This book is an account of Andrew Freeman’s time spent at The Bangkok Daily Mail, an English language newspaper published in Siam during the 1920s. Freeman is asked by King Pradjadhipok himself to take over as editor and encounters a world where pride is the name of the game for Bangkok’s small community of foreigners, where the local police department has a direct hand in the trafficking of Chinese women, and love struggles against powerful social forces which seek to keep men and women from different cultures apart.