Songkhla lake

[Seastallion]

Interesting map. "1893 - Supplément illustré du petit journal - Carte du Siam". Your French is as good as mine.

Songkhla does not have a lake, but an offshore island. Also of interest....South Vietnam is French Cochine, and North VN is the Dannam Empire.

Angkor Wat in Cambodia is under the Thai kingdom.

I'd love to see the Thai Malay border!

[phuketsub]

Wow. Very interesting indeed. Is there a higher-res version available?

[Stocky]

All the early European maps I've seen suggest that Lake Songkhla is open both ends with a large island offshore. The map below is dated 1764 and shows an island rather than a lake, Songkhla is marked as Singor and Nakhon Si Thammarat is given its old name of Ligor. The border of Siam places Pattani as part of the Malay States.

The map is in the Library of Congress collection

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gmd/g8025.ct002397

If you view the area in Google Earth, you can see from colour contrast that the lake was probably much larger, extending north to Nakon Si Thammarat, the lake has since silted up, or human intervention has reclaimed land and shrunk the lake.

Even this 1932 road & rail map shows a separation.

http://cdn.supadupa.me/shop/14281/images/1857491/siam_thailand_map_1932_p2_grande.jpg

Edited August 20, 2015 by Stocky

[Seastallion]

Wow. Very interesting indeed. Is there a higher-res version available?

Not that I know of, but I zoom in using Ctr + scroll wheel

[Seastallion]

Although the waterway appears continuous, thus forming and island, none of the 3 maps presented on this thread show the island as having a name....it suggests that the waterway may have been extremely shallow at each end, so much so that the land mass was not considered to be an island.

[phuketsub]

Although the waterway appears continuous, thus forming and island, none of the 3 maps presented on this thread show the island as having a name....it suggests that the waterway may have been extremely shallow at each end, so much so that the land mass was not considered to be an island.

I think the earlier map (click here) calls it "I. Papier", which would stand for Isle de Papier ('Paper Island' in English).

Maybe the French explorers just called it that because it must have been so white and flat? It doesn't mesh with any vernacular names in the area that I am aware of.

Also of interest is the fact that what is almost certainly labelled as 'Bordelun' must have been their attempt at 'Phattalung' (Phattalung Town), which would seems to indicate that the town was once a port town, accessible from the sea...

Given the time, the map is impressively accurate. The map of Phuket (Isle de Junk Seilon) is a good benchmark.

I am really fascinated by this topic.

In Ranode Town they have an expression "when the lake meets the sea it will be the end of Ranode"...given global warming I wonder how far off that might be....

[Stocky]

I think the earlier map (click here) calls it "I. Papier", which would stand for Isle de Papier ('Paper Island' in English).

Maybe the French explorers just called it that because it must have been so white and flat?

Maybe they traded for paper there, the toothbrush tree (Streblus asper) grows throughout the Thai/Malay peninsular and was used historically for paper making in Thailand.

Edited August 21, 2015 by Stocky

[Bredbury Blue]

Regarding comment on Angkor Wat being in Thailand possesion, maybe related to this:

In the Rattanakosin era, during thePaknam crisis in 1893, French troops landed and occupied the western part of Chantaburi Province. In 1904, Siam was forced to surrender Trat to French Indochina in order to regain Chantaburi. Three years later, however, finding that Trat with its almost entirely Thai population was hard to rule, the French returned Trat to Thailand on March 23, 1907, in exchange for larger areas along the Mekong river, which included Battambang, Siam Nakhon, and Sisophon, which all have a Khmer majority population.

[phuketsub]

Here's a link to another French map circa 1752. Here they call the big island Isle de Tantalum, but also lists a second, smaller island as Isle de Papier, although it is not clear to me exactly what that corresponds to...Kor Yor perhaps?

They also name the waterway running north to NST (Ligor) as 'Rindang'. It is interesting because it's location must have run through Klong Daen in Ranode, where there is an old town floating market.

It also shows Phattalung (Bondelun) as accessible from the sea....

[Seastallion]

Oh to have a time machine!

[phuketsub]

Oh to have a time machine!

Next time you are in Ranode, you should check out the 'Ranot(sp?) Museum', which is right next to the swimming pool at Burapachan Park and Cultural Center, where we once met.

They have many of the old maps on display and a lot of other interesting info about the history of Ranode and its importance as a center of transport back in the days when ferries were the way to get around, not buses or (increasingly nowadays) vans. Back then, Songkha Lake was far more important in terms of transport than it is now and if you wanted to get around the region that that was the best way.

Take your wife, as all the info is in Thai, even though a certain person (me) offered to translate it all into Thai for them free of charge.

Anyway, it opened a few months ago I finally went in there over the weekend (free admission as they were having a cultural day to commemorate their famous Menorah dancer who was a National Artist ) and it was much better than I expected. They have nice wooden models of the ferries used and the routes people used back in the day (see photo).

Normal price of admission 30 baht.

My only regret is that my parents-in-law, who live right around the corner, are too ornery and/or frail to visit and that my daughter doesn't have the time/patience to let me see and read about all the exhibits.

It is child-friendly, though, as they have re-creations of old shops where the kids can play and look at the junk-food and pre-plastic playthings of yore...