A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Their rulers also competed for sheer precedence. With treasuries stocked from trade profits, armies swollen with recruits from the hinterland, personal guards manned by foreign mercenaries, temples embellished with images and gold looted from their conquered neighbours, the rulers of these places imagined themselves as cakkavatin, the unique world-conquering emperor described in Buddhist texts like the Traiphum (Three worlds). In this east–west competition, west had the advantage, probably because that direction was the source of the Portuguese mercenaries and cannon. Siam sent armies that battered the Khmer capital and placed submissive princes on the Khmer throne. Pegu demanded Siam accept similar tributary status, then allied with the northern nobles to besiege and take Ayutthaya in 1569. Pegu hauled away people, artisans, Buddha images, and loot; seized valuable elephants as symbolic tribute; and took members of the Ayutthayan ruling family as wives and hostages.

  But over these distances, and across greater barriers of cultural difference, emboxment was even more difficult to sustain. Siam’s domination of Cambodia declined once Vietnam became a countervailing power on the Khmers’ other flank. Similarly, Naresuan, the Siamese prince taken away as hostage to Pegu, escaped, abrogated the tributary relationship with Pegu, and spent most of his 15-year reign (1590–1605) on campaign, resisting further Burmese inroads, and re-establishing Ayutthaya’s dominance in the lower Chao Phraya basin.

  By the start of the 17th century, this era of warfare had reached a stalemate. Most of the ruling centres across mainland Southeast Asia had been sacked one or more times over the preceding century. People began more effectively to resist being slaughtered for the sake of royal self-esteem. In the 1560s, a massive revolt erupted among the war prisoners taken to Ava. Other resistance was less flamboyant but equally effective. People bribed the military recruiting agents, melted into the monkhood, or fled into the forests. Rulers struggled to raise armies on their former scale. Cities invested in brick walls, wider moats, and defensive cannon, which cancelled out the besiegers’ advantages. In the 1590s and early 1600s, a succession of sieges failed, and mutinous armies dissolved into the countryside.

  Map 2: Early political geography.

  The age of commerce

  Peace brought prosperity. In the early 17th century, Ayutthaya revived. After Naresuan’s conquests, the city ruled an inner core (ratchathani) in the heart of the Chao Phraya delta. Ranged around were many ‘great cities’ (mahanakhon), controlled by their own ruling families but unquestionably emboxed within Ayutthaya’s sphere of influence. These included the old northern cities, ports around the head of the gulf, the portage route across to the upper western coast of the peninsula, and border posts commanding the main routes to east (Khorat) and west (Kanchanaburi). Further out was a ring of tributaries whose attachment was more fitful and compromised by competing attachment to other powers. These included the port cities down the peninsula, which simultaneously looked southwards to the Malay world, and the interior states of Khmer, Lao, Lanna, and Shan, which balanced Ayutthaya against Vietnam, China, or Burma.

  Ayutthaya again prospered as an entrepot between east and west. To the east, Tokugawa Japan conditionally opened up to trade. To the west, the Safavid and Mughal empires became rich markets and producers of fine goods. The portage route under Ayutthaya’s control gained in attraction for Asian traders after the Dutch dominated the more southerly route through the Melaka Straits. Ayutthaya grew into perhaps the largest city in Southeast Asia, and certainly one of its most cosmopolitan. The city was ringed by settlements of Chinese, Viet, Cham, Mon, Portuguese, Arab, Indian, Persian, Japanese, and various Malay communities from the archipelago. The Dutch arrived in 1604, competed for a share in the trade to Japan, and added their settlement to this ring. The French and English followed later in the century.

  The court made use of these peoples. It recruited Malays, Indians, Japanese, and Portuguese to serve as palace guards. It brought Chinese and Persians into the official ranks to administer trade. It hired Dutch master artisans to build ships, French and Italian engineers to design fortifications and waterworks, British and Indian officials to serve as provincial governors, and Chinese and Persians as doctors. A Japanese, a Persian, and then a Greek adventurer (Constantin Phaulcon) successively became powerful figures at court. The kings, especially Narai (r. 1656–88), welcomed new knowledge, exchanged embassies with the Netherlands, France, and Persia, and borrowed dress and architectural styles from Persia, Europe, and China. As part of the management of such a cosmopolitan centre, the kings allowed freedom of religion, even proselytization, which impressed the Europeans (who were busily killing one another over the interpretation of Christianity at home). But this openness tempted both the French and Persians to believe they could convert the Siamese king and thus the country. This folly sparked a crisis in 1688, in which Phaulcon was killed, the French were expelled, and the British fled.

  Late Ayutthaya society

  Enriched by trade, guarded by mercenaries, helped by experts from all over the world, the Ayutthayan monarchy became exceptionally powerful in the 17th century. Through monopolies, it reserved for itself the largest share of Siam’s external trade, and through other taxes it took a share of an expanding internal economy. Little was wasted on war. Much was invested in unprecedented magnificence of new palaces, new and refurbished wat, and showy festivals. Even the most superior French visitor, the Jesuit Guy Tachard, gulped on entering the palace’s Wat Phra Si Sanphet in 1687: ‘there is nothing to be seen but Gold…it must needs touch one to the quick to see one single Idol richer than all the Tabernacles of the Churches of Europe’.2 The noble elite channelled their unused martial energies into elephant and tiger hunts, boat races, and martial arts displays. The court also found a new taste for gentler pursuits of courtly poetry and drama celebrating the victories and romances of kings and gods.

  To dramatize and enhance its power, the monarchy was hidden, mystified, and drenched in ritual. In the 1630s, King Prasat Thong reinvented Ayutthaya’s traditional links to Khmer civilization. The dynasty claimed distant roots in Angkorian Cambodia. More Brahmans were imported to create elaborate court rituals. New temples were built on plans inspired by Angkor Wat, and with strong Angkor-style identification between the king and his personal sanctuary. The palace was rebuilt several times, hiding the inner sanctum behind successive outer courtyards, higher walls, and smaller entrances. The royal body was hidden from sight, revealed to the people only on a handful of grand occasions per year, and even then officially forbidden to look upon. After seeing the court and public ritual, the republican Dutch found ‘this reverence better becoming a celestial Deity, than an earthly Majesty’. But the royalist French found it rather wonderful: ‘In the Indies there is no state that is more monarchical than Siam’.3

  Late Ayutthayan society was strictly divided into a service nobility of maybe 2000 people and their families, and a mass of people bound to surrender some or all of their labour to the elite.

  By the 17th century, the service nobility was an elaborate structure, codified in lists of official posts, each with its specific title, honorific, and rank measured in numerical units known as ‘sakdina’.4 The administration was divided into four main sections. The first looked after the palace and capital, including collecting rice from the royal land, guarding the royal person, keeping the peace, running the royal household, and adjudicating disputes in the capital and the core kingdom (ratchathani). The second looked after military affairs and managed relations with the outlying great cities and tributary states. The third carried out royal trade, oversaw the foreign communities, and looked after the main treasury. The fourth contained the Brahmans who took care of ritual, astrology, and record keeping.

  Entry into the official ranks was a noble preserve. Families presented their sons at court, where they were enrolled as pages. Ascent up the ladder of success then depended on personal skill, family connections, and royal favour. Noble families could advance their cause by presenting the king w
ith a daughter and hope she would gain influence in the royal bed and the intricate politics of the palace. Nobles were invested with symbols of office, mostly betel boxes of graded elaborateness of design. Senior officials might also be awarded people and maybe land or its product. They paraded through the streets displaying their betel boxes and trailed by an entourage to indicate their status. Nobles were expected to live from these grants and from whatever income they could make through their status and office – mostly by taking a percentage of revenues collected, or charging fees for judicial work.

  Over the era of warfare, all men (and some women) outside the noble ranks had been brought within systems of servitude and forced labour. Under methods adapted from the Tai hill states, most freemen (phrai) were registered on a conscription roll and placed under an overseer (nai or munnai) who was responsible for mobilization. Those who evaded this registration lost rights, such as access to judicial procedure. Conscripts served on a rotational basis (alternate months or alternating half-years). As warfare diminished, these corvée forces were transferred to other tasks, such as building temples and palaces, carrying palanquins, rowing boats, or loading the trading junks. The kings and great noble-officials controlled this forced labour and sometimes competed over it. The Ayutthaya practice was replicated in other mueang.

  War prisoners were excluded from this system and had a status of that, usually translated as ‘slave’. Others could sell themselves into that status, or be forced into it by debt or as punishment. Household heads could sell their wives and children. This slave status was hereditary. Slaves had a money valuation and were bought, sold, and redeemed. These systems of labour control were so comprehensive that European traders found it difficult to hire people unless they worked through the labour-controlling aristocracy. Even then, they occasionally found the labour supply dried up when people were needed for military expeditions or great construction projects.

  Gender roles differed sharply by social status. Among ordinary people, women did at least their full share of work. Visitors ranging from the Chinese in the 15th century to the French and Persians in the 17th, and the English in the 19th, noted that the women ‘do most of the work’ in Siam. Some attributed this to the corvée system, which removed men from the household for up to half the year. Through most of the Chao Phraya basin, rural households gave equal weight to their maternal and paternal bloodlines, and partitioned inheritance equally among male and female children. In the spirit religions that existed alongside Buddhism, many of the ritual specialists were women. In Khun Chang Khun Phaen, an early epic that originated from oral tradition, the women have strong characters, clear economic functions, and considerable independence.

  But among royalty and nobility, women were treated as assets. Patriarchs accumulated wives in order to augment the lineage. Families deployed daughters to build dynastic connections. In law, a woman was always the property of a man – first of her father, then of her husband (marriage law was like a deed of sale from father to husband), and possibly of an owner if she were sold into slavery. Court poetry portrayed women as objects of beauty and devices in the plot, but not as agents with functions and character. In the entire Ayutthaya chronicle, there are only two prominent women: one a warrior and honorary male (Suriyothai), and the other a femme fatale whose sexuality is a threat to the dynasty (Sudachan).

  In the 17th century, the society began to change in ways that gathered pace over the following century. The growth of a trading economy, and the decline of the military ethic, partially undermined the systems of forced labour. Many offered bribes to keep themselves off the registration rolls. Some sought less demanding patrons. Others sold themselves into slavery as a way to raise the capital for business ventures as well as gain freedom from corvée. Others entered the monkhood. Almost certainly, increasing numbers took refuge in the forests and lived beyond the reach of officialdom. By the early 18th century, the court found it difficult to mobilize armies of more than a few thousand. The kings issued edicts designed to improve the registration procedure, punish bribery, discourage lapse into slave status, expose fake monks, and locate people hidden under a noble’s protection. But the repetition of such legislation indicates that forced labour was becoming more difficult to marshal.

  The nobility also underwent change in this era. During the era of warfare, people could vault up the ladder of success through demonstrated skill in battle. After this route diminished in importance, two others were still available. A few could become wealthy through the phrakhlang, the department of the treasury overseeing trade. Many of its posts were given to foreigners because they had the necessary skills, and because they were easier to discipline. The Thai nobles who served in the phrakhlang were hence rather few, but very splendid. They had the opportunity to trade, and also to demand ‘presents’ from foreigners trading at Ayutthaya.

  The other ladder of success was through the intricate politics of royal favour within the court. This manoeuvring was constant, but peaked during times of royal succession. Those with a chance to ascend the throne had to have royal blood and preferably be closely related to the previous monarch, but there was no exact law of succession. In practice, each succession was a trial of strength, usually involving the previous king’s brothers and sons. In a martial era, such a contest made sense as a way to select a warrior-king. In the more peaceable 17th century, the succession became an elaborate contest involving not only competing royal kin, but factions of nobles and royal guards who backed rival candidates in the hope of advancement. These contests began with a miniature civil war fought in the centre of the capital, and ended with wholesale purges of the nobles who backed the wrong side and of male royal relatives who might want to renew the contest at some later date. Nobles who helped to make a king could expect rewards of position, women, wealth, and honours.

  Great noble households tried to accumulate wealth and prestige over generations. Especially in the outlying areas, they could often make their offices virtually hereditary. At the capital they could ensure their sons’ entry into the page system, proffer their daughters, and try to choose the winning side in succession struggles. The kings, however, obstructed the growth of such powerful households. They rotated appointments. They imposed death duties and administered them discriminately to disperse wealth. They occasionally arraigned particularly tall poppies on grounds of the bribery that was regular practice. The accused then suffered a humiliating public execution, after which his wives and slaves were distributed to others, and his house thrown open for public looting. European visitors noted that the great nobles lived in splendid houses and were surrounded by hordes of retainers, but seemed to possess almost no movable property. Diamonds were popular because they were easy to hide.

  In the early 18th century, however, the aristocracy became stronger, largely because of a shift in the pattern of trade. After the crisis of 1688, British and French traders quit Ayutthaya. The Dutch remained, but their attentions were elsewhere, and they finally departed in 1765. Yet Ayutthaya’s trade soon reoriented towards China and to a lesser extent the Malay world to the south. China increasingly needed rice to feed its southern peoples, and thus allowed more freedom to trade. Siam became a favoured rice supplier. Chinese migrated to settle in Siam, with the community estimated at 20 000 by 1735. At least two Chinese rose to the post of phrakhlang. The first, according to French missionaries, ‘placed his Chinese friends in the most important posts…with the result that the Chinese now do all the trade of the kingdom’.5 Some Chinese married into the court elite. Others traded rice, manufactured noodles, distilled liquor, and raised pigs. At least around the capital, a market economy thrived. The city’s many markets were thronged with riverboats bringing produce from the Chao Phraya river system. The court expanded the coinage, passed laws to regulate commercial contracts, and invited bids for tax-farms. Land was bought and sold. Imported cloth, crockery, glass, and ironware found a rising market. Robbery increased. A new category of phrai mangmi, rich commoners
, emerged. People offered bribes to gain rank and position. At least at the capital, trade began to shake the social order.

  The succession wars became less frequent, more confined within the royal ranks, and less damaging for the nobility. A few great households managed to accumulate manpower and wealth across generations. Some were old local families, but others originated from Brahmans in the ritual department, refugee Mon generals, and Persian and Chinese traders. Gradually this aristocracy began not only to seek its own advancement, but also to try to limit the power of the monarchy. In the wake of succession struggles, some provincial nobles raised the standard of revolt, but none effectively threatened the capital. Some peasant bands, recruited probably among those who had withdrawn beyond official reach into the forests, marched boldly on the capital but were dispersed by cannon. More subtle resistance to royal power was exercised through the language of Buddhism.

  Buddhism and kingship

  Theravada, the way of the elder, differs from other strains of Buddhism in the prime position accorded to the monk and monastic practice. The duty of the Sangha or monkhood is to preserve the thamma or teachings of the Buddha by adhering strictly to the winaya or monastic code. Some monks study the texts, preserve them by recopying, and preach their contents to the laity. Other monks exemplify the teachings by living an imitation of the Buddha’s own life, gaining insight through ascetic rigour and meditation. The duty of the laity, including the ruler, is to sustain the monkhood by patronage and protection. The enthusiasm for Theravada in the Chao Phraya basin, as elsewhere, stemmed especially from urban society’s appreciation of its openness and inherent egalitarianism: all have the same opportunity to become a monk, to give the monkhood their patronage, and to achieve the ultimate release from the material world (nibbana).