Everybody in the room held their breath.
On the table lay an oblong century-old teak box within which 60 fragile glass plate negatives stood in a neat row. Specially attired for the occasion, Sumongkol Suahem, who works as part of the documentary preservation team at the National Archives of Thailand (NAT), gingerly lifted one of them with gloved hands and let it hover over a light source to reveal a snapshot of history captured for posterity with astonishing clarity.
It was indeed a rare visual treat. Normally kept in a rather forbidding, climate-controlled storage room, the treasured glass plate negatives in the teak box, which represent just a fraction of the enormous collection in the care of NAT since 1977, are so zealously safeguarded that even the archives’ director, Nitcha Jariyasetkarn remarked in humour: “I don’t usually get to see them!”
Dating from 1855 to…
