At the same time that the Siamese modernizing elite appropriated Western objects to refashion their self-and public images, they were also engaged in representing Siam by means of its material culture for the European and American audiences of international exhibitions—one of the prominent invented traditions of the second half nineteenth century. What the promoters of these events concocted by blending the profit-making rationale of trade fairs, the classificatory approach of museums, and the entertainment of itinerant shows was an eminently modern kind of spectacle centered on the display of commodities. A crucial ingredient of their success was also the synergy with the printed media, which amplified the resonance of exhibitions by allowing those who could not physically pay a visit to do it vicariously via guidebooks, catalogs, illustrated periodicals, and ephemera. Even though in a reverse dynamic to that examined thus far, things produced and circulated—physically as well as symbolically—within the global capitalist marketplace at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made it possible for the Siamese elite to represent their rule as civilizing, both to themselves and to the wider Victorian ecumene.