The King and I. At first Rama V's reign was dominated by the conservative regent, Somdet Chaophraya Sri Suriwongse, but when the king came of age in 1873 he soon took control. He created a Privy Council and a Council of State, a formal court system and budget office. He announced that slavery would be gradually abolished and debt-bondage restricted. Western colonialism and cessation of protectorates Two kings, Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, witnessed the expansion of both France and Great Britain to increase their colonial territories in Southeast Asia and encircle Siam. From the west, the British conquered India, Burma and Malaya, and from the east, the French conquered South Vietnam, Vietnam and claimed to be "protecting" Cambodia, while Siam lost its extraterritorial rights in these areas to the new conquerors. The construction of Kra Isthmus Canal, planned by a group of entrepreneurs led by the engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, was not constructed after the British conquered Kongbaung-ruled Burma in the Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. A major event was the Paknam incident, when, on 13 July 1893, French cannon boats entered the Chao Phraya River toward Bangkok and were fired upon from a Siamese coastal fort, leading to the Franco-Siamese War. In the same year, Siam was compelled to conclude a treaty with France, in which the territory of Laos, located east of the Mekong, was annexed to French Indochina. The French forced Siam to refrain from any influence on its former vassal state. In 1887, the Indo-Chinese Union was founded. In 1896, British and French concluded a treaty which made a border between their colonies, with Siam defined as a buffer state. After the Franco-Siamese War of 1893, King Chulalongkorn realised the threat of the western colonial powers, and accelerated extensive reforms in the administration, military, economy and society of Siam, completing the development of the nation from a traditional feudalist structure based on personal domination and dependencies, whose peripheral areas were only indirectly bound to the central power (the King), to a centrally-governed national state with established borders and modern political institutions. The Entente Cordiale of 8 April 1904 ended the rivalry between Great Britain and France over Siam. French and British zones of influence in Siam, were outlined, with the eastern territories, adjacent to French Indochina, becoming a French zone, and the western, adjacent to Burmese Tenasserim, a British zone. The British recognised a French sphere of