The siamese elite by then were concerned for territory the land about which their ancestors had never worried and even given away a gifts. The object over which sovereignty would prevail had shifted from a governed town and its ruler to an actual territory. For siam now, every bit of soil was desirable not so mush for its economic value but because of its meaning to sovereignty, royal dignity, and nationhood. From the first confrontation in 1888 to the 1993 crisis, Siam hadexerted great effort to ensure that most of the borderland would be securely under its sovereignty. Inevitably, the traditional methods of dealing with the borders had to be replaced. Border surveillance became stricter and disciplined. All the localities along the borders were reinforced. Some no man lands were filled by rotating corvee laborers who drew lots to camp there temporarily. Of course, all of these practices and concerns were alien to their predecessors. The battlefield had moved from the defense of a town fortress to many other points of collision, including those wastelands where there was no living body or possession. Many incidents which led to the phknam crisis and the blockade of the chao phraya river took place in areas which would have been ignored had the premodern geographical ideas prevailed. The major clash occurred in april 1893 on an unpopulated sandbar in the middle of the mekhong. This led to a regional and then international crisis in which the French sent two gunboats to blockade the chao phraya river. It was just another strategic move to resolve the ambiguity of space.
The franco-siamese dispute has long been considered a conflict of two nations. But both rivals were actually on the same side as far as the displacement of the indigenous tributary space by a new geo-body is concerned. Both sides utilized the force of modern knowledge which collied with, and subdued, the indigenous one. The overlapping spheres were determined and distributed. The emerging interface imposed limits on the territory of each side a sharp and cler-cut division between the two realms. Moreover, the domain marked by this new division was transformed into an integral one by the new mechanism of control. All the actions and incidents were moments of shift where the displacement of geographical dicourses took place. The chashes and the blockade can be viewed as moment which led to the emergence of modern territorial sovereignty and international order and a new meaning of native soil.
But military force and the new administration ere not the only means to decide the ambiguity of space. The shift in the embodiment of sovereignty to actual territories implied that the from in which sovereignty was represented must shift as well from traditional rituals and practices of submission to a new representation which dealt directly with horizontal planes. The beginning of full-scale surveys and mapping of boundaries by the chulakorn regime reflected not merely his sympathy for modern geography but also a change in the discourse of sovereignty. To fulfill the desire to have their geobodies concretied and their margins defined for exlusive sovereignty, the French and the Siamese alike had fought both with force and with map.