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Bangkok: Mission Press, 1841. 12mo (8.375” x 5.5”), recent blue wrappers. 26 pp., title page wood engraving. [Bound as issued with:] The Seven Princes. Bangkok: Mission Press, 1841. [4], [1 blank], [1] pp. CONDITION: Very good, some light foxing throughout.

Stated first edition of this scarce tract comparing Christianity and Buddhism by one of the first American missionaries to Siam (now Thailand), published at the Baptist Mission press in Bangkok.

Printing operations at American missionary establishments in Siam (modern-day Thailand) began in 1835 with the arrival of Dan Beach Bradley to the newly-established American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) station in Bangkok. Bradley, a physician by training, transported an old-fashioned printing press, as well as Thai type, from the Singapore mission, and the earliest development of American missionary printing in Siam was shaped by his collaboration with Baptist minister John Taylor Jones, who, after a couple years’ stint in Burma, was sent to Bangkok in 1833 by the American Baptist Missionary Union (ABMU). Jones, like his wife and collaborator Eliza Grew Jones, was a gifted linguist, and would oversee some of the first Thai-language translations of Christian scripture, including a significant early version of the New Testament. It would not be until the 1836 arrival of the Jones’ fellow Baptist missionary Robert Davenport, a trained printer who brought a press and other printing equipment, that the Baptist and the ABCFM missions’ presses at Bangkok gained momentum. At first, the two missions pooled resources, and over the following eighteen months published about a dozen tracts. A printing house, with a storehouse for paper and print materials, was constructed for Davenport, and by 1838 the Baptist and the ABCFM missionaries were publishing under separated imprints—the Baptists under the “Mission Press,” and their colleagues as the “A.B.C.F.M. Press.”

Both presses produced a wide range of religious tracts, scripture portions, and educational materials in Thai, Chinese, and English, supporting the missions’ evangelical goals while also contributing to broader developments in literacy and publishing in Siam. Their work extended beyond religious content; Bradley edited the Bangkok Recorder, which was published in both Thai and English from 1859 to 1873, and an English-language almanac, the Bangkok Calendar. The presses laid the foundation for modern Thai printing and helped standardize Thai orthography. By combining linguistic scholarship with technological innovation, the Bangkok Mission Press became a vital institution in the transfer of Western knowledge and the shaping of Thailand’s print culture in the mid-nineteenth century.

John Taylor Jones (1802–1851) was born in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, attended Brown College, and worked briefly as a teacher. In 1825 he graduated from Amherst College, and afterwards attended Andover Theological Seminary and Newton Theological Institution. Two weeks before receiving his ordination at Boston in July 1830, Jones married Eliza Coltman Grew, a native of Providence, Rhode Island. Two weeks after the wedding, the couple set sail for Burma, where they worked for over two years before being restationed by the ABMU in Siam (prompted by the urging of German Lutheran missionary to Siam, Karl Gutzlaff). The Joneses arrived in Siam on the schooner Reliance, essentially under the protection of its owner, Robert Hunter, a British merchant and unofficial delegate of the Crown who had the ear of the prime minister of Siam and was sympathetic to the mission cause. With Hunter’s help, they were initially stationed in Cokai, where they began their intensive study of the Thai language. Eliza Jones died of cholera in 1838, after which Rev. Jones married twice more (his second wife also predeceasing him), and died in Siam in 1851.

His facility with the Thai language notwithstanding (he was said to preach more eloquently in his adopted language than in English), Jones makes arguments in this volume—intended as a tool for considering Christianity as opposed to (or simply over) Buddhism—which were dubiously received. The concept of original sin did not hold water for the Siamese, and “educated [Buddhist] priests considered the missionaries’ belief in a Creator-God as superstitious…A generation later the Siamese state minister and scholar Chaophraya Thiphakorawong made a short remark on Jones’s views on Buddhism [in his 1867 Book on Various Things], in which he dismissed them altogether as biased and inaccurate” (Trakulhun p. 1226). Thiphakorawong writes: “The American missionary, Dr Jones, wrote a book called the ‘Golden Balance for weighing Buddhism and Christianity,’ but I think anyone who reads it will see that his balance is very one-sided; indeed, he who would weigh things ought to be able to look impartially at the scales” (p. 1226n82).

The Golden Balance is bound, as issued, with The Seven Princes (stated fourth edition), with woodcut illustrations of a pineapple and a manicule opposite the title page. We find no evidence of either work being published in English.

OCLC records just two examples of this work (both bound with The Seven Princes), at Harvard and Princeton.

REFERENCES: Winship, Michael. “Early Thai Printing: The Beginning to 1851,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Vol. 3, No. 1 (1986); Winship, Michael. “The Printing Press as an Agent of Change?” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life Vol. 8, No. 2 (2008), online; Trakulhun, Sven. “Among A People of Unclean Lips: Eliza and John Taylor Jones in Siam (1833–1851),” Asiatische Studien/Études asiatiques Vol. 67 (2013).

Item #9896

Price: $1,750.00