Music and Recording in King Chulalongkorn’s Bangkok is the first comprehensive history of Siamese music during the celebrated reign of Rama V (r. 1857–1910). Following on from the author’s 2015 exploration of Thailand’s most popular music genre, luk thung, James Leonard Mitchell focuses in on the brief period from 1903 to 1910 when gramophone recording came to Siam and almost failed. Music and Recording in King Chulalongkorn’s Bangkok is the story of Siamese musicians, European recording experts and Chinese middlemen. It is the story of the city that was inherited and developed by Rama V, of a Chinese community seething with secret societies and revolution, and of the adventurous western companies that dreamed of global commercial domination. Based on research from the EMI Archive in London and the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, along with years of fieldwork in Thailand, the book contains 88 photographs, a discography of all known recordings, and links to YouTube videos.