[17] The tical is about twenty-five per cent. more valuable than the Sicca rupee.
[18] A fuang is the eighth part of a tical.
[19] The Barmans entertain the highest reverence for Magadha; a deputation from his Majesty of Ava visited the sacred places in that vicinity a few years ago. Possibly this veneration for localities changes according to political circumstances.
[20] According to Loubere, this enactment suffers various interpretations, some abstaining from feeding on vegetables so as to hurt the seed, and so, says he, eat only fruit; others vary the practice of the law in the opposite direction, and hang themselves out of devotion, which action, if performed on a certain sacred tree, is considered as having great merit.
[21] It is, perhaps, a combination of an essential oil with resin.
[22] Packnam is a term of frequent occurrence in Siam, apparently signifying the mouth of a river.
[23] This mode of constructing embrasures had been long before strenuously recommended by some military writers.
[24] Possibly we may be allowed to doubt the validity of our author’s opinion on this point; it may be that the monarch of Cochin China in 1822, had heard of the drama of Constantine Phaulkon, M. Chaumont, and the Jesuits, which was acted by command of His Majesty the French king in 1688, at Bankok and Louvo.
For an account of the extraordinary alliance projected between the kings of France and Cochin China, and which was disconcerted only by the breaking out of the French revolution, see the historical sketch in Barrow’s Cochin China from p. 250 throughout. The political importance attaching to such a connexion is incalculable; every one must in this agree with the opinion of Mr. Barrow, that “it is difficult to say what the consequences of such a treaty might have been to our possessions in India, and to the trade of the East India Company with China; but it is sufficiently evident that it had for its object the destruction of both.”
[25] In their persons, the Cochin Chinese are far from being a cleanly people. Many of their customs are, in fact, extremely disgusting. Those ablutions so much practised by all the Western Asiatics, are here unknown; and their dress is not once washed from the time it is first put on, till it is no longer fit for use.