Four Reigns

Through the long life of Mae Phloi, from a girl sent to serve in the royal Inner Court to a grandmother in the Second World War, Kukrit Pramoj tells the story of Siam across the reigns of four kings and its passage from old kingdom to modern nation. Bangkok is the whole book: the Grand Palace and its Inner Court where Phloi grows up, the canal-laced city of the old capital, the Chao Phraya river, and the modernising, then war-shadowed, city of her old age.

Mae Phloi

The Grand Palace

Reign of Rama V

Brought as a child into the Inner Court of the Grand Palace, Phloi is raised in the refined, cloistered world of royal women, learning its manners, arts and hierarchies. The palace of Rama V's reign, at the height of the old order, is the paradise of her girlhood and the standard against which she measures all the changes to come.

Reign of Rama V

explicit As a girl Phloi is sent to serve in the Inner Court of the Grand Palace, the real royal complex on the Chao Phraya in Bangkok; her upbringing there frames the whole book.

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Choi

The Inner Court

Reign of Rama V

In the Inner Court, a whole enclosed city of royal wives, attendants and their intrigues, Phloi and her irrepressible friend Choi come of age. Kukrit lovingly reconstructs this vanished women's world, its ceremonies and gossip and small dramas, as the intimate heart of the old Siam.

Reign of Rama V

inferred The Inner Court, the women's city within the Grand Palace, is where Phloi and her friend Choi grow up; sited within the real palace, the specific quarters the novel's own.

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