Danes in Siam: Richelieu, Business, and the Making of Modern Bangkok
When people think of foreigners in late nineteenth-century Siam, they usually picture British merchants, French diplomats, or American missionaries. Yet one of the most important groups in the country’s modernization was Danish. Danish naval officers helped organize Siam’s navy, Danish soldiers helped build its provincial police, and Danish businessmen helped bring Bangkok electricity, railways, hotels, shipping, and eventually its first domestic bank.
Their story is not simply one of Europeans “helping” Siam. It was a practical partnership shaped by mutual need. Siam wanted technical expertise without surrendering itself to Britain or France, while Denmark had skilled officers and entrepreneurs but little ambition to colonize Southeast Asia. At the centre of it all stood Andreas du Plessis de Richelieu, a Danish naval officer who became a Siamese admiral, royal favourite, businessman, and one of the most influential foreigners in King Chulalongkorn’s Siam.
Why Siam Turned to Denmark
By the reign of King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, Siam faced a dangerous balancing act. Britain controlled Burma and Malaya, while France was expanding across Indochina and pressing against Siam’s eastern borders. Siam needed to modernize its administration, military, communications, and economy quickly enough to remain credible as an independent state.
The Siamese court therefore hired foreign specialists from several countries rather than relying on one dominant power. This was deliberate policy: a mixture of British, French, German, Danish, and other advisers made it harder for any single empire to claim Siam as its own sphere of influence. Danes were especially attractive because Denmark was a competent European state with naval and commercial expertise, but it had no serious colonial ambitions in Asia.
There was also a personal dimension. Once a few Danes proved themselves in Siam, they recommended friends, relatives, and former colleagues from Denmark. Richelieu recruited naval officers; Gustav Schau brought officers into the provincial gendarmerie; Hans Niels Andersen built commercial networks that drew in other Danes. What began as a handful of individual appointments became a small but highly influential Danish community in Bangkok.
Andreas du Plessis de Richelieu
Andreas du Plessis de Richelieu was born in Denmark on 24 February 1852. He trained as a merchant sailor, earned a master’s certificate, and became a reserve lieutenant in the Danish navy. In 1875, aged only twenty-three, he asked King Christian IX of Denmark for a letter of introduction to King Chulalongkorn of Siam.
That letter changed his life. Richelieu sailed to Bangkok via Singapore, met Chulalongkorn on 3 April 1875, and soon entered Siamese naval service. Within a year, he was helping to organize the Royal Siamese Navy; by 1878 he commanded the royal yacht. His early career in Siam was built not on conquest or diplomacy alone, but on practical service: training crews, managing vessels, and proving that he could be trusted with the king’s ships.
Richelieu’s relationship with Chulalongkorn deepened through royal voyages and inspection trips. In 1892, the royal yacht Maha Chakri was delivered, and Richelieu’s association with it made him a familiar figure at court. He was no longer merely a foreign technical adviser; he had become part of the king’s inner circle.
His most dramatic test came on 13 July 1893, during the Franco-Siamese crisis known as the Paknam Incident. French gunboats forced their way up the Chao Phraya River toward Bangkok, and Richelieu commanded Siamese forces at Phra Chulachomklao Fort near the river mouth. The confrontation ended badly for Siam, leading to French demands and major territorial losses, but Richelieu’s willingness to defend Siam against France strengthened his standing with the king.
In 1900, Richelieu became commander-in-chief of the Royal Siamese Navy. He is generally described as the first, and still the only, foreign-born commander-in-chief of the Thai Navy. He also received the Siamese noble title Phraya Chonlayutthayothin, a remarkable mark of royal trust for a man who had arrived in Bangkok as an unknown young Danish officer.
The Navy and Coastal Defence
Richelieu’s naval work mattered because Siam’s independence depended partly on its ability to defend the Chao Phraya approach to Bangkok. The river was the country’s main artery, and any hostile fleet that could force its way upstream could threaten the capital itself. The Paknam crisis made that danger painfully clear.
Richelieu helped develop the Siamese Navy and was involved in the design and oversight of Phra Chulachomklao Fort at the mouth of the Chao Phraya. The fort was intended to protect Bangkok from naval attack, and it remains one of the most tangible reminders of the period when Siam was trying to turn itself into a modern defensive state.
He was not alone. Other Danish officers served in the Siamese Navy through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, helping with training, navigation, engineering, and administration. Their presence reflected a wider pattern: Siam did not simply import weapons or ships; it imported people who knew how to use, maintain, and organize them.
Gustav Schau and the Gendarmerie
Another Dane, Gustav Schau, played a major role away from the sea. In 1897, King Chulalongkorn established the Provincial Gendarmerie, an elite military-police force intended to extend royal authority and maintain order across the provinces. Schau became its first commander.
Schau was known in Siam as Phraya Vasuthep. Under Prince Damrong Rajanuphab, the influential interior minister, he helped build a force that could operate beyond Bangkok and bring remote regions more firmly under central administration. By the time Schau retired in 1915, the gendarmerie had become an important instrument of Siamese state-building.
This work had a political edge. Siam was not only defending itself against European empires; it was also consolidating control over its own frontier regions. Danish officers therefore became part of the machinery through which Bangkok extended law, taxation,1881 and administration into areas that had previously been governed more loosely.
Danish Business in Bangkok
While Richelieu and Schau worked in uniform, other Danes were transforming Bangkok’s commercial life. The most important was Hans Niels Andersen, a Danish sea captain who arrived in the city in 1879. He bought the Oriental Hotel in 1881, which became one of Bangkok’s most famous hotels, and in 1884 founded Andersen Co. with Richelieu and another Danish captain, Peter Andersen.
Andersen Co. began in shipping, trade, and teak. It later became the foundation for the East Asiatic Company, established in 1897, with offices in Copenhagen and Bangkok. The company handled imports and exports, shipping, and forestry interests, linking Siam more closely to global markets while also giving Danish businessmen a strong position in Bangkok.
The Oriental Hotel connection is especially interesting for modern visitors. The hotel became a landmark of Bangkok’s riverfront and a symbol of the city’s growing role in international trade and travel. Its early ownership by Danish entrepreneurs shows how business, hospitality, shipping, and empire-era commerce were often intertwined. What today is known as the Authors’ Wing was designed by Italian architects for Anderson and his partners, opening in May 1887.
Electricity, Trams, and Railways
Danish involvement went beyond ports and hotels. In 1884, electricity was introduced in Bangkok, with the Grand Palace among the first places to receive it. Danish engineers later helped extend electricity into public use, turning a royal novelty into part of the city’s modern infrastructure.
In 1898, Richelieu established the Siam Electricity Company with Aage Westenholtz. The company provided electricity directly to the public and operated a tram service, helping reshape daily life in Bangkok. For a city that had long depended on canals, boats, and human power, electric lighting and trams represented a very visible break with the past.
Danes were also involved in railways. Richelieu was associated with the Paknam Railway Company, which received a concession to build the first railway line between Bangkok and Samut Prakan. Later, H.N. Andersen supervised construction of the first stretch of the Bangkok–Ayutthaya railway, which opened in 1896.
These projects were not charity. They were commercial concessions, and Danish firms expected profits. But they also gave Siam practical infrastructure that the royal government wanted: better transport, public utilities, and links between Bangkok and the provinces. The Danes profited, but Siam gained systems that helped it function as a modern state.
The Birth of Siam Commercial Bank
Perhaps the most enduring Danish contribution was financial. In the early 20th century, Siam still lacked a domestic bank capable of supporting its own commerce and government finances, while large foreign banks, notably British, did little or nothing for the domestic market. Richelieu proposed the idea of a Siamese bank to Prince Mahit, the minister of finance, and Danish colleagues helped turn the proposal into reality.
H.N. Andersen, Isak Glückstadt of Denmark’s Landmandsbanken, and financier Carl Frederik Tietgen all played roles in the project. The result was the Siam Commercial Bank, established under royal charter and opened to the public in 1907. It was Siam’s first domestic bank, created with Thai shareholders and capital connections to Denmark and Germany; the first manager being German.
The bank was initially called Bank Siam Gummajon and later became Siam Commercial Bank, or SCB, in 1939. Today it is one of Thailand’s largest banks, which makes its Danish connections easy to overlook. Yet its creation shows how deeply Danish business networks were woven into Siam’s economic modernization.
Trust, Profit, and Power
It would be too simple to portray the Danes as selfless friends of Siam. They were employees, contractors, investors, and businessmen. They wanted salaries, concessions, influence, and profit. Richelieu himself was involved in electricity, railways, shipping, and banking, and his business interests were closely connected to his official career.
At the same time, Siam was not passive. Chulalongkorn and his ministers chose whom to hire, set the terms of concessions, and used foreign expertise to strengthen the state. The Danes could be useful precisely because they were not British or French: they brought competence without carrying the immediate political weight of a neighbouring empire.
That balance is what makes the Danish story so revealing. Siam’s modernization was not a simple story of Western knowledge arriving to “awaken” a passive country. It was a negotiation between a determined Siamese monarchy and foreign specialists who had something valuable to offer. The Danes were successful because they understood both sides of that bargain.
Richelieu’s Departure
Richelieu left Siam in 1902, largely because of poor health. His departure was unusually warm for a foreign adviser. King Chulalongkorn and members of the royal family accompanied him aboard the royal yacht Maha Chakri as far as Singapore, a public demonstration of the affection and trust he had earned.
Back in Denmark, he continued his career in business and shipping, becoming involved with major Danish companies and banks. He died in Hørsholm on 25 March 1932, aged eighty. By then, the country he had helped serve had changed profoundly, but many of the institutions connected to his career—the navy, coastal defences, electricity, railways, and banking—had become part of modern Thailand.
A Danish Legacy in Thailand
The Danish presence in Siam was never huge in numbers, but it was remarkably influential. Danish officers helped build the navy and gendarmerie; Danish entrepreneurs helped create shipping lines, hotels, electricity networks, tram services, railways, and a national bank. Their work touched both the high politics of survival and the everyday experience of a changing Bangkok.
Richelieu remains the best symbol of that story. He arrived as a young foreign sailor with a letter of introduction, became a trusted commander in the Siamese Navy, faced French gunboats at Paknam, and left as Phraya Chonlayutthayothin, a Siamese nobleman and admiral. His life captures the strange, practical, and often overlooked alliance between Denmark and Siam at the moment when Thailand was fighting to remain independent in a colonial world.