You give Russia something and it expects maintenance too
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha was so busy signing business deals and buying military gear on his trip to Moscow last week that most news media overlooked an interesting cultural aspect to the jaunt.
Fortunately Russia Beyond The Headlines, a publication occasionally inserted in The Nation, picked up the story. “Thailand to help restore King Rama V’s gifts to Nicholas II” was the headline it used last Thursday.
Years before King Chulalongkorn the Great made his own trek to Europe (and Russia), the young man who would become the last of the Russian tsars came to Siam, and was duly loaded up with sundry Southeast Asian collectibles.
Upon Crown Prince Nicholas’ return home to Saint Petersburg, the items were stored at the former capital’s Kunstkamera, the oldest museum in Russia, and there they remain, a little worse for wear after a century.
They include portraits of Rama V and his Queen, Savang Vattana, a Malay kris (dagger) with a blade fashioned from a meteor, and a pair of sabres, one characteristically Siamese in design and another in the Laotian style.
Russia Beyond The Headlines quotes Prayut as saying, “I offered to send Thai craftsmen to Russia to restore the gifts that King Rama V gave to Tsar Nicholas II 119 years ago.” The premier said he and his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, had agreed that the collection would later be exhibited in both Thailand and Russia.
Prince Nicholas came to Asia on his “Great Eastern Journey” in 1890-91 to establish links with the rulers of countries including Siam. Having already visited Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, Ceylon, Singapore and Java and with Vietnam and Japan still on the road ahead, he was bestowed with several gifts by Rama V.
Clearly in no hurry to return to the imperial palace of his dad, Alexander III, Nicholas made his way from Japan to Vladivostok in Russia’s distant east and helped get work going on the Trans-Siberian Railway.
In 1894 there was a large exhibition of the treasures given him during his eastern odyssey and then everything was tucked away at the Kunstkamera, though some goodies also went into storage at the Hermitage, today the country’s most revered museum.
The Bolsheviks seemed uninterested in the Asian hoard when they staged their revolution in 1916 and slaughtered the imperial family. The treasures also survived the fall of the Soviet Union and Russia’s economic decline in the early 1990s, but, despite careful storage, time has taken its toll.
The case holding the sabres is cracked, as has the sheath of the Siamese one, and the steel of both blades has darkened. Restoration can only be entrusted to a highly skilled specialist, the curators agree, someone who’s able to return the valuables to their original lustre.
Handymen are invited to queue to the right and be prepared to pack warmly for the Russian winter.
