A campaign emerged in early 20th-century Bangkok which sought to control the acquisition of political power by the city’s growing migrant population and cultivate support for the absolute monarchy. Bangkok eventually developed into two cities that shared the same space: the capital of a sovereign nation-state under the authority of a ‘Thai’ absolute monarchy and a thriving port populated mostly by ‘Chinese’ migrants who were governed by extra-territorial laws. By juxtaposing the roads, shop houses, trams, and monastic complexes that migrant laborers built against architectural manuals, demographic statistics, and literature written by the ruling class, Chua demonstrates the development of conceptions of space, representations of space, and built space in a metropolis being integrated into the worldwide capitalist system.