This paper examines the ethnography of the travelling embassies – the diplomatic missions – to the Tai states in the 1820s and 1830s. It explores five themes which were recurrent in those encounters. On the European side, there were the issues of ‘ceremony’, which was usually held by Europeans to be too much, too superficial, or too servile, and that of ‘delay’, that included the frequent request for an embassy to wait at various stages as it came closer to the court. On the Tai side, the tropes were ‘invasion’, the fear that an embassy was a prelude to attack, and ‘spying’, the suspicion that an embassy was essentially a device to secure secret information. And there was an essentially neutral theme, that of ‘friendship’ – the indulgence of pleasure and delicacy, and the expression of kindness and appreciation.
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