Leseprobe

36 Architecture and Uncompromising Quality Unrealized forerunner of Villa Salzburg, April 1871. Site plan, Strehlen plots, parcel 121a. The top of the map points south. What would later become Tier- gartenstrasse is not yet named and is marked ‘street by the zoological garden’. protracted and arduous, but in the mid-19th cen- tury, also dangerous—he must have possessed more than a modicum of a taste for adventure. At least for his time in Thailand (then Siam) in the first half of the 1860s, his impeccable political and economic connections are well documented. Prior to this, he worked in San Francisco, where he de- clared bankruptcy in 1855. In 1857, his trading and shipping firm A. Markwald & Co. relocated to Bangkok. In the travel correspondence of the Prus- sian captain Reinhold Werner, published in 1873 under the title Die preussische Expedition nach China, Japan und Siam in den Jahren 1860, 1861 und 1862 , the sheer scale of Adolphe Markwald’s shipping business becomes evident: ‘In the year of 1861 alone, the German company Markwald & Co. shipped 90 vessels, comprising a total of 51,000 tonnes. The man at the helm of this com- pany, a Prussian by birth, enjoys the full confi- dence of both Kings and of Prince Kroom Luang, is the agent for all of their commercial business, and as a result, highly influential at court.’ And as a footnote, the captain adds: ‘Mr Markwald returned to Europe in 1865, though his company in Bangkok continues to exist.’2 Until the founding of the North German Confeder- ation in 1866, Prussian interests in Bangkok were represented by the English Consulate. Afterwards, the Markwald company assumed representative duties. The English Consul at the time was Robert Schomburgk, a German-born friend of Adolphe Markwald. It wasn’t until after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 –1871 that the German Empire sent a professional consul to Siam. In 1877, Adolphe Markwald himself once again assumed the role of the consular representation of Siam in Berlin. Markwald seems to have been the driving force be- hind the plans to build a villa in Dresden. His sig- nature always appeared before his partner Adolph Salzburg’s on the planning application documents, and he listed his address as ‘Loschwitz: Villa Ernes- to’—an indicator that his place of residence at the time lay in one of the most prestigious residential areas of the city. However their joint project to build a villa was not approved by the local authorities, and the partnership broke up. The reason for the rejection of the application given by the Royal Ad- ministrative Court was that the area was not zoned as land for development. Emil Lehmann, the lawyer for Salzburg and Markwald mentioned in an earlier