed in the palm fronds and waves rocked the boat gently, the newborn twins lay quietly on the bamboo mat, perhaps curious about the strange new world they had just entered. The year 1811, however, was not a peaceful one in world history: In January, an uprising of more than four hundred slaves, led by Charles Deslondes, was brutally put down in the newly American New Orleans, killing sixty-six blacks, whose heads were strung up along the roads of the city. In March, Ned Ludd led English workers in violent riots against industrial mechanization, a movement that gave birth to the word Luddites, and the British government responded with mass shootings, hangings, and deportations to the colonies. In July, Venezuela, after years of rebellion led by Simón Bolívar and others against colonial rule, became the first South American country to declare independence from Spain, while in November, General William Henry Harrison fought an especially bloody battle against the Shawnee Indians in Tippecanoe and put an end to Tecumseh’s dream of a pan-Indian confederation. In November and December, two massive earthquakes hit Missouri at New Madrid, among the most powerful in American history, causing the mighty Mississippi River to flow backward and church bells to ring as far away as Philadelphia.

  In the ancient Kingdom of Siam, however, 1811 was rather peaceful. In fact, the entire fifteen-year span of Rama II’s reign (1809–24) has been characterized by historians as “a breathing spell between crises,” a halcyon interlude between the First and Third Reigns of the Chakri Dynasty.2 Dubbed the “Poet King,” Rama II devoted himself to literature, art, and the construction of pleasure gardens filled with artificial lakes, islands, and pavilions where his passion for poetry and dance could be given free rein.3 Rather than battling with neighboring states, Rama II preferred spending his time rendering the Indian epic Ramayana into Siamese, chanting lines such as “I should bathe you with scented water/pervaded with the fragrance of flowers.”4 John Crawfurd, the British envoy to Bangkok in 1822, reported that the reigning monarch was “one of the mildest sovereigns that had ruled Siam for at least a century and a half.”5

  Such was the historical moment into which the Siamese Twins were born. Only two years into Rama II’s reign, the country was enjoying the calm between storms, made possible by a benevolent king and a lack of belligerence directed against Siam by such traditional enemies as Burma. News about the conjoined twins created a small ripple and, in fact, reached the ear of the king. A dabbler in the interpretation of symbols and signs—one day he would correctly predict his own impending demise after seeing the death of two white elephants—Rama II regarded the abnormal birth as an omen portending something evil in his kingdom. He issued a death warrant for the conjoined twins. But the king’s wish for removing a bad sign was merely a whim, like an insignificant word on the scented scrolls of Ramayana, catching only his momentary attention. Soon the king lost himself in the poetic tales of Sita and forgot all about those baleful newborns of a Chinese fishmonger in Meklong.

  In quick order, their parents named them “In” and “Chun,” two words that caused no small amount of speculation as to their meanings. At first, some had thought that the words—or their later variants, “Eng” and “Chang”—simply meant “right” and “left,” referring to their positions in relation to each other. This belief was discredited in 1874 by Dr. William H. Pancoast in his well-publicized autopsy report on the twins. As if scientific medical knowledge were not enough to reveal the anatomical mystery of the conjoined twins, the curious Philadelphia doctor consulted an authoritative dictionary of the Siamese language and found that the words Eng and Chang did not at all signify right and left. Instead, Pancoast found that, “In the Siamese language, words spelt exactly in the same way may have an entirely different signification according to the accompanying accent. Thus, by a different pronunciation, a word is made to do service for various meanings. Of all the different significations of the words Eng and Chang, those which give for Eng the meaning of ‘strictly, to tie strongly,’ and to Chang that of ‘unsavory, tasteless,’ seem applicable.” Based on these findings, Pancoast supported another common belief that “the names were given them to express their natural characteristic. Eng was ever the stronger and healthier of the two, and of a pleasant disposition; Chang was irritable, and less amiable.”6

  A century later, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, the father–daughter team who coauthored a popular biography of the twins in the 1970s, supplied a different explanation by citing a Thai textbook that states: “Their mother called them ‘In’ and ‘Jun.’ . . . In and Jun were the names of a certain kind of local fruit growing on trees. When the fruit was raw, it was green, and we called it In fruit, and when the fruit was ripe it was yellow, and we called it Jun fruit. Since to Europeans the pronunciation of these two words was not familiar, they pronounced them Eng–Chang.”7

  All of these etymological speculations, colorful and plausible as they may sound, fail to consider the simple fact that the twins were ethnically Chinese. The family spoke a Chinese dialect at home and also wrote in Chinese. Hence it is reasonable to suggest that the origin of their names ought to be found in the Chinese language, not Siamese. As we shall see later, on a document they signed in 1829, the twins wrote their names in Chinese characters, which will solve the mystery for us. For now, let us continue with the story of their early life in the land of Bengal tigers and white elephants.

  Although later known to the world as the “Siamese Tw
ins,” In and Chun were called the “Chinese Twins” by the locals in Meklong. So, in order to understand the larger framework of their journey, a brief tour of Chinese Siamese history is worthwhile. The twins’ family belonged to a large, thriving Chinese community in Siam, a country that historically had always welcomed the Chinese. As early as the thirteenth century, the Chinese diplomat Zhou Daguan had found his countrymen doing business in places that would later become part of Siam. In the fifteenth century, the famous Ming Dynasty maritime expeditions led by the eunuch Zheng He brought Chinese to Ayudhya and other parts of Siam. That encounter, according to historians, may well have led to the first of Siam’s lukjin—children of Chinese fathers and Siamese mothers. In the following century, Portuguese accounts described Chinese merchants as being “everywhere established” in Siam, and Chinese records showed that pirates from China ravaging the high seas headquartered in South Siam. Especially in the long period of Siam’s isolation after the 1688 Ayudhya Revolution, which spelled the end of European trade, Siamese commerce was dominated by Chinese junks that brought goods and immigrants. When John Crawfurd visited in 1822, he estimated that there were about 440,000 Chinese out of a total population of 2,790,500 in Siam, more than 15 percent. The estimate made by D. E. Malloch during the Burney Mission in 1826 gave the Chinese an even bigger share, almost one-fourth of the population.8

  These numbers tell the story: The Chinese were a welcome presence among the Siamese, a fact confirmed by most historical accounts. One of the officers on the Zheng He expedition in the fifteenth century wrote that, “whenever [a Siamese woman] meets a Chinese man, she is greatly pleased with him, and will invariably prepare wine to entertain and show respect to him, merrily singing and keeping him overnight.”9 Such an idyllic account may sound like a run-of-the-mill exaggeration by an explorer in faraway places. Early South Sea narratives, for instance, were full of accounts of mermaidlike island maidens, wahines, who, upon a ship’s arrival, jumped off beaches, swam, and climbed aboard half naked, eager to entertain European men and cater to their carnal cravings. But there seemed to be no question of the warm feelings that the Siamese historically harbored toward the Chinese. As a seventeenth-century Chinese traveler stated, “The inhabitants [of Siam] accept the Chinese very cordially, much better than do the natives of any other country.”10

  In the early nineteenth century, the Chinese living in Siam enjoyed special privileges, thanks to one heroic man whose story is still shrouded in the mist of legend: Phraya Tak, often known as Taksin. Born in 1734 to a Chinese father and a Siamese mother, thus making him a lukjin, Taksin had been adopted by a noble family. In 1767, when the Burmese invaded Siam and captured the capital city of Ayudhya, Taksin rallied the country to expel the invaders. He became king and ruled Siam for more than fourteen years, until he was overthrown in 1782. He was said to have met his end by being “tied up in a velvet sack and struck on the back of the neck with a sandalwood club.”11 The seeming brutality was merely a ritual for executing royalty by the rules of an ancient law, which also dictated that Taksin be given a royal cremation by his successor, Rama I. As homage to Taksin and his Chinese heritage, the new king decreed that the Chinese would be “exempt from corvée [unpaid labor] and from the requirement to attach themselves to a patron or government master.”12 Rather than fall victim to servitude or slavery, as did most native Siamese and all other Asian foreigners, the Chinese would only need to pay a triennial head tax.

  Despite the special treatment accorded the Chinese, life was not easy for a hard-scrabbling fisherman and his wife trying to raise a large family. Adding three more babies after the twins, the family of nine kids and their parents lived in the crowded houseboat afloat on the Meklong, a boat moored by bamboo poles driven into the river, its roof thatched with leaves. In the front part of the vessel, a table was set up as a platform for selling the catch of the day and other items. Like other households living on the river, they also had a dinghy tethered to their floating domicile, to be used as a convenient means of transportation.

  The town of Meklong (today Samut Songkhram), where the twins spent their formative years, had a population of a few thousand souls, many of whom were Chinese. The earliest Western description of the town was given by Claude Céberet du Boullay, the French envoy sent by Louis XIV to Siam on the eve of the 1688 Revolution. As Céberet described in his journal: “This town . . . is situated on the banks of a stream also called the Meklong, a league from the sea. The water is good here. The town has no walls, but is defended by a small square fort with four very small brick bastions.”13 By the time the twins saw light, Meklong had emerged from a rustic village to become a bustling river town. Jean-Baptiste Pallegoix, bishop of Mallos, who spent decades doing missionary work and traveling extensively in Siam from 1830 to 1862, spoke of Meklong as “a populous and beautiful city, with its floating bazaars, fine pagodas and gardens, and a population of ten thousand, the largest proportion of which is Chinese. . . . The soil is remarkably fertile, and the salt-pits produce enough to supply the whole kingdom.”14 Sir John Bowring, governor of Hong Kong—who went to Siam in 1855 and later quoted extensively from Pallegoix in his classic The Kingdom and People of Siam (1857)—also mentioned an American missionary who had visited Meklong and had been impressed by the “villages of Chinese, with their floating houses and well-filled shops.”15

  Located conveniently by the river, about a mile from the sea and connected to Bangkok by canals, Meklong provided an easy access point for traders. Siam was rich in natural products, including sugar, sapan wood, bêche-de-mer (sea cucumber), birds’ nests, shark fins, gamboge (yellow dye), indigo, cotton, ivory, and many other items that attracted Chinese traders, who had dominated Siamese commerce in the absence of European competition. Karl Gutzlaff, a German missionary who had diligently followed the Chinese to Siam to save their pagan souls, and who figures more prominently later in this narrative, noted in his journals dating from 1831 that every year in the months of February to April, about eighty Chinese junks arrived from Hainan, Canton, Amoy, Shanghai, and other ports, bringing various articles for the consumption of the Siamese and the Chinese.16 Edmund Roberts, the American envoy to Siam in 1833, marveled at these watercraft: “A true Chinese junk is a great curiosity; the model must have been taken originally from a bread-trough, being broad and square at both ends.”17 The liveliest and most informative account of the annual fleet was provided by Dan B. Bradley, an American missionary who arrived in Siam in 1835, brought the first Siamese printing press, and initiated vaccinations against smallpox:

  Junks in the China trade would then as now make but one voyage in a year, taking advantage of the favoring SW monsoon in June to sail from Bangkok, and of the NE monsoon to return the latter part of January and first part of February. From February to June there were annually from 60 to 80 of these monsters of the deep moored in the river, forming two lines, all heading down the stream, always ready as to position, to start on another voyage. These two long lines of junks were practically a great Bazaar for a period of two months or more from the time of their arrival. Each junk was freighted with the goods of several parties, each of whom occupied a part of the deck for the display of his wares until they were all sold out.18

  As Bradley and others noted, these “monsters of the deep” brought from China massive amounts of crockery, such as cups and dishes, plus teas, silks, crapes, brassware, sugar candy, playing cards, dice, paper, dried vegetables, Chinese trunks, chests, Japanese woodenware, mirrors, and so on. Merchandise sold on these floating bazaars would be further distributed to smaller vendors, including the twins’ mother, Nok.

  Nok was said to be a capable trader who eked out a living by supplementing her husband’s catch of the day with other sources of income. Historically, it was quite common for Siamese women to marry Chinese men due to a number of factors: First, very few Chinese women emigrated, forcing overseas Chinese men to either remain single or marry local women. Second, according to G. William Skinner, Siamese wo
men, not their menfolk, were the traders in the indigenous population. These women had “a certain amount of business know-how and could appreciate the advantages of an industrious Chinese husband.”19 We do not know whether Nok had met her future husband, Ti-eye, through business dealings, perhaps haggling over prices at the local floating bazaar. Their ethnicities and professions would certainly make their marriage fit the sociological norm, except that Nok was half Chinese and half Siamese, making the union possibly a result of arranged marriage, also a common practice in the Chinese community. Either way, the parents raised the twins and their siblings as Chinese, speaking Chinese (possibly Cantonese) to them, and at some point letting them learn to read and write in Chinese as well. Judging by the incredible efficiency with which the twins would later learn to speak, read, and write in English, their elementary education might not have been rudimentary, despite their low station in life. However fantastically unreliable her tale was, Anna Leonowens, the famous English governess who taught the sixty-plus children and the entire harem of King Mongkut in the 1860s, made a keen observation in her autobiography that might shed some light on the state of literacy in Siam: “The fact is remarkable, that though education in its higher degrees is popularly neglected in Siam, there is scarcely a man or woman in the empire who cannot read and write.”20 Also, based on the fact that the twins in their early teens were able to do business on their own, we can be reasonably certain that they had also learned basic arithmetic. As for whether or not they knew how to use the suan-pawn (abacus), which Edmund Roberts in 1833 saw many Chinese use “as an assistant in making calculations,” we do not know.21