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It was a significant moment in the history of Phuket. A decision
made thousands of miles away in London and a choice made by a colonial
official in India would shape the future development of not only
the island, but the entire region.
The year was 1785 and Captain Francis Light had lived in Phuket
for a dozen years. He had spent much of that time trying to convince
the British East India Company of the importance of Phuket as a
strategic trading post and naval base. The company had finally agreed
but when the Sultan of Kedah offered the company Penang - in return
for protection from his volatile neighbours - the London accountants
had decided that it could not afford two such outposts. The choice
of which island the British would take over was left to the nearest
senior officer - Sir John Macpherson, Governor-General of India.
Sir John weighed up the options and decided it would be easier and
cheaper to garrison Penang. He also believed that the Malay island
offered better anchorage for the company's fleet of trading vessels.
Captain Light would have to move.
Had the company realised just what it was giving up - an island
the size of Singapore with abundant tin deposits and already a flourishing
trading post - and had Sir John actually visited the two islands
and seen that Penang was virtually uninhabited and virtually devoid
of natural resources, it would be a fair guess that the decision
would have been different.
At the time, however, the choice may have seemed prescient; Siam
was battling for its very existence against yet another Burmese
invasion. While King Rama I's army had won a significant victory
at the Three Pagodas Pass in Kanchanaburi, many of the southern
principalities had fallen to the Burmese marauders - and their next
stop was Phuket.
What's in a name?
Phuket may only have gained wide-spread international recognition
in the last 30 years - its white sand beaches and verdant natural
beauty the obvious enticements for holiday-makers - but the island
has been making its mark on regional and international affairs for
almost a thousand years.
The island is believed to have first entered the annals of history
in the third century AD, as a vague reference in Ptolemy's Geographia,
in which the Alexandrian explorer refers to passing by the Cape
of Jang Si Lang on the way down the Malay Peninsular. Ptolemy's
rendering of the island's name is a variation of the Malay name
Ujang Salang, meaning "northern most island".
Further name changes occurred when the island came under the rule
of the Shivite empire that dominated the Malay Peninsula until the
beginning the last millennium and then as one of the twelve city-states
of the Sirivijaya empire - becoming known as Muang Takua-Talang,
named after the island's largest village. It was later renamed just
Thalang, when King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai conquered much of the
peninsula in the latter part of the 13th century, in his creation
of the first, and arguably greatest, Siamese kingdom.
The island was later called Bukit, the Malay for mountain, but
early western seafarers preferred to further adulterate the Ptolemy
mispronunciation and for many hundreds of years - and upon many
charts - the island became known as Junk Ceylon. It was not until
the reign of HM King Chulalongkorn that it was officially named
Bhuket, with a further 70-odd years passing before the spelling
was set as Phuket, in 1969, almost seven hundred years after the
island had been integrated into Siam, and just in time for western
tourists to discover it and mispronounce its name all over again.
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