Many rural crime sprees punctuated the last two decades of King Chulalongkorn’s reign, but one of the worst broke out in early 1903. A violent gang of robbers repeatedly made off with herds of water buffaloes, consistently eluding the newly established provincial police force…

The interrogation of this group of robbers yielded such a wealth of information about bandit practices that Damrong concluded that it ought to be written down and distributed to the kingdom’s administrators so that they would be better informed in dealing with rural crime.

A Thai prince’s manual on how crime worked in rural Thailand, written in an elevated question-and-answer style no doubt inspired by the Theravāda exegetical tradition.