Chris Baker - A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World

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DOI: 10.1017/9781108120197

Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit 2017

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First published 2017

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European travelers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries placed Ayutthaya or Siam among the three great powers of Asia alongside China and India. They reckoned the city as large as London or Paris, and they marveled at the gold in the temples and treasuries. Later events have obscured this major part of the Southeast Asian past. In 1767, Ayutthaya was destroyed by Burmese armies. Much of its historical record was lost. As Siam avoided formal colonialism, it missed the data gathering and history writing by early colonial officers elsewhere. To this day, there is no academic study of the full four centuries of Siam in the Ayutthaya era.

Of course, Ayutthaya is covered in

The history of Southeast Asia was originally written from the post-colonial capitals. Its major theme was the commercial and cultural penetration of the west. Having no colonial ex-master, few spices, and even fewer converts to Christianity, Siam had a subdued role in this account. Ayutthayas rise (and fall) belongs instead to an Asian story of Asian trading networks, cultural influence from China and India, and rivalries between regional neighbors. This Asian story is now coming into its own.

Within Thailand, the neglect of Ayutthaya is bound up with the role it was assigned in the national history. The early histories of Siam, compiled from the mid-nineteenth century, begin with the foundation of Ayutthaya in 1351 in the royal chronicles.in the ruins of the grand palace at Ayutthaya, King Chulalongkorn called for the construction of a new national history:

Those many countries which have been formed into nations and countries uphold that the history of ones nation and country is an important matter to be known clearly and accurately through study and teaching. It is a discipline for evaluating ideas and actions as right or wrong, good or bad, as a means to inculcate love of ones nation and land.

He noted that most countries had histories stretching over a thousand years. He regretted that Siams history extended back no further than 1351, and attributed this to over-reliance on the royal chronicles. He urged the audience to use other sources, such as Pali chronicles and archeology, to extend Siams history further into the past.

Id like to persuade all of you to make up your minds that we will collect the historical materials of the country of Siam for every city, every race, every dynasty, and every era to compile a history of Siam over the past thousand years.

Between 1912 and 1917, Prince

Over the next decade, Prince Damrong compiled a core history of Ayutthaya. Again he used a range of sources including the Ayutthaya chronicles, excerpts from the Burmese chronicles

Prince Damrongs work was developed into a national history that occupied the textbooks and popular accounts for the rest of the twentieth century. In this history, Sukhothai is the first capital of the Thai and its era in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the Dawn of Happiness, a Golden Age marked by Buddhism, paternal kingship, and Damrongs Thai values. During the Ayutthaya era, the Thai purity of Sukhothai is besmirched by Khmer influence

This story is reflected in the first English

After this narrative was set into the textbooks and Prince Damrong

Starting in the 1980s, an attack on this national history was mounted by a group associated with Sinlapa watthanatham (Art and Culture), a monthly cultural magazine and publishing house.

Second, the school presented history as a process of increasing anthropological complexity in which kings and other hero figures were incidental. In Srisakaras master work, Sayam prathet (The country of Siam), the motors of history are the increasing ethnic complexity of society and the gradual extension of commercial networks and cultural exchanges. Through these processes, the basis of society evolves from village in the Bronze Age, to town ( mueang ) in the early first millennium CE, to state in the late first millennium, and finally to kingdom ( ratcha-anajak ) in the early Ayutthaya era. As ethnicity and monarchy no longer served as the focus of history, the Sinlapa watthanatham

After making a case for giving Ayutthaya more importance than Sukhothai in the national history, and presenting this view of its emergence, which was path-breaking for its time, the book followed the conventional story.