The Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery
By 1898 there were over fifty foreigners based in Chiang Mai. The majority worked for British companies in the teak trade. Many of them were educated in British public schools and universities. Life in the forest, where they spent most of the year was adventurous and its health hazards great, as they well knew, so that, together with the missionaries, they requested Mr. Beckett, the British Vice-Consul, to approach the Siamese Government for a grant of land in Chiang Mai to be used as a foreign cemetery. The approach was successful and by Royal Deed of Gift of H.S.M. King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, dated14 July 1898, the land was granted. The main conditions attached to the Royal Gift are:-
The land may never be sold. The British Consul was to be Custodian of the land in perpetuity. And so it was until the British Consulate was closed. Then the Consul in Bangkok became custodian and he appointed a local committee to look after the cemetery; this they have done with great success. The first member of this elite club was Captain Guilding of the Essex Regiment who, on a fine February day in 1900, rode into Chiang Mai from Kentung, far to the north, suffering from the last stages of dysentery. What he was doing there no man knew. Was he, perhaps, playing the ‘Great Game,’ whereby the British watched the moves of Russia in sensitive areas beyond the borders of each others Empires? Many famous residents now lie in the foreign cemetery – McGilvary and McDaniel, missionaries, Barkowski and Janzen, artists, Mcfie and Melvin, teak wallahs, Captain Jensen, gendamerie, Case and Johnson, babies, and two British Consuls
(Credit John Shaw, British Honorary Consul 1990-1995)
