Eng is the quiet, studious one on the left. Chang, slightly shorter, likes to have fun, but don’t offer him a drink.

In their homeland they’re known as In-Jan, and there’s a monument to them near their birthplace, but few Thais these days know much about the conjoined brothers who became world famous a century and a half ago as Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese Twins.

It’s such a remarkable story that it’s worth retelling on any continent. They met the crowned heads of Europe, were gentlemen farmers in America and even owned African slaves, they chopped down trees wielding two axes at once, they amused Mark Twain and worried Herman Melville, they were very nearly recruited into the Confederate Army, they worked for PT Barnum but stood up for their rights, and together they somehow fostered 21 children.

I recently assembled an illustrated, 24-piece biography for Google Earth that travels with the brothers Bunker from Siam to America and back with visits to Britain, France, Germany and Russia.

The story begins at the monument to Chang and Eng on the side of the Mae Klong River (no, it’s not the Mekong, as some biographers misstated) in Lad Yai, a district of Thailand’s Samut Songkhram province. With an eye to tourism, the larger-than-life sculpture rendered from the broken bronze propellers of fishing boats donated by locals was unveiled on May 10, 1999, the 188th anniversary of their birth.

On hand for the occasion were a great-granddaughter and a great-great-granddaughter of Eng, visiting from the land that the twins proudly called home. The descendants offered to help finance improvements to the little photo-bedecked replica floating home built here to show the curious how the twins lived in their childhood.

Eng and Chang — known in Thailand as In-Jan (Earth-Moon), which is close to the actual pronunciation of their names, In and Chun — never returned to the Siam they left behind.

The boys were born on May 11, 1811, in Mae Klong district, which shares its name with the river. They were joined at the sternum by a small piece of cartilage, a condition now known as xiphopagus. Their livers were fused but functioned independently. The midwives summoned by their father, a Chinese called Ti-eye, found that his half-Chinese/half-Cham wife Nok had given birth to a monster, a bad omen.

But In-Jan had overcome the odds — conjoined twins occur in about one in 200,000 births and half are stillborn — and now they began to overcome superstition. After their father died in an 1819 cholera epidemic, along with five siblings, they took to their boat selling duck eggs to provide for their mother, brother Noy and a sister.

Their increased visibility brought them to the attention of Siam’s king, and here many biographies take a dire turn. It’s often claimed that Rama II either condemned them to death as ill-starred infants or had them brought to his court in Bangkok when they were teenagers to pronounce judgement.

Such cruelty seems unlikely. Even if some blamed the boys for the cholera, the monarch was a learned man and a Samut Songkhram native himself. More likely true is Thai history’s portrayal of In-Jan as popular performers in the royal court of a patron of the arts.

The twins had one other obstacle: avoiding the physicians who proposed separating them by suspending them by the connecting tissue across a fine catgut cord, which they reckoned would gradually work its way through with little pain or blood loss, or perhaps slicing the cartilage with a red-hot wire.

They were the original Siamese twins, but as early as 945 a pair of conjoined Armenian brothers were assessed in Constantinople and in England, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst, joined at the back, lived from 1100 to 1134. There were many others before Chang and Eng came along and gave the condition a colloquial name. In show business they had as rivals “The Two-Headed Nightingale”, Millie and Christine McCoy, born into slavery in North Carolina in 1851. Showman JP Smith taught them to speak five languages, play music and sing.

@ @ @

Scottish merchant Robert Hunter, who in 1824 became the first Western trader to settle in Bangkok, came across Chang and Eng on a visit to Samut Songkhram five years later, thinking at first that the swimming figure in the river was some strange amphibious animal.

Hunter had his home and Siam’s first department store, Morgan & Hunter, in a building on the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, where he sold imported fabrics, medicine and, to his hosts’ dismay, opium from China. He’d later get thrown out of the country for threatening the king with British military might if the monarch didn’t buy his steamboat, the first seen on the Chao Phraya.

In the meantime, the twins looked like a sure path to fame and fortune. Hunter spent several years convincing the court to let him take the boys overseas, and persuaded their mother to part with them for $3,000 (she never received more than $500).

They set sail for America on April 1, 1829, aboard the Sachem, skippered by Captain Abel Coffin, who would be their manager while Hunter remained in Siam.

Chang and Eng, still just 18 years old, reached Boston in mid-August 1829, and Coffin began arranging appearances here and in New York, Philadelphia and nearby towns all that summer and autumn. It wasn’t long before they were being billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World”.

At first they simply stood onstage, showed how they walked and ran, and answered questions. Prodded further, they were soon doing somersaults and backflips and carrying heavy audience members around. As time went on they delighted with synchronised acrobatics and walked on their hands.

For the next three years they toured at a furious pace, the twins on display four hours a day every day, with little rest between appearances. They were exhibited before hundreds of thousands of people.

Coffin fuelled publicity (and staved off suggestions of fakery) by inviting doctors at each stop to examine the twins before their shows. A Harvard Medical School professor of anatomy determined that their connecting tissue was largely cartilage with few blood vessels or nerves linked, but deemed separation unnecessarily hazardous. Today it would be a simple procedure; that wasn’t the case then.

In October 1829 Coffin brought his young charges to London and they toured the British Isles for more than a year, now showing spectators their skill at shuttlecock as well. Their appearance at the Egyptian Hall in the capital drew an array of medical professionals, resulting in a formal paper being presented to the Royal Society of London.

While the president of the Royal College of Surgeons agreed that separation would be risky, other doctors were discovering that asparagus eaten by Chang caused the usual odour in his urine but not in Eng’s. Chang later became a heavy drinker, and Eng remained sober even when his brother was drunk.

Upon their return to the US in March 1831, the touring continued non-stop until the brothers turned 21 the following year and, in accordance with their contract with Hunter, were given their freedom. They had never been abused by Coffin, but took umbrage at crossing the ocean in steerage while he sailed first-class, and at earning just $10 a month at first and later $50, when their appearances were netting $1,000 monthly.

The twins started arranging their own shows in 1832, a slew of New York exhibitions bringing in enough money to buy a buggy and baggage wagon and three horses so they could tour the smaller towns.

At the same time they became friends with Fred, William and Barthuel Bunker of New York City. The young Catharine Bunker so enchanted Chang that she was the beneficiary in his will until he fell in love again later. When it became necessary for the twins to adopt a surname, this is the one they took. (In other versions of their story, the surname came patriotically from Bunker Hill, from a bystander at immigration when they required a name to enter America, and from a friend in North Carolina, as a corruption of Bon Coeur — Good Heart.)

Accompanied by a man named C Harris, whom they called “Doctor”, and occasionally a Mr Doty, they travelled around the countryside in the summer and spent the winters in the cities. In 1835 they spent several more months touring England and went on to Holland, Belgium and, finally, France, a country that had barred them in 1829 fearing they “might deprave the minds of children” and cause deformities in the unborn. They were back in the States in 1836 and travelled around Canada as well, building a secure nest egg.

The twins continued touring for another seven years before being persuaded to take a vacation by Dr James Calloway of Wilkesboro, a town they’d admired before, during their decade on the road. It was rural and secluded, and by 1839 Chang and Eng were ready for a change.

They enjoyed Calloway’s hospitality there, did some fishing and learned to hunt with guns, and decided they’d stay. With the $10,000 they’d saved up, Chang and Eng bought a retail store. Meanwhile “Doctor” Harris fell in love with a local girl, and at their wedding the twins met Sally Ann and Adelaide Yates, the daughters of a well-to-do farmer.

The local economy proved insufficient to support the twins as shopkeepers, so they bought 1,000 acres and switched to farming, eventually establishing a tobacco plantation, complete with 33 slaves. The Doctor had settled between the Blue Ridge Mountains and Rock Mountain, and Chang and Eng wanted to stay close to him. Their farm was just outside the village of Trap Hill.

Each of them could use an axe at the same time, sometimes felling a tree from opposite sides. They attended church and joined their neighbours in fishing, hunting and games (they enjoyed playing chess, but not with each other) and were much liked in the district. Respect for them grew further when they killed a marauding wolf dubbed “Bobtail” that was savaging livestock.

The home of Sally Ann and Adelaide Yates was on the twins’ way into town and Chang and Eng became regular visitors. It’s been said that, as well as romantic notions, they were drawn by the girls’ mother, who was physically unusual as well: nearly nine feet in circumference and not less than 500 pounds, and often attracting curious strangers from afar.

In return for meals and sometimes a room for the night, Chang and Eng entertained with stories and tunes played on a pair of flutes. The brothers were fond of reading — Pope, Shakespeare, Byron — and Eng would often read to others.

Chang soon fell in love with Addie, age 17, and Eng and 18-year-old Sally drew close almost by necessity, but as much as the twins were liked locally, objections were raised to any possibility of an “unholy alliance”. The Yateses at first forbade marriage but then consented when they discovered that an elopement was planned. With wedding-night difficulties in mind, Chang and Eng went to Philadelphia to be surgically separated, but Sally and Adelaide intervened.

The nuptials took place at the Yates home on April 15, 1843, and the newlyweds retired to a specially built double-double bed at the Trap Hill farmhouse. It’s been said that the twins agreed that when one of their wives was in bed with them, the other brother would switch off his mind.

Eng fathered 11 children and Chang 10, none of which were twins, connected or otherwise. In 1844 Sally delivered a baby girl, and six days later Addie did likewise. The following year there were two more arrivals, this time eight days apart. A new, larger house was built here on Stewarts Creek in what is now the White Plains community near Mount Airy, with a mammoth bed also serving as a reception area for guests as the wives’ weights ballooned and still more children arrived.

Chang and Eng and nearly 30 other Bunkers are buried behind White Plains Baptist Church, a fact noted out front by a state historical plaque. The original white-clapboard church was built in about 1856 on land donated by the brothers, and they attended services there as well.

In 2001 twin bridges subsequently built over Stewarts Creek (one in 1968, the other in 1999) were together dedicated as the Eng and Chang Bunker Memorial Bridge. Bunker Road, close to the property, is named for Scott Bunker, one of their descendants.

Many in the Bunker line still live in the Mount Airy area, and there’s a family reunion here each June that’s open to the public.

After more than a decade of being “retired” from show business, the twins again needed to shore up their finances. In 1849 they his the road once more in the United States and Canada, Eng taking along his oldest daughter Kate and Chang his oldest son Christopher. The proceeds allowed them to stay home for another several years.

When Chang and Eng were home, the family, to put it mildly, had a population boom, and meanwhile Addie and Sally were regularly at each other’s throats. In 1852 it was decided that the best solution was to buy a house in Mount Airy where Adelaide could live with the children who were of school age. Sally stayed at the farm with the rest. The family portrait here includes 18 of the 22 children and Grace Gates, one of the slaves on their plantation.

With their wives living apart, the brothers spent three days at one house and three at the other, leaving the seventh day up for grabs. But at the same time Chang and Eng were also having heated arguments, and for only the second or third time in their lives came to blows. Once, in a fury, they begged the family physician to cut them apart, even if it killed them. It’s been speculated that Eng’s penchant for all-night poker games and Chang’s fondness for the bottle together provided the fuel for the fire.

I’ve been unable to determine where the Mount Airy home is exactly, but it may well still be the residence of a descendant. The 1910-vintage Robert Smith House and the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History have exhibits about the Siamese twins for visitors interested in something other than Andy Griffith.

The actor grew up in Mount Airy, a fact celebrated by a statue of him downtown and such “Andy Griffith Show” trappings as Floyd’s City Barber Shop and the Old Mayberry Jail.

In 1841 PT Barnum opened Barnum’s American Museum in New York and made a bundle with early attractions including General Tom Thumb and the Feejee Mermaid, as well as “automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gypsies, Albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope-dancers” and, in the 1840s, Chang and Eng — at least in wax.

The real twins didn’t appear there until 1860, when they needed the money that Barnum was offering them. Until then, the crowds that swarmed into the museum to view its 850,000 curiosities saw only Siamese effigies on display. By the time Britain’s Prince of Wales came to visit in October 1860, however, the genuine article was on view, for a six-week engagement.

On April 2, 1865, Union Major General George Stoneman rolled into North Carolina hoping to draft some of the locals, no matter which side they were cheering for, and the names of all males over 18 were put into a lottery wheel. One of the names drawn was Eng Bunker, but Chang refused to go, and since his name hadn’t been drawn, Stoneman couldn’t force Eng either.

But Chang’s son Christopher enlisted in the Virginia Cavalry in 1863 and was with Brigadier General John McCausland when Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, was held for ransom and then destroyed. Outside Moorefield, West Virginia, Christopher was wounded and captured in a Union ambush an spent the rest of the war in a military prison. Eng’s son Stephen joined the same battalion in 1864 and was wounded near Winchester, Virginia. When peace came, both sons farmed near Mount Airy, though without slaves.

The Civil War had the effect of relieving the twins of their slaves, ending an acute irony in that they themselves had been sold off as children. The financial loss prodded them to accept yet another show tour, this time managed by Confederate veteran Major Henry London and his brother-in-law, a Mr Zimmerman. Among the stops on this six-month outing, which had their sons Albert and Patrick along, was the then-fashionable resort of Cape May.

This is Mathew Brady’s 1865 portrait of the twins and their wives with Chang’s son Patrick and Eng’s son Albert.

In 1868, with the PT Barnum powerhouse supporting them, the twins undertook an ambitious tour that was to have covered all of Europe. Eng’s oldest daughter Kate came along, hoping the sea air might improve her health, and Chang’s daughter Fannie finally overcame her stagefright to be with her father.

They arrived in Liverpool in December and carried on to Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Leeds, Bristol and Ireland, but in August 1869, before they could travel on to the continent, Kate’s failing health steered them home.

New York Times ran a curious article on January 1, 1907, reporting that Mark Twain had rung in the new year with a hilarious “Siamese twin act” at his home here at 21 Fifth Avenue. He surprised guests at 11.30pm by entering with a young gentleman dressed in the same white suit, who he introduced as his Siamese brother. With arms around each other and their suits fastened together with a pink ribbon, Clemens launched into a comedy routine about his brother giving up alcohol, while all the time the brother was taking surreptitious sips from a flask. Clemens gradually became more and more “drunk” as he continued speaking.

Newspaper accounts of Chang and Eng fascinated Clemens, and more than once he employed them as a satirical device to comment on man’s dual nature and the immorality of the Civil War. “The Siamese Twins”, written about 1868, is humourous with reference to Change and Eng “nearly always” playing together as children, and as enlisted men on opposite sides of the War Between the States, capturing one another. (A general army court decided they were both prisoners and exchanged them.)

Sharing Twain’s obsession with twins and duality was Herman Melville, though the author of “Moby Dick” offered a sombre perspective of darkness inevitably prevailing over good. In “Billy Budd” he wrote of “passions irreconcilable in reason” being nonetheless “conjoined like Chang and Eng”.

Barnum had a Mr Wallis plan another assault on Europe, for which sons Albert and James were recruited. It began in February 1870 in at Gluckstadt, Germany, and moved on to Berlin, St Petersburg and Moscow, Austria, Italy, Spain and France. The tour was a great success, leaving both Queen Victoria and Tsar Nicholas amused, even if the war just begun between France and Prussia cut short the curtain calls.

They sailed from France on July 30, 1870, and en route home a week later, while playing poker with the president of Liberia, Chang suffered a stroke that partially paralysed his right side. He recovered but was henceforth frail, a condition further exacerbated by his heavy drinking and a fall from a carriage. Eng remained in top form.

On January 17, 1874, Chang died of a blood clot in the brain. Eng died two and a half hours later, but the reason why has never been settled. Some contend that Eng succumbed to fright, believing the death of his brother would necessarily bring on his own.

A double coffin was quickly made and the local smith soldered a tin sheet around it. It was wrapped in charcoal and put in the Bunkers’ dry cellar. The family, worried that someone would try and steal the body, held off against a cemetery burial. They might have been right: The tinsmith even sent a drop of his solder to his sister as a keepsake. News of the Siamese twins’ death was making headlines around the world.

The widows rejected a proposal to sell the corpse for display or medical study, but while they waited for the eldest Bunker son to return from San Francisco, rumours flew about the body in the basement. After a few days the twins were interred in the front yard of Chang’s house, and then the widows agreed to let them be exhumed and examined at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum.

At a well-attended meeting of the College on February 18, the twins were exhibited and the autopsy findings presented. A plaster cast was made (still on display at the Mutter), and the body was replaced in the tin casket, shipped back to North Carolina and reinterred in the yard. It wasn’t until Adelaide died in 1917 that the twins were moved to the cemetery at White Plains Baptist Church.

@ @ @

In 1848 Christian missionaries found In-Jan’s brother Noy and told him that Chang and Eng had become successful entertainers in the West were married with families. Noy composed a letter for them, saying their mother had passed away the year previous, thinking they must have died long ago, but she told him on her deathbed that should any word come, the twins ought to return home and make merit on behalf of their parents.

In 1872 they heard from their supposed nephew Nai-Chu in Bangkok, who reported that Noy had since died but his family still lived in Mae Khlong. Their sister was a wife of a nobleman. Chang and Eng followed up on neither letter from home. Theirs was a different world now — any bond with the old one had long since been severed.

@ @ @

Further reading: A wordy but colourful reminiscence by Judge Jesse Franklin Graves, who knew the twins, is on the
Surrey County Historical Society website and there are engaging accounts from American Heritage, Wilkesboro’s historians and Blue Ridge Country.com, not to forget the musings of Mark Twain.