4 
When he first laid eyes on the twins, Robert Hunter instantly knew he had found a most precious curio.
Conjoined twins were rare, and most of them would not grow to maturity. Back in Great Britain, Hunter had heard of the famous Biddenden Maids, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst. Those twins, born in the twelfth century in Kent, England, allegedly were joined at the hips and shoulders. Even though some skeptics considered them to be a mere fable, the Biddenden Maids had been commemorated for centuries in Kent with a big celebration on Easter Sunday. The festival each year drew thousands of spectators, who would gobble up the special Biddenden cakes bearing impressions of the twins. Veracity be damned, the legend grew—the cakes were reputed to be a cure for stomachache, or great souvenirs that would engender luck.1
Or, closer to home, in Glasgow, Scotland, where the Hunter family business was based, there had been the Scottish Brothers, born in 1490, often referred to as the “Northumbrian Monster,” for “the lower half of their bodies was fused,” sharing “one set of genitals and two legs.” They had been raised and educated at the court of King James IV of Scotland, became fluent in half a dozen languages, and learned to sing duets—“one a tenor and the other a treble bass.” They “lived to the age of twenty-eight” and died a few days apart, with the survivor dragging along the corpse of his brother “before succumbing to infection from putrescence.”2
In more recent times, there had been the Hungarian Sisters, Helen and Judith, who had visited England and created a stir. Born in Szony in 1701, they were joined back to back, with a single vulva but two vaginal tracts. After viewing them in London, Alexander Pope was so smitten that he was said to have immortalized the twins with a poem:
Two sisters wonderful to behold, who have thus grown as one,
That naught their bodies can divide, no power beneath the sun.
The town of Szoenii gave them birth, hard by far-famed Komorn,
Which noble fort may all the arts of Turkish sultans scorn.
Lucina, woman’s gentle friend, did Helen first receive;
And Judith, when three hours had passed, her mother’s womb did leave.
Unwilling to leave anything to the imagination, Pope continued:
One urine passage serves for both; one anus, so they tell;
The other parts their numbers keep, and serve their owners well.
Their parents poor did send them forth, the world to travel through,
That this great wonder of the age should not be hid from view.
The inner parts concealed do lie hid from our eyes, alas!
But all the body here you view erect in solid brass.3
Also inspired by the Hungarian Sisters, elite members of the Scriblerus Club, including Pope, Jonathan Swift, Robert Harley, and others, coauthored a satirical tract, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), in which interested parties carry on a heated debate over conjoined twins.
These were all sensational tales about “freaks” that tickled curious minds. And now, standing right in front of such a specimen of what Pope had called a “great wonder of the age,” Hunter was not going to miss this opportunity. He approached the twin boys, and, with the aid of his servant Hattee—described in language typical of the period as “a fat good humored little Siamese-Chinese”4—Hunter made inquiries into their lives, asking about their birth, family, and other details. When he was done, he already had a plan. He promised to come back soon.
And he did, repeatedly, like the suitor returning again and again to serenade the girl he had first sighted at the bend of a country road. It did not take much for Hunter to convince both the twins and their mother to agree to his scheme of taking them on an exhibition tour to Europe and America. Sweet-tongued and persistent, he managed to tickle the prepubescent imaginations of the twins about the big, wide world out there. As for their mother, he lured her with lucre, more money than she would ever see in her life as a riverine merchant. Of course, he promised to bring them back, safe and sound, soon after the tour.
The obstacle, however, lay with the king. In Siam, the king owned everything within his dominion: land, wealth, products, people. No one was allowed to leave the country without the court’s permission. The Chinese in Siam might have enjoyed special privileges of exemption from corvée labor and avoidance of exploitation by feudal lords, but they were still the king’s subjects and his possessions. In China, ever since the Ming Dynasty of the fourteenth century, there had also been similar laws forbidding travel overseas without permission, as well as in Japan before the Meiji Reform in 1860.
Forced to approach the king, Hunter was disappointed when Rama III did not consent to let him take the twins. The honeymoon of the king and the British trader, sweetened by Hunter’s dowry of a thousand muskets, had proved short-lived, and now he and Rama III were partners in trade. Unless Hunter could come up with an enticing offer, the king was unwilling to let go a prize possession as rare as the white elephants. Hunter would have to wait for a more opportune time.
In fact, Hunter’s request piqued the king’s curiosity. Realizing that he had not seen these wonders of the age born in his kingdom, the king ordered that they be brought to him for a personal viewing.
When the royal summons reached the humble boathouse in Meklong, it threw the family into a panic. The family scrambled to get the twins ready for this very special occasion: getting haircuts, mending clothes, and washing duck-yard mud off their bare feet. According to Graves, the twins soon “repaired to Bangkok accompanied by their mother and single sister, not forgetting to take along a cargo of their now famous eggs.”5 Meeting the king might be a big deal, but the twins, having acquired a keen business sense, would not want to miss the opportunity of plying their trade at the famous bazaar in the capital city.
It was their first trip to Bangkok, the “city of wild plums.” With a population in the early nineteenth century of more than 400,000 souls, half of them perennially afloat, the city seemed to have risen from water like a deus ex machina. As the boat, rowed by eight muscular men garbed in the king’s red livery, entered the serpentine Meinam River, the twins were overwhelmed by the splendor and magnificence of the scene: Under a blazing sun, against the sultry sky, a panorama of palaces, temples, pagodas, and floating houses spread out as far as their eyes could see. Single-plank bridges arched to a giddy height of thirty feet. Spidery canals were thronged with boats. A fleet of gaudy Chinese junks was anchored in the middle of the stream, surrounded by the pandemonium of haggling traders.
Upon arrival, the twins were hurried to a secluded location, where a eunuchlike courtier drilled them on the etiquette of being in the presence of the monarch. After a sleepless night, the twins were taken to the palace in a covered hammock—the king, exercising a variant of droit de seigneur, did not want anyone else to see them before he did. But at their curious age, the twins could not help prying open the curtain and peeking at the animated street scenes of the capital. After they entered the front gate guarded by musket-armed soldiers, they reached a courtyard where a white elephant was chained to poles. Newly caught in the wild, the pachyderm was yet to be tamed before she could join the team of royal white elephants, all supposedly animated by the transmigrated souls of deceased monarchs. Of course, the twins had no idea that one day they would share with those treasured creatures the distinction of being one of the three most famous Siamese exports, the other two being white elephants and Siamese cats.
Still concealed, the twins soon arrived at the Hall of Audience, where Rama III, a corpulent man approaching forty, sat cross-legged like a Buddha on the ten-foot-high gold throne. In front of him, in a scene almost anticipating The King and I, hundreds of court officials groveled on stomachs and elbows like amphibious toads. A contemporary narrative captures the setting where the monarch viewed the twins:
The extent of the audience-chamber is thirty-five by seventy feet. The middle of the floor, about one-half of the whole width, is raised eighteen inches above the rest, leaving a sort of lobby on each side, equal to one-fourth of the breadth of the whole room, and extending its entire length. A row of six pillars, three feet square, stood on each edge of the middle floor; and the walls, ceiling, and pillars were hung with red gilt paper, and the floors were carpeted. Chandeliers and lamps of various patterns were suspended from the ceiling, and numerous Chinese paintings and mirrors adorned the walls. From a central point, the floor gently rises in an inclined plane up to the throne, at the farthest end of the apartment.6
The twins were then let out of the hammock like animals released from a cage, and were told to crawl toward the throne. As they covered the distance, obviously in tandem, the king was amused by the rare, if not surreal, sight. His Majesty launched saliva into a golden spittoon and then renewed his quid of betel and areca-nut, a pastime shared by almost all of his subjects, a national habit that blackened their teeth and, as described in countless travelogues, dismayed foreign visitors in no small degree. When the twins scampered to about forty feet from the throne, they were told to stop. As instructed the previous night, they made three salaams by placing their palms against their foreheads. Again three times they knocked their heads on the ground. As they did so, the entire cohort of officials and courtiers present also bowed three times. The king then asked some questions about them and their family. All the queries were filtered in whispers through a line of courtiers, one of whom crouched by the throne, another by the twins, and yet another somewhere in the middle—Siamese court etiquette forbade any visitor to speak to the king directly. The answers were relayed back to the king in a way that resembled the modern-day children’s game called the “Chinese Whispers”—except that here each answer with its relay was preceded by three salaams and a lengthy recitation of a string of the king’s titles: “Phra, Putie, Chucka, Ka, Rap, Si, Klau, Si, Kla, Mom, Ka Prah Putie Chow.”7
While this elaborate Siamese ritual was being performed, a few swallows flew in and out of the open court. Kneeling on the ground and stealing sidelong glances with their peripheral vision, the twins sensed the swift movement of the swallows alighting on the beams and chandeliers. The Chinese considered these migratory birds an auspicious sign because their annual return in spring coincided with the beginning of the sowing and planting season. Eschewing interest in the power and wealth—the king in his rich gold clothing, the officials in their silk sarongs—the twins, betraying their rural roots, were more interested in the swallows, which gave them much-needed distraction, or perhaps an ironic perspective. In the future, in faraway places, when hundreds of curious onlookers would gawk, scream, and taunt them as freaks on stage, they would remember this moment, when the birds flew over their heads, chirping their throaty notes, heeding neither kings nor queens with their pretensions. The birds taught the twins to free themselves, to take the wings of fancy, a momentary reverie, withdrawing deep into their inner selves, while the world looked on with contempt and disgust, awe and bemusement.
Suddenly, a loud clang of gongs, as if in a Siamese theater, emerged from an invisible place, followed by a flourish of music played on pipes and strings. Yellow silk curtains were pulled over the throne, shielding the godlike king from view. The entire court made the three obligatory salaams yet again and loud salutations in concert. Before the twins knew it, their viewing by the king was over.