For Thongchai Winichakul, a significant ideological accompaniment to these developments was a shift in the cosmological representation of space in Siam, which was modelled on the Buddhist 'three worlds' account of various levels of existence from celestial to bestial. He argues that the modern' understanding of 'borders' was absent until the elite found themselves confronted with Western cartography and demands to the boundaries of rule. Emerging out of this encounter with imperialism and the grave imperative to respond, was the Siam, a new spatial imagination of territorial and bordered sovereignty. providing a central condition for nurturing national identity 15 Thongchai's insight builds on the critical account of nations as 'imagined communities developed by Benedict Anderson 16 For Thongchai, national space constructed by the mediation of maps and visual representations, such that it could be discursively deployed to provide 'a component of the life of a