From all of these observations, then, we may see numerous boundaries which might not be connected but which were flexible. Some might be thick, some might be blurred. Many had dis appeared or never existed. Siam before the last decade of the nineteenth century was not like “an old axe,” but a discontinuous, patchy arrangement of power units where people of different overlords mingled together in the same area while only spies were working close to the frontier towns of one another. And those areas far from the center of a kingdom might be generously given away for the sake of friendship. In this case, the border would shrink a bit. It did not matter. In fact, throughout Southeast Asian tradition, as one scholar remarks, “marginal territorial concessions were not viewed as fatal to the kingdom. As long as the essence of sovereignty [the center] was unimpaired, such concessions were a legitimate instrument of policy.
The sphere of a realm or the limit of kingdom could be defined only by those townships’ allegiance to the center of kingdom. The political sphere could be mapped only by power relationships, not by territorial integrity. Thus to talk about the frontier of sovereign unit-anakhet, khopkhantha-sima-meant those marginal authorities in the remote townships or those chiefdoms at the margin of the sphere of power rather than the frontier space itself.