2 Salung - Rama VI

Rama VI came to the throne in 1910 with a strongly Western-oriented education — he had studied at Sandhurst and Oxford — and his reign saw Thailand's coinage modernized along European lines, moving away from the bullet-coin traditions that had persisted into the late 19th century. The 1915 date places this piece in the early years of his reign, just before Thailand entered World War I on the Allied side in 1917, a calculated diplomatic move designed to secure a seat at the postwar peace table and renegotiate the unequal treaties that had constrained Thai sovereignty since the 1850s.