2.4 Inch Iron Gun from Thailand

This 2.4-inch ML (muzzle loading) gun is 1.88m in length and was manufactured in Siam (now
Thailand) around 1683. Our original catalogue describes it as being of “forged iron”, and it is highly decorated with hammered and engraved silver foil. It would have fired a projectile of about two pounds in weight, although it was probably intended only for ceremonial use.

The cannon is one of a pair presented to the King of France, Louis XIV, by the King of Siam, Phra Narai in 1686. It is said that on 14 July 1789 during the French Revolution, these guns were seized from the Royal Furniture Repository in Paris and used to destroy the gates of the Bastille.

The guns were subsequently held in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Artillery Museum near Paris. When
that museum was captured by the Prussian Army in 1815, the Prussian commander General von
Blucher gave this cannon to the Duke of Wellington as a gift. Wellington presented the gun to the Board of Ordnance which deposited it in the Rotunda museum at Woolwich. The second gun was located in Berlin in 1945 and is now in a private collection.

This important piece has previously been loaned to both the Palace of Versailles and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the ‘Visitors to Versailles 1682-1789’ exhibition.