Always interesting to read how something very difficult was done very well. Understanding the West's true and purported motivations, bending their own culture - choosing what to adopt or not and how - without breaking, ceding some land, and it all working out in the end. Quite remarkable.

There's a lot of stuff there that needed to succeed in several different ways (technical, local population, foreign image) to work, and it did.

> it all working out in the end

This seems a little too glib to me. Certainly Siam was a success in relative terms, but it seems to me they still adopted Western culture partly under duress. I suppose it's academic at this point, but I wonder how quickly they would have chosen to assimilate without the imminent threat of colonization.