Denis Gray meets Mom Rajawongse Narisa Chakrabongse – publisher, human-rights advocate, palace-turned-hotel owner, and granddaughter of a prince who travelled to EUROPE and returned with a Russian bride. This is her story.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CEDRIC ARNOLD  

The year is 1906. And something almost unpardonable – “a national dynastic catastrophe” – has burst over Bangkok like a bombshell. A favourite son of the great King Chulalongkorn and second in line to the throne, sent by his father to study in St Petersburg, has married a foreigner, a Russian with not an ounce of royal blood. Two worlds – a still-cocooned Siam and the distant West – touch in one of Thailand’s most poignant love stories.

Fast forward more than a century, to a riverside Bangkok palace where a handsome Thai woman with green eyes and reddish hair sits beneath the portrait of Ekaterina Ivanova Desnitsky, better known in Thai history as Katya. Subdued morning light plays over antique furniture, paintings and photographs of nobles and princesses of a vanished era.

“I think she was a very gutsy woman,” says Mom Rajawongse Narisa Chakrabongse, looking up at her grandmother. “I identify with her, and the fact that once you leave one country and go to another and spend a lot of your life there you are never going to be totally Russian again, and she could never be totally Thai. She would always be diff erent, so it’s that otherness I identify with a lot.”

Like Katya, Narisa is decidedly a unique personality: she is a Thai Buddhist but as English as tea and cricket. She is also a privileged aristocrat – Mom Rajawongse is a royal title – who could have slipped into a life of ease, but she instead labours hard as a book publisher and as the creator and owner of an exclusive hotel. She is a committed advocate of environmental conservation and human rights, too. Very much a woman of her times, the 53-year-old has delved deeply into a haunting past that in part mirrors her own life.

Narisa was only three when Katya passed away. Both her English mother and Thai father died prematurely. She remembers feeling much like an orphan as she grew up in Thailand and England, her family history virtually a blank slate. Only when she completed university and moved to her house in England did she begin to sift through trunks piled with old photographs, letters and diaries, crying as she read some of them and driven to dig deeper into the past. In 1994, after five years of research, she and her aunt, author Eileen PHOTOS BY: GREENASIA PRODUCTION CO LTD (LEFT); LINDA VERGNANI (RIGHT) Hunter, published Katya and the Prince of Siam.

“It was a way of finding out who I was, where I came from, why I look the way I do,” she says. “Growing up in Thailand, looking like this but being largely in Thai society, was quite traumatic… It wasn’t easy and so I think understanding one’s roots can help to find a kind of resolution.”

These roots were put down when King Chulalongkorn – said to have had 92 wives and 77 children – sent Prince Chakrabongse Bhuvanath first to England and then Russia as part of a policy to dispatch the country’s best and brightest to learn from the West. Narisa stands in awe of her grandfather, a 13-year-old initially speaking neither English nor Russian thrown into a totally alien culture – before not only succeeding, but graduating at the top of his class and earning the aff ection of Czar Nicholas II. He also fell passionately in love with Katya, a nurse from a well-todo Ukrainian family. The young pair eloped and married in Istanbul in 1906 before making their way anxiously to

Siam, as Thailand was then known.

The odds were stacked against the pair; even before her arrival in Bangkok, the 18-year-old Katya sounded an ominous note: “My life has been too simple to adjust to such change so quickly and although my husband is charming and is doing his best to make me happy, sometimes it is inevitable that no-one can help me… Now, that I have begun to understand my future better, it begins to lose its rosy colour.”

Anger and icy silence greeted the star-crossed couple. The first foreigner to have intruded into the highest circles of the Siamese court was relegated to isolation behind a palace wall, where she learned the language and customs, tended a garden and played with pet dogs and monkeys. Only with the birth of a son did Queen Saowabha, the king’s favourite wife, and others begin to warm to and accept the outsider. But some years later, after the revolution in Russia led Katya to take a long trip abroad alone, the marriage began to fray. The prince, a product of a polygamous society, took a royal mistress and divorce followed for Katya in 1919.

“No one can say they saw me crying or miserable. I left Siam with a smile on my lips when my heart was perfectly broken,” Katya wrote as she began her sad odyssey through China, the US, England, and finally Paris. Katya and her son, the highly talented Prince Chula Chakrabongse, saw each other rarely until her 1960 death in Paris, where she is buried.

“I don’t know if I could have done what Katya did. You could say in a way she was foolhardy, but no… I think it was very spirited,” Narisa says.

“It was much easier for me, and it gets easier all the time. The world is now so interconnected. My children don’t seem to have any angst about that side of their lives at all; who they are, what does it mean, whereas I’ve pondered over it a lot.”

Unlike Katya, who was bound by strict royal etiquette and the prejudices of those times, Narisa says she has enjoyed far greater freedom and opportunities in Thai society – and has taken full advantage of them.

When the publishing company she ran with her former English husband fizzled out in the UK, Narisa started

Bangkok-based River Books, a highly respected enterprise which has published some 120 diverse titles, many of them on Thai arts, culture and history.

“I try to show that there is a lot more to Thailand than is often portrayed,” Narisa says. The company went through difficult times last year, but she expects a favourable 2010 with some books being placed online. More works on Thailand and Asia are on the cards.

“We’re quite small. I like working with the authors myself,” Narisa says. “So I’m not seeking to turn this into a mega-company. I don’t think we want to get into people management so we don’t want to expand every much. To grow massively is against my philosophy. I like to keep life relatively simple, keep things in scale.”

Geography also simplifies her life, at least in Thailand, as she pursues what Narisa describes as “quite small but challenging and interesting involvements”. The compound of Chakrabongse House, a charming palace built by the prince in 1908 on the Chao Phraya River, encompasses not only her ancestral home but the offices of River Books, The Chakrabongse Villas boutique hotel and the headquarters of Green World Foundation, which she chairs.

The non-profit foundation, started in 1991, focuses on environmental education of the young; “environmental detectives” programmes get schoolchildren to ferret out and note down pollution and other indicators of environmental quality in the country’s streams, seashores and most recently Bangkok’s atmosphere. It’s exciting for the kids, Narisa says, and the data they collect is surprisingly accurate and useful.

Narisa’s other non-commercial pursuit is human rights. “Trying to live an ethical life,” Narisa holds membership in Amnesty International and several human rights organisations. In 2008 she sparked media attention when she declined to be one of six Thai torchbearers for the Beijing Olympics in protest over China’s policies toward Tibet. “I always try to make it clear that I am not against China as such, but I see that it could do something about Tibet that was interesting… and acceptable to the world community. I’m surprised that they’ve sort of missed that trick.”

Narisa’s second business venture – The Villas – has, like publishing, turned into a labour of love rather than a hard-nosed affair. “I just realised that to maintain the house and the staff and the garden I was going to have to bring in some more income,” she says, recalling the impact of the 1997 Asian economic crisis. Narisa built exquisite Thai-style villas set amid tropical vegetation, looking out over the river and across to Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn. A swimming pool replaced a little pond where Narisa played as a child. With the help of her husband Korsvasti Svasti, a Thai-English media consultant, she found great pleasure in furnishing the rooms, thinking up new menus and ways to enrich the experience of her guests, numbering at most 16.

“I don’t want to make it any bigger. I think the concept is right and I don’t want to change that,” she says, taking us on a tour of the villas, garden and palace. “This is still my home.”

The three-storey palace itself, built in a once popular Siamese-Italianate style, is strictly a private family home, where Narisa plans to spend up to five months of each year. She’ll spend the balance in London, indulging her passion for travel (last summer she returned to Bangkok by train via Russia, Mongolia and China). Before that, she lived mostly in England.

But Narisa spent some of her early years in the Bangkok palace, returning for a longer stay at the age of 28 when she began its restoration, something she describes as a work-in-progress. When first setting about her task, the place was hardly grand given that her mother had little interest in interior decoration. “The reception room used to be eight chairs in a semi-circle, a horrible picture on the wall and a blue carpet,” she recalls, glancing around a plush but lived-in room decorated with tasteful objets d’art and memorabilia including a bronze statue of Ramushka, a beloved white charger Prince Chakrabongse rode as a dashing Hussar officer in Russia.

Narisa assembled the furnishings and décor from the family’s one-time house in Cornwall, England, dredging up others mouldering in the palace cellar and bought items that would match the style of the early 1900s. Paintings and photographs abound, from ones of King Chulalongkorn and Queen Saowabha to those of Narisa’s sons – songwriter, singer and former film star, Chulachakra, and Puwasvasti, who is about to enter the London School of Economics.

“This is totally my creation,” Narisa says. And another link to the past: up a wooden staircase, in a small room of the turret that surmounts the building are tiny urns containing the ashes of her mother and father placed among statues of the Lord Buddha.

“I don’t know what my father would think of my hotel business, though I am sure he would be happy that the palace compound is being so well maintained,” she says, taking us through Prince Chula’s book-lined study. “He would be happy with River Books since he was a writer and interested in Thailand and promoting [it] to the outside world. He was obsessed with the fact that I should learn Thai and when he was very ill he made my mother promise that she would make sure I spoke Thai.”

Despite her research, there are still missing and possibly revealing pages from the lives of her parents and grandparents that she hopes to add one day. Even after Katya and the Prince of Siam was published, Narisa travelled to St Petersburg where, with the help of a distant cousin, she uncovered some 1,000 items in the National Archives related to the lovers. These included such details as receipts for Ramushka’s hay and the books Chakrabongse had read.

“There is quite a bit more material that would bring more depth to the book – Katya’s feelings and motivations, why exactly their marriage failed,” she says. And whether at the end of a life filled with both adventure and heartache, Katya may after all have found some happiness.

Sent abroad with Prince Chakrabongse was a gifted young man, Poum Sakara, and the two became close friends. Poum never returned home, rising to the rank of colonel in the Hussars and falling deeply in love with a Russian woman. Decades later, a melancholy widower and living in impoverished exile from post-revolutionary Russia, he was drawn back into the Chakrabongse circle. Katya and Poum, sharing both joyful and painful memories, grew very close until the gentle man died suddenly in Narisa’s parents home and was laid to rest in a windswept Cornwall graveyard. “How I miss Poum you do not know,” Katya wrote in a letter.

“I hope they were lovers,” Narisa says.

Visit River Books at www.riverbooksbk.com; Chakrabongse Villas at www.thaivillas.com

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