Good evening everyone, Lausl Montgomery with you once again and as always thanks for spending this half hour with me

2% of your day. This is the China History Podcast and we're 263 episodes into this humble effort of mine.

Part 5 today of our overview of the history of those adventurous Chinese immigrants who

left their families and homes in the Middle Kingdom and created new lives

for themselves in today's great Kingdom of Thailand.

And the famous mid and late 19th century, chaos and social unrest,

prime the pump for the greatest wave of Chinese migration in its long history.

But violence and turmoil in the homeland alone wasn't enough to cause such huge numbers.

It was also the introduction of a game-changing innovation, beginning in the 1860s of regularly scheduled steamer service

between Bangkok and the major ports of Fu-Chien and Guangdong once this became an

established and affordable service, more of the good people of Guangdong and food

ien saw this as a very attractive life choice. We left off last time with the Anji, these secret societies in Siam,

proliferating in all the major ethnic Chinese population centers in the kingdom.

All this late 19th century prosperity that flooded into the

kingdom stoked the fires of illegal enterprises that came hand in hand with these

economic good times.

But as mentioned last time, the government took this sad song and made it better

and institutionalized sin taxes.

That would be collected by these tax farmers I mentioned last episode

so by taxing these vices and at least from the Treasury's standpoint a bad thing

sort of kind of became a bad thing, yeah, sort of, kind of, became a good thing. Secret societies and organized

crime, you could find them everywhere from Singapore in the south to the Corrod Basin

...