After I had sent off the manuscript of Bangkok Utopia to the publisher, I visited Wat Rachathiwat วัดราชาธิวาส, a monastic complex on the Chao Phraya River in the north of Bangkok. Classified as a second-class royal temple, it was originally called Wat Samorai วัดสมอราย or Wat Samo วัดสมอ, a Thai corruption of the Khmer word thmo ថ្ម or “stone.”[6] The complex was adjacent to a historic Khmer community in the area. It was an important site in the mid-19^th century when King Mongkut began the Thammayut reformation of the sangha on a raft moored just beyond where the current uposot now stands. The uposot underwent a major renovation in the early 20^th century when it was redesigned by Prince Narisara Nuvadtivongs, a son of King Mongkut and one of the most prolific Siamese designers of the 20^th century. Part of Prince Naris’ renovations include a series of murals, painted by the Florentine artist Carlo Rigoli, depicting the Vessantara Jataka. One of the last ten of the jataka stories, the Vessantara Jataka is a moving story about the responsibilities of the monarchy that circulated widely in an era of tributary states and mandala polities.[7] These murals sit within a design that accommodates not only reworked Khmer idioms but also features of the Baroque-revival style that was taught in the Paris-based École des Beaux-Arts, the prototypical school of architecture, in the late 19^th century. The renovation and the murals are themselves arresting, but understanding the historical context in which they were accomplished makes the place even more fascinating. The turn of the century was a critical moment in which new understandings of sovereignty threatened the older cosmological rationale for the monarchy’s legitimacy. Prince Naris’ design holds these multiple histories in tension within a modern framework. It suggests the ways designers like Prince Naris conceived of modernity on the basis of a more complex framework than simple binary oppositions between “the West” and “Southeast Asia.”