The Kingdom of Ayutthaya

What was carried north

Drafted from Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (2017)formation

Ayutthaya was founded in 1351 on an island where three rivers meet, about fifty miles up the Chao Phraya from the Gulf. Eighty years later its army took Angkor, and what it brought back was not treasure.

It brought the brahmans. The ritual specialists of the Khmer court, the consecration rites, the Sanskritic royal titulature, the palace language, the legal formulae — the working apparatus of Angkorian kingship went up the road to Siam, and the Siamese court used it for four hundred years. The Bangkok dynasty that followed was still using it in the twentieth century.

It was a whole court culture acquired by capturing the city that had it, and Ayutthaya went on using it, without apparent embarrassment, for four centuries.

And the letters

Ayutthaya wrote in the Thai script, which is an adaptation of the Khmer script made at Sukhothai in the late thirteenth century. So the titles taken from Angkor in 1431 were written down in letters that had also come from Angkor, a hundred and fifty years earlier and by a different route, through the Sukhothai kingdom that had first adapted them.

The titulature and the alphabet it was written in had, by different roads and a century and a half apart, the same origin.

Not a rice kingdom

Drafted from Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (2017)expansion

Ayutthaya is usually described as a rice kingdom on a fertile delta. Baker and Pasuk's account, which the chapters here follow, is against the standard picture.

The Chao Phraya delta was not intensively farmed for export until the nineteenth century — the great canal-and-paddy landscape of central Thailand is a later thing — and what the crown actually lived on was trade. Customs on the Gulf traffic. And, more importantly, royal monopolies on what the hinterland produced: sappanwood, eaglewood, hides, ivory, tin, and the sea products the China trade wanted, bought cheap through the corvée system and sold on through the king's own warehouses to Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Indian and eventually European buyers.

The king was the kingdom's largest merchant, and for some commodities its only legal one.

A land power that lived like a port

Angkor, a hundred and fifty miles away and the source of Ayutthaya's court ritual, lived on land tax and almost nothing else. So did its other neighbours inland. Ayutthaya sat fifty miles up a river with a corvée labour system and a hinterland empire, and made its money the way Melaka did.

It is worth being careful about what that resemblance means. A strait polity lives by sitting astride somebody else's route and charging for passage. Ayutthaya's tolls were collected at a river port it controlled by holding the whole country behind it — the hinterland was not a route to be taxed but an estate to be worked, and the monopolies only functioned because the corvée that supplied them reached deep inland.

Same ledger, then, and a completely different state underneath it.

1688

Drafted from Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (2017)peak

King Narai's court in the 1680s had gone further toward Europe than any other in Southeast Asia. His chief minister was a Greek adventurer, Constantine Phaulkon, who had arrived as an employee of the English East India Company. There were French troops garrisoned in two forts, at Bangkok and Mergui. Embassies had gone to Versailles and been received with ceremony. A French mission in Ayutthaya believed, and reported home, that the king was on the point of converting to Catholicism.

In 1688, as Narai lay dying, the commander of the elephant corps seized the palace. Phaulkon was executed. Narai's heirs were killed. The French garrisons were besieged and then allowed to leave, and the commander took the throne as Phetracha.

Siam then dealt with Europeans on its own terms for the next century and a half.

Why the removal held

Elsewhere in the region, a European garrison seized by force tended to come back with a bigger fleet, or simply never leave. Ayutthaya had foreign soldiers inside its own capital's defences and removed them in a palace coup, and the removal held for good.

The difference was not courage or cunning. Ayutthaya was a large agrarian-labour state with an inland capital and a population it could conscript, not a port city standing on water a fleet could reach and blockade. A crown that could raise an army from its own rice-growing hinterland did not depend on the harbour the way a trading city did, and a coup that expelled a foreign garrison from an inland capital was not answerable, the way a coastal sultanate's was, to whatever fleet arrived next season.

After the French

Drafted from Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (1693)contraction

Simon de la Loubère reached Ayutthaya as Louis XIV's envoy in September 1687 and left in January 1688. Four months later the reign he had been negotiating with was over, the Greek favourite who had arranged everything was dead, and the country closed the door he had come through.

His book is the last European description of Ayutthaya before that happened.

What he saw at court

He is exact about the physical protocol, and the protocol is the political system.

When the king moves, the guards follow confusedly and without any order; the courtiers walk with their hands joined on their breast; and when he stops, everyone on foot prostrates themselves on their Knees and Elbows, while those on horses or elephants bow down entirely on the animal.

He notes a category of royal attendants — he transcribes the word as Scham mow — who follow on foot, and specifies that they are the King's Domesticks, which are not Slaves, which tells you what the default assumption was.

He records that revolutions are common at Siam and refers his readers to two earlier accounts for examples, which is a striking thing to print about a court you have just concluded a treaty with, four months before it happened again.

Why the French were there at all

Because of Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek who had come east with the English East India Company, entered Siamese service, and risen to run the kingdom's foreign trade and much of its foreign policy.

Phaulkon's project was a French alliance: embassies both ways, French officers, French garrisons at Bangkok and Mergui, and — the part that destroyed him — the suggestion to Versailles that King Narai might be converted.

He was not wrong that Ayutthaya wanted a counterweight. The kingdom had spent the century balancing the Dutch, who had the shipping and were prepared to blockade the river to get trading terms, against everyone else. What Phaulkon supplied was a European power with no commercial position in the region and therefore, in theory, no leverage to use.

1688

Narai fell ill in the spring of 1688. Phra Phetracha, the commander of the elephant corps, took the palace, executed Phaulkon, killed the heirs, married into the royal house and took the throne when Narai died.

The French garrison at Bangkok was besieged and allowed to sail away. The missionaries were imprisoned. The treaties were void.

It is usually described as a xenophobic reaction and it was narrower than that. The Dutch stayed and went on trading. Chinese, Indian, Persian and Japanese merchants stayed. What was expelled was a specific arrangement — foreign troops in Siamese forts under a foreign favourite — that a substantial part of the court had regarded as intolerable for years.

What the century afterwards looked like

Not decline in the ordinary sense. Trade with China grew through the eighteenth century and Ayutthaya's Chinese population with it; the rice export to the Chinese coast became the kingdom's most valuable business.

What did change is that the court stopped taking European powers seriously as partners and stopped being taken seriously by them, and the succession problem did not improve. The throne passed by palace violence more often than not, and the reign that ended in 1767 began with the usual eliminations.

So the kingdom that met the Burmese army in the 1760s was rich, commercially sophisticated, and had spent eighty years without a stable rule for replacing its own kings.

1767

Drafted from Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (2017)end

The Burmese came twice. In 1569 Bayinnaung took the city and Ayutthaya spent fifteen years as a vassal before Naresuan restored it; the city survived that one substantially intact.

The second time, in April 1767 after a fourteen-month siege, a Konbaung army took it, burned it, and carried off what was left of the population. The chronicles, the law codes, the literature and the palace archive largely went with it, which is why the history of a state that lasted four hundred years has to be reconstructed from foreign accounts, from what survived in provincial copies, and from later recensions made at Bangkok from memory.

What replaced it, and how fast

The state re-formed almost immediately. Taksin held most of the country from Thonburi by 1770, and Bangkok was founded in 1782 — fifteen years after the sack.

The Chakri dynasty that founded it made the continuity explicit. It rebuilt the royal precinct on a new river bend to reproduce the old one, re-promulgated the law code from what could be recovered, had the lost literature composed again by commission, and put Ayutthaya's own name at the head of its new capital's formal title, where it still is.

Fifteen years between the destruction of a capital and the founding of its deliberate replacement is about as short an interval as this kind of thing takes.

What Bangkok rebuilt

Drafted from Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (2017)afterlife

Ayutthaya was destroyed in 1767 and the state was reassembled within fifteen years, forty miles downriver, by people who had been in it — and the reassembly was deliberate, itemised, and largely successful.

The interval

The Burmese sack was thorough: the city burned, the population deported or scattered, the royal family killed or carried off, the archives and the libraries gone.

Then the Burmese left, because a Chinese invasion of Burma required the army elsewhere. What was left in Siam was five or six regional warlords, and the one who won was Taksin — a provincial governor of Chinese descent who had broken out of the siege with a few hundred men, took the eastern seaboard, then Thonburi at the river mouth, and had reunified most of the country by 1770.

He reigned fourteen years, went — by the account of the men who deposed him — mad, claimed to be a stream-enterer on the path to arhatship and had monks flogged for not prostrating to him, and was executed in 1782 by a general who took the throne as Rama I.

Rebuilding on purpose

What the new dynasty did at Bangkok is unusual because it was explicit.

The Grand Palace and the temple of the Emerald Buddha were laid out to reproduce the Ayutthayan royal precinct. The city was sited on a river bend and canalised to give it an island quarter, as Ayutthaya had been. The ministries were re-established with the Ayutthayan names and functions. The law was recompiled in 1805 — the Three Seals Code — from whatever texts had survived, with the gaps filled by the memory of officials who had served the old kingdom.

The royal chronicles were rewritten too, and this is the part to be careful with. The versions of the Ayutthaya story that are standard were compiled or recompiled in Bangkok, by a dynasty that had replaced Taksin and needed the sequence to run cleanly from the old kingdom through a regrettable interval to itself.

Taksin's reputation is the casualty. The madness may be true and it is also exactly what a successor regime would record.

The literature

The most striking single act of reconstruction is the Ramakien.

The Thai version of the Ramayana had existed at Ayutthaya and was largely lost in the sack. Rama I convened a commission and had it composed again, in 1797, running to some fifty thousand verses — a national epic rebuilt from fragments and memory by royal committee, thirty years after the library burned.

The same was done for the Traiphum cosmology, the court poetry, the dance drama and the mural conventions. The classical Thai culture that exists now is substantially an early Bangkok reconstruction of an Ayutthayan original, and it is not always possible to tell which is which.

What that bought

A century later, when Britain had taken Burma and France had taken Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Siam was the one state in the region that was not colonised.

The reasons are usually given as diplomacy and buffer geography, and both are real. But the thing being defended mattered: a continuous monarchy with an articulated bureaucracy, a codified law, a national literature and a court that could negotiate — all of it demonstrably older than the Europeans in the region, and much of it rebuilt from ashes by men who had watched the original burn.

Ayutthaya is a ruin and a UNESCO site, and it is also the template the country next door to it is still built on.