En: Thailand Freemasonry
A Brief History of Freemasonry in Thailand
Thailand began to open up to the west in the late 19th century. King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) was the first Thai king to travel abroad and to begin to understand the importance of the west as a trading partner. As a result, westerners began to arrive in the kingdom as part of diplomatic and commercial missions. History has shown that these are the necessary seeds for the growth of Freemasonry.
Unfortunately Thailand proved rocky ground for the Craft. Perhaps it is due to the fact that unlike most other nations in the region, Thailand was an absolute monarchy that had never been colonized. It had (and still has) distinct and rigid classes of society. The central Masonic concepts of democracy, treating men of all social class on the level, and the Judeo-Christian basis for the Craft’s legends must have seemed unnatural and strange to the devoutly Buddhist local population.
Between 1878 and 1905 there were four failed attempts to start an English lodge. The brethren in Bangkok faced the most amazing string of bad luck. The individual failures are too painful to detail here. The reasons ranged from waning interest on the part of the few founding members in the first attempt to the death of the Master-elect in the final attempt.
In 1907, a new generation of brethren petitioned and was granted a warrant from the Grand Lodge of Scotland. But of course the troubles hadn’t ended yet. Expatriate lodges are renowned for high turnover as assignments end and new ones begin. Thus when the charter eventually arrived from Edinburgh, several of the officers had left and the charter had to be reissued. Lodge St. John was finally consecrated on January 24, 1911 with the reissued charter.
The lodge attracted a very international following including British, Thai, German, Swiss, American and other brethren. This diversity was shortly to become critical to the fate of the brethren in Bangkok. In World War II, Thailand remained neutral. Shortly after the Japanese entered Thailand at the start of World War II, the Japanese secret police raided the rented premises where the lodge met. Records, regalia and other items were seized and brethren from Allied countries were interred. Thankfully the international flavor of the lodge enabled the neutral Thai and Axis German brethren to save some of the early records. They were also able to help the interred brethren better cope with their incarceration.
A growth spurt hit Freemasonry in the kingdom between 1991 and 1997, when five lodges were formed. A second Scottish lodge, Lodge Pattaya West Winds was opened in Pattaya in 1991, more than 80 years after Lodge St. John. This was followed by the kingdom’s first Irish lodge, Lodge Morakot. The National Grand Lodge of France (GLNF) founded Lodge 7 Niveaux de la Sagesse in Chiang Mai in 1994 and Lodge Tantawan Fleur du Soleil in Bangkok in 1996.
After the recovery from the 1997 financial crisis, a second growth spurt occurred and seems to still be in progress. Lodge Lane Xang was a Scottish lodge originally formed in Laos, but that went dark in 1976. The brethren of Bangkok reopened the lodge in Thailand in 2000. In 2001, the English finally succeeding in establishing a beach head with Chula Lodge in Bangkok a mere 123 years after their first attempt. This was followed by the opening of Light of Siam Lodge in Phuket in 2004.
In 2005, the GLNF formed a second Lodge Hoa Sen Lumière d’Asia in Bangkok while the Irish branched out to southern Thailand with a lodge in Songkla.
The Dutch established their first lodge in South East Asia with the consecration of Loge Erasmus, No. 297 in Bangkok on January 7, 2006. The lodge works in English and includes brethren from The Netherlands, Thailand, and assorted other countries. It has become a focal point for Dutch masons from all over southeast Asia and even Australia.
In February 2006, the Scottish founded the first Thai language lodge. Lodge Ratanakosin, No. 1833 SC refers to the name bestowed upon what is now Bangkok by the first king of the Chakri Dynasty in 1782. The name translates as “Bejeweled City of the God Indra.” The Standard Scottish ritual is being translated by a team of very distinguished Thai brethren. The lodge works in Thai and English.
Now Thailand supports lodges from six Grand Lodges offering ritual in three languages. Freemasonry may have had a rocky start in Thailand, but we hope that the strong and very diverse system in place continues to grow and flourish for years to come.
[Taken from a variety of local sources]
The History of Lodge St. John The following is an excellent paper written by one of Thailand’s most prolific Masonic authors. We hope you enjoy it..
The History of Lodge St. John
W. Bro.: James Soutar
The first known record of Freemasons in Thailand dates back to April 1878, when it is reported that there were seventeen “regularly constituted Freemasons in Bangkok”, who proposed to start a Lodge. By June 1878, however, it was announced that “owing to the difficulty of finding seven willing Brethren to be Foundation members, and who would be prepared to undertake the erection of a Lodge when the Charter arrived several months hence, the proposed Lodge could not be proceeded with”. This setback was to be an ominous augury for what was to be repeated over and over again in the succeeding decades.
In early 1880 a second attempt was made to establish a Lodge, but by July that year Bro. Badman, who had been the driving force behind the attempt, had to admit defeat, commenting that “the members of the Craft who belong to the Mercantile Marine were very anxious to have a Lodge established but without the cooperation of those resident permanently in Bangkok, it was felt the project should not be proceeded with”.
It took a further eighteen years and a new generation of Freemasons before there is any record of Brethren meeting with the specific purpose of erecting a Lodge. Many of the original old Masons in Siam were already dead, and their graves can still be seen to this day, the tombstones duly marked with Masonic symbols, in the old Protestant cemetery in downtown Bangkok, near the Chao Phraya River.
In 1898 the impetus came from Masons afloat on merchant vessels and keen Brethren in Singapore, who wished to support the opening of a Lodge in Bangkok, but all was to be of no avail. The obstacle this time was that there was a lack of potential Officers of sufficient rank and experience in the Craft. One valiant Brother, the Master of the merchant ship “HECATE”, sailing weekly between Singapore and Bangkok, took up the challenge. After correspondence backwards and forwards with Grand Secretary in England on the matter of whether or not the UGLE would issue a Charter, he reluctantly had to inform his correspondent that “there is not in Bangkok one Master Mason who has held the Office of Warden to put forward for the Master’s Chair, but there are English, Scotch, Irish, Danish and German Constitution Brethren in Bangkok sufficient to form a Lodge”. Grand Secretary’s reply was not surprising. He stated that “numbers did not count and since there was no-one qualified and experienced enough to be installed as Master, the Most Worshipful Grand Master could not be recommended to grant a Warrant”.
In 1900 things Masonic started out much more promisingly. Perhaps believing that Bangkok-UGLE relations were jinxed after the failure of all past attempts, or perhaps because the first Master-designate was himself an Irishman, the Brethren in Bangkok and the Brethren afloat between there and Singapore applied for a Warrant to the Grand Lodge of Ireland. This was approved and the Warrant was issued to establish Lodge No. 300 on 4 October 1900. But the jinx had spread to Dublin, because the Master designate, Bro. George F. Travers Drape, a distinguished graduate of the University of Dublin and a barrister working for the Siamese government, died suddenly.
History of Lodge St John Part 2
Informal Masonic meetings continued during the next five years, usually held in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank compound, and in April 1905 a petition, signed by over 30 Masons, supported by the Freemasons of Singapore and by the English District, was sent to the UGLE for the erection of Lodge Menam (“Menam” being the name of the Chao Phraya River in those days). Once again fate intervened. The Master designate fell ill of fever and subsequently died. So confident had the Masons in Bangkok been on this occasion that they had purchased furniture and equipment and had started collecting funds among themselves. Indeed, one of the founding Brethren was so confident and enthusiastic that he undertook to raise a sum of 10,000 Ticals (as the Thai Baht was called in those days) to purchase land and erect a temple. The Engineering Society of Thailand and the world-famous Oriental Hotel both offered temporary accommodation to the new Lodge. But eventually, after running out of options, the Petition had to be withdrawn and the money raised was returned to those who had donated it, who unanimously agreed to use such funds for the education of a Masonic orphan.
But the problems facing the “lost” Freemasons of Bangkok were not yet at an end. One of the founding Brethren of the abortive Lodge Menam wrote to his fellow Freemasons, stating that “the Government and myself have had a great row about my shooting of elephants and the result is that I am going away”. Hardly surprising, as a similar offence nowadays would result in decades of residence in a Thai prison!
After all these failed attempts to establish a Lodge under the Irish and, especially the English Constitutions, I believe that the Brethren in Bangkok, who hailed from nine different regular Constitutions, did not have the stomach to approach Dublin and London again. And so, early in 1907, they decided to go North of the border and approach Edinburgh. In doing so they received the wholehearted support of their Scottish Brethren in Lodge Scotia in Penang, whose Lodge had been Consecrated in 1906, the oldest Scottish Lodge in Southeast Asia. Grand Secretary in Edinburgh, however, proved to be as intractably legalistic as his counterpart in London, and it took some time and a lot of waiting for correspondence backward and forward by ship before, finally, the Charter of Lodge St. John No. 1072 SC was signed in Grand Lodge on the 4th of August 1910. But the troubles had not even started!
Owing to departures from among the Brethren in Bangkok between 1907 and August 1910, this first Charter had to be returned and re-issued. And once again the old problem arose of the availability of sufficiently qualified Brethren to fill the Chairs. But at last, a very long last, the Freemasons of Bangkok were to have their Lodge. On the 24th of January 1911 Lodge St. John was consecrated, although without several names on the re-issued Charter being in their designated Offices – or, indeed, even present.
The Consecrating Officer, a very high-ranking and distinguished Mason from Hong Kong, was Worshipful Brother The Reverend Spafford. He had already been delayed by adverse weather conditions at sea in his journey from Hong Kong. Little did he expect, however, that he would be delayed in Bangkok for many weeks by very stormy conditions in Lodge St. John. If ever a man must have seriously considered throwing out the baby (in this case “babies”) with the bathwater, it must have been the good Reverend Brother. He must have had the diplomatic skills of a Buddha and the patience of Job to survive those fraught weeks that followed Lodge St. John’s almost stillborn birth. His Masonic and religious Obligations must have been strained to the limit. Just before the Consecration the Master Elect and Secretary Elect informed Worshipful Brother Spafford and the Bangkok Brethren that Lodge St. John was “their ball, and if they couldn’t make the rules, then no-one else could play”. Worshipful Brother Spafford (under which Rule in the Constitutions and Laws I definitely do not know) expelled both Brethren and (once again I cannot find out how he “legally” did so, but perhaps by cable exchange to and from Edinburgh) installed a different Brother than the one designated on the re-issued Charter. So Lodge St. John, somehow or other, was Consecrated and a Master, Wardens and Office Bearers duly took their places.
