by Baker Chris
In practice, this pure form of Theravada was blended with other religious practices, including roles for Hindu gods, notions of supernatural power often borrowed from tantric types of Buddhism, and folk beliefs in spirits – especially in their power to foretell and influence the future.
Southeast Asian rulers favoured the Hindu gods because of the opportunity, exemplified at Angkor, to associate the ruler with the power gods of the Hindu pantheon (Vishnu, Siva, Indra). Hence, the Ayutthayan kings imported Brahmans to plan and execute royal rituals. But Hinduism developed no local following in Siam. In popular practice, Hindu gods were transformed into attendants of the Buddha or converted into local spirits (as in their popularity in spirit houses). The Brahmanical royal rituals thus had limited meaning beyond the court.
Rulers also saw opportunities to appropriate the supernatural powers muddled into Buddhist practice. They sought association with the power of local spirits, Palladian Buddha images, sacred hills and rivers, white elephants, relics of the Buddha enshrined in chedi reliquaries, and ascetic rishis. But often this association required the consent of the monkhood. Hence, kings and Sangha negotiated the relative roles of spiritual and political leadership. The Sangha needed the protection and patronage that rulers could provide. In return, rulers might demand administrative power over the Sangha hierarchy and monastic approval of their rule. And in return again, monks might insist that the ruler govern well for the material and spiritual benefit of the people. During the martial era, monks criticized rulers who demanded too much tax, conscripted people during the cultivation season, seized women or property at will, killed animals for pleasure, got drunk, or otherwise set a bad example. Some major monasteries kept chronicles that judged each ruler, praising those who defended the mueang skilfully, ruled their people with fairness and compassion, and of course patronized the Sangha. From these delicate negotiations came the concept of the thammaracha, the ruler who ruled according to the thamma or Buddhist teachings on the model of the early Indian emperor Ashoka. In the chronicles, the concept was exemplified by the later rulers of Sukhothai who took Thammaracha as their dynastic name.
In the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was a groundswell of Buddhist enthusiasm in Ayutthaya, probably associated with the growth of trade and a more independent aristocracy. Many new temples were built. Wihan (assembly halls) were enlarged to accommodate more people. The rulers invested in some of these projects, but most were the work of nobles. The 17th-century kings patronized Brahmanism rather more than Buddhism. Narai built or repaired very few wat, reduced his appearances at ceremonial events, and seemed to favour the Muslims and Christians clustered around the court. In a literary work, he challenged: ‘Can monks question kings?’ In the crisis of 1688, monks organized people to take up arms and prevent continued succession within the Narai line.
The king installed after this crisis was not a member of the royal clan, but had been a popular leader in the official nobility. Under this new dynasty, the patronage of Brahmans diminished, while that of the Sangha dramatically increased. King Borommakot (r. 1733–58) and his nobles built and repaired so many temples that the skyline of Ayutthaya was totally remodelled. His personal devotion was so marked he was accorded the title of Thammaracha. His fame became such that Sri Lanka, the original home of Theravada Buddhism, sent a monastic delegation to ask for Ayutthayan monks to help revive their degraded Sangha.
The nobility acclaimed Borommakot, but also sought more power to constrain the monarchy. They adopted the Akanya Sutta, an early Buddhist text that said that monarchy evolved when the horrors of an unregulated society forced the people to band together and ‘elect’ the best man to be king. In their own account of the later Ayutthaya period, nobles wrote that at each succession the king was chosen by the assembly of the nobility – a record of aspiration rather than reality. The nobles and the monkhood also stressed that the king must continually prove he was the best man to rule by following the thotsaphit ratchatham, the 10 laws of royal conduct, meaning munificence, moral living, generosity, justice, compassion, absence of bad ambition, suppression of anger, non-oppressiveness, humility, and upholding thamma. ‘Long Song Prophecy for Ayutthaya’, a poetical work probably dating from this era, predicted that the city would fall if these moral rules were neglected:
When virtues ten fall deaf on kingly ears,
So smash the spheres; sixteen disasters smite.
The moon, the stars, the earth and, yea, the sky
Are knocked awry – in every realm the blight…
Though now Ayutthaya in bliss can claim
To shame all heaven’s joys a myriad-fold,
Yet here – behold! – are whores and sin foretold.
Alas! Alas! Count the days ’til it shall come to pass!6
The fall of Ayutthaya
It indeed came to pass, in 1767, when Ayutthaya was besieged and sacked a second time by armies from the Burmese capital of Ava. The destruction was so violent that later historical writing portrayed Burma as a constant aggressor, and the defence against Burmese attacks as the central theme of Thai history. In fact, the prior round of warfare ending in the late 16th century had resulted in a stable settlement: Burmese influence prevailed in the interior in an arc running from Ava through the Shan States and Lanna to Lanchang and Sipsongpanna; Ayutthaya dominated the coastline from the neck of the peninsula eastwards to Cambodia. Apart from some minor skirmishes, there had been almost no conflict between Siam and Burma for 150 years.
The attacks in the 1760s were not the latest episodes in an old theme. Rather, they were a huge surprise. They stemmed from the ambitions of a new Burmese dynasty to spread its influence in all directions, and they were sparked by renewed competition to control the neck of the peninsula. But unlike before, Burma had grandiose ambitions to spread its power eastwards by eliminating Ayutthaya as a rival capital.
The Burmese attack was another contest between dynasties for dominance. But over the previous 150 years of relative peace, Ayutthaya had become a wealthier and more sophisticated society. A new popular culture had emerged of ballads, dance dramas, and other performances held mostly in the wat. Even court poets had begun to celebrate the romance of travel and the joys of erotic love rather than victory in battle and fables about princes. Ordinary people had eased free of the ties of subordination which bound them to participate in such princely conflicts, and had not yet been captured by an idea that demanded their loyalty. As the Burmese armies advanced, many people around Ayutthaya avoided conscription by bribing officials. Others took refuge in the forests, away from the expected passage of armies. Among the provincial lords called on for help, only a few sent troops. Cities in the path of the advancing armies concentrated on defending themselves, usually by capitulating to avoid destruction. Some people along the way were swept up into the invading armies. Others joined for the prospect of loot. The Ayutthaya nobles tried to negotiate with the advancing assailants on the basis of the same Buddhist humanism they deployed to constrain the monarchy: ‘It will be like when elephants fight. The plants and grass on the ground get crushed…So ask your lord to ally the two countries as a single golden land…Both kings will gain fame for their kindness in freeing their people from worry’.7
The Ayutthayan rulers understood the old martial era had passed. To compensate for the lack of recruits, they had heightened the city walls, widened the moats, and bought a quantity and range of guns that astounded the Burmese when they broke open the arsenal. Behind these defences, the city could last out one campaigning season and rely on the annual monsoon floods to disperse any siege.
But the Burmese brought three armies whose combined size was much larger than any force fielded since the 16th century. They camped outside the city around temples built on higher ground, and thus sustained their siege over two years despite the floods. The city’s supplies dwindled, and many people slipped away. The walls were breached on 7 April 1767. As the Burmese chronicle states, ‘The city was then destroyed’.8
The Burmese aim was not to force Ayutthaya into tributary status, but to obliterate it as a rival capital by destroying not only the physical resources of the city, but also its human resources, ideological resources, and intellectual resources. Any of these that were movable were carted away to Ava, including nobles, skilled people, Buddha images, books, weapons, and (reportedly) 2000 members of the royal family. Resources that were immovable were destroyed. The walls were flattened and the arsenals trashed. The palaces and wat that distinguished the city as a royal and religious centre were reduced to ‘heaps of ruins and ashes’.9
The fighting continued intermittently for 40 years. The areas around Ayutthaya were heavily depopulated. The initial main Burmese attack had come through Lanna, seizing people, gold, and supplies for the campaign. Further Burmese attacks in 1772, 1774, and 1776 devastated Lanna so much that Chiang Mai was abandoned, and large areas northwards from the city were deserted. In 1785–86, the Burmese mounted another massive attack, with five armies totalling over 100 000 crossing passes along a 1000-kilometre stretch of the hills from Lanna in the north to the mid-peninsula in the south, and spreading disruption over a wide area. Phitsanulok and other northern cities were abandoned. The Burmese were finally expelled from Lanna in 1802–04, but Chiang Mai was reduced to a village, and the northward areas were not resettled fully until the 1870s. In the south, skirmishes with the Burmese continued until 1819. The first western visitor to Nakhon Si Thammarat in 1826 thought: ‘It appears never to have recovered’ from the Burmese wars and had ‘few inhabitants, no trade and insignificant resources’.10 Even the major central plain town of Ratchaburi burnt down in 1767, remained deserted until 1800, and still had parts left abandoned in the 1880s.
Conclusion
Southeast Asia’s characteristic modern landscape of tessellated paddyfields is a very misleading guide to how it was in the past. The hills and plains were covered with forest. In the 17th century, up to 200 000 deerskins were exported from Ayutthaya each year – an indicator of the extent of the forest and its resident game. Human settlements were scattered sparsely along the river systems. The population living within the modern boundaries of Thailand in the early 19th century was probably between 1 and 2 million (Chart 1).11 As waterways were the best communication routes, the river systems came to define the cultural divisions of the region. By the 16th century (though exactly how long before is not at all clear), Thai was the main language of the lower Chao Phraya basin south of the hills. By virtue of its trading wealth, Ayutthaya became this area’s dominant place. But the fragmented pattern of human settlement was reflected in the region’s fragmented politics. Each locality had its own local ruler and often its own ruling practices and traditions. Ayutthaya, and rival centres, extended their influence by drawing these rulers into relationships of subordination and tribute. On the eve of Ayutthaya’s 1767 destruction, the city had strong influence over the mueang in the lower Chao Phraya system, and looser influence over Lao and Khmer rulers to the east, and over Thai–Chinese–Malay port mueang down the peninsula.
Chart 1: Estimated population in area of modern Thailand, 1800–2010.
The premodern social structure was based on bonds of personal subordination – rice peasant to the ruler of the local mueang, that slave to master, commoner to conscription chief, junior noble to patron, senior noble and tributary lord to king, and king to the emperor of China. In each of these relationships, the subordinate surrendered produce (of his fields or labouring skills) or labour power in return for some measure of protection. In ordinary mueang, the social hierarchy was relatively shallow. But at major centres, such as Ayutthaya, the king and great nobles accumulated resources through warfare and trade, and created a deep and finely graded hierarchy.
During the overall expansion of Asian commerce from the 16th to 18th century, the Ayutthaya kings amassed wealth, weapons, mercenaries, and new skills and technologies from Europe, Persia, and China. They consolidated their power locally through ritual dramas, and extended it further afield by armed expeditions, often clashing with similarly expansive rival neighbours, such as Ava, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
By the 18th century, the expansion of commerce had begun to undermine royal power and militarism. An emerging aristocracy sought ways to preserve wealth across generations. Ordinary people resisted surrendering their labour and their lives. Social aspirations were expressed in the moral language of resurgent Buddhism. This faltering commitment to the old order left the city vulnerable to the unexpected and unusually fierce Burmese attack in 1767. In the short term, this event wrecked trade, dispersed wealth, and provoked a revival of militarism. But over the longer term, it paved the way for the growth of a market economy and a new social order.
2 The old order in transition, 1760s to 1860s
Although the capital was physically destroyed, Ayutthaya represented traditions of trade and rule that were not easily erased. Over the next 15 years a new capital emerged further down the Chao Phraya River at Thonburi-Bangkok, a site with better chaiyaphum for trade and defence. Members of the old elite dramatized Bangkok as a revival of Ayutthaya. But in fact much was very different. This era of war extended the Siamese armies’ influence farther to the north, south, and east than ever before. Forced movements of people transformed the ethnic mix in the Chao Phraya plain. The great noble households that survived the crisis became the dominant force in the polity.
The major change was in the economy. The trading connections with China, begun in the early 18th century, were resumed and reinforced. The market economy expanded rapidly in the Chao Phraya plain and down the peninsula, driven largely by importation of Chinese enterprise and labour. The growth of the market economy began to remake the social structure and change the mentality of the elite. The return of Europeans bringing ideas of ‘progress’ and threats of colonial rule prepared the ground for an era of change.
From Ayutthaya to Bangkok
Within a very short time, several pretenders emerged to occupy the vacancy left by the obliteration of the city and dynasty of Ayutthaya. Among these, Phaya Taksin emerged as strongest. His origins are obscure. Possibly he was the son of a Teochiu Chinese migrant gambler or trader and his Thai wife. Possibly he became a provincial cart trader and bribed his way to governorship of the border town of Tak. He thus had no traditional claims to rule but was a leader of great charisma. He gathered around him other Chinese traders, sundry adventurers, and minor nobles. He founded a new capital at Thonburi, surrounded by a swamp that was good for defence, and opposite an old Chinese trading settlement at Bangkok. He used his Chinese connections to import rice to provision the devastated area, and then to revive trade to generate revenue. He brought back the traditions of the warrior-king and militarized society. He tattooed male wrists to facilitate conscription and led armies by example. The ritual shrouding of the late Ayutthayan kingship was abandoned in favour of an open, personal, charismatic style resembling the phumibun men of merit who had typically led the occasional peasant revolts in Ayutthaya’s hinterland.
As the Burmese threat was neutralized, people drifted back. Among the surviving nobles, few initially were prepared to serve this new and very different ruler. Later they were blocked by the adventurers whose early support for Taksin was repaid by promotion to the highest posts in both the capital and provinces. One exception was Bunma, a descendant of the foremost Mon lineage in the old nobility. He later brought his elder brother Thongduang into Taksin’s inner circle. The two became Taksin’s most successful generals. Thongduang was adopted as leader of the old nobles who resented their own exclusion from office, and who were disturbed by Taksin’s origins, supporters, and ‘abnormal’ rule. They bristled when Taksin claimed to have exceptional spiritual merit and elevated himself over the monkhood. In April 1782, they mounted a coup, executed Taksin on grounds he had become mad, purged his relatives and followers, and placed Thongduang on the throne as King Yotfa (Rama I).1 The dynasty thus begun took its name from Thongduang’s f
ormer ministerial title, Chakri.
The new regime portrayed itself as a restoration of Ayutthayan tradition in reaction against the abnormalities of Taksin’s interregnum. The capital was moved across the river to Bangkok and built on similar principles to Ayutthaya – an island created by closing a river meander with a canal. The word Ayutthaya was inscribed in the city’s official name. The remains of shattered Ayutthayan monuments were brought to the city and incorporated into its new buildings. All surviving manuscripts were sought out and compiled into recensions of laws, histories, religious texts, and manuals on the practice of every aspect of government. Yotfa’s coronation was delayed until it could be confidently modelled on that of Borommakot.
But this revivalism was superficial. Underneath, there were big changes.
Territorial expansion
The remilitarization of society, initially for defence, resulted in an expansion of the Siamese capital’s territorial influence far beyond any earlier scope. In the north and south, Bangkok’s armies pacified areas disrupted by the Burmese invasions and settled them as tributaries. Then Bangkok’s military resources were redirected eastwards.
To the south, Ayutthaya had previously imposed only loose tributary relations over ports on the peninsula. From the 16th century onwards, the peninsula had become more populated and more important. Malays in flight from Dutch rule in the archipelago arrived in increasing numbers. Chinese merchants fleeing legal restrictions at home settled in the ports. This increased population made it possible to exploit the peninsula’s natural resources, particularly its tin deposits and its suitability for crops like pepper. Ayutthaya began to take greater interest in controlling the peninsula and its resources. It developed Nakhon Si Thammarat as its outpost. It sent navies south to impose control. But these efforts were only moderately successful until the disruptions of the Burmese invasions. In the aftermath, Taksin and Yotfa sent armies south, gained a warmer welcome from local rulers, and established Siam’s influence down to the Malay states of Kedah and Trengganu.