Ayutthaya Kingdom

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Where the Lopburi and the Pa Sak run into the broad lower course of the Chao Phraya, the central plain of the Tai world narrows to a single defensible island, ringed on every side by water and the rice that the water makes. On that island, in the year 1351, a lord remembered as U Thong was consecrated under the throne-name Ramathibodi I and founded a city he called Dvaravati Sri Ayudhya — Ayutthaya, named for Ayodhya, the capital of Rama in the Indian epic, the unconquerable city of a righteous king. For the next four centuries it was the seat of Siam. At its height it was among the largest cities on earth and one of the most cosmopolitan ports of the eastern seas, a place where the ambassadors of Louis XIV walked the same canals as Persian Shia merchants, Chinese junk-captains, Japanese mercenaries, and Dutch factors of the great chartered company. When it fell, in 1767, it fell completely, and the form of the kingdom that it bequeathed outlasted the stone.

The island and the founding

The choice of the site was strategic before it was sacred. The island sat at the convergence of three rivers and commanded the river-road to the sea, so that the wealth of the whole upper basin had to pass its wharves on the way to the Gulf. Ramathibodi I, by tradition tied to the ruling house of Lavo (Lopburi) and married into the lordship of Suphan Buri to the west, gathered the older Mon and Khmer-influenced principalities of the lower plain into a single river-mouth polity. The ground he gathered was deeply layered: the central plain had carried, centuries before, the Mon Buddhist city-culture of Dvaravati, and behind that the Indic mercantile world of Funan at the mouth of the Mekong, the earliest of the region’s Hindu-Buddhist states. Ayutthaya rose on that sediment of older polities and made itself their heir on the river. The new capital did not invent Tai kingship; it inherited it. To the north lay the older Siamese kingdom of Sukhothai, the dawn of happiness, remembered as the cradle of the Thai script and of a Theravada golden age. Ayutthaya, founded near the mouth of the river system that Sukhothai held upstream, was its rival from the first generation and within a century its master: by 1378 the kings of Sukhothai acknowledged Ayutthaya’s supremacy and ruled as vassals, and when the last of the Phra Ruang line died in 1438 the throne of the dawn-city passed to a son of Ayutthaya, and Sukhothai became a province governed from downstream.

The kingdom that absorbed Sukhothai was never a single dynasty. Two houses contended for the capital across its first century — the Uthong line of the founder and the Suphannaphum house of his brother-in-law Borommaracha I — and across the whole span five royal lines held the throne, the Uthong, the Suphannaphum, a Sukhothai line installed after a Burmese conquest, the Prasat Thong house from 1629, and the Ban Phlu Luang house from 1688. Succession was rarely peaceful; the chronicles are a record of regicide, regency, and the elephant-mounted contest of princes. What endured beneath the dynastic violence was the city, the administration, and the religion.

The inheritance of Angkor

Ayutthaya rose on the western edge of a world that the Khmer Empire of Angkor had built and was even then relinquishing. The plain had lain for centuries under Angkorian prestige — its administrative Sanskrit, its garrison towns, its temple-mountains raised to the gods. The Tai who founded Ayutthaya took up that Khmer apparatus of sacred rule and made it the architecture of their own court. From the Khmer they inherited the conception of the king not as a first-among-chiefs but as a devaraja, a god-king, and as a chakravartin, a universal wheel-turning monarch whose dominion mirrored the order of the cosmos. The model was the great temple-state of Angkor Wat and the ritual kingship it had embodied, in which the sovereign stood at the axis of the world and his capital reproduced the geography of the heavens. In 1431 an Ayutthayan army took and plundered Angkor itself; the Khmer king Ponhea Yat abandoned the old capital as indefensible and withdrew toward Phnom Penh, and a part of what Ayutthaya carried home from the sack was the very court ceremonial of the conquered.

That ceremonial was administered by Brahmans. The court of Ayutthaya kept a hereditary college of royal Brahmans — descendants of priests drawn from the Khmer establishment and from the Tamil south — who conducted the consecration of kings, the ploughing rite that opened the agricultural year, the swing ceremony, and the great calendar of state rituals whose vocabulary descended from the Brahmanism and the broader Hinduism that the Indic world had carried across the Bay of Bengal. The regalia of consecration, the lustral waters, the conch and the sacred thread, the recitation that made a man into a divine king — all of this was the Brahmanical layer of a court that was, in its devotional center, Buddhist. The two registers did not compete. The Brahman made the king; the Buddha defined what a king was for.

A Buddhist kingdom

The state religion of Ayutthaya was Theravada Buddhism, the Teaching of the Elders, the lineage of the Pali Canon and the path of the arhat that had reached the central plain from Sri Lanka by way of the Mon and the peninsular centers. The kings of Ayutthaya patronized the Sri Lankan ordination line, the Lankavong, and conceived of themselves as its protectors: the sovereign was the chief patron of the Sangha, the monastic order, and the defense and purification of the order was among the highest duties of the crown. The relation ran both ways. The Sangha legitimated the king, and the king sustained the Sangha through the most public and most consequential of Buddhist acts, the making of merit.

Merit-making was the economic and devotional engine of the religious polity. A king demonstrated his fitness to rule by the scale of his giving — by raising monasteries, casting Buddha images, gilding stupas, sponsoring ordinations, and feeding monks — and the great royal foundations of the capital were the monuments of that giving. Wat Phra Si Sanphet, the chapel-royal raised within the palace precinct, held its colossal standing Buddha sheathed in gold and was reserved to the royal house; Wat Mahathat, the monastery of the great relic, anchored the city’s sacred center. The merit a king accrued was understood to advance him along an immense trajectory: the Ayutthayan sovereign was increasingly identified as a bodhisatta, a Buddha-to-be, a being accumulating perfections across many lives toward a future awakening — a formulation present by the reign of Narai in the later seventeenth century and in full flower in the eighteenth. The cosmology that framed this was the Traibhumikatha, the Three Worlds, the account of the layered universe of heavens, human realm, and hells through which beings rise and fall by their deeds; first composed in fourteenth-century Sukhothai, it remained the cosmological imagination of the Ayutthayan court and a charter for the moral order of the kingship.

Beneath the gilded merit-economy of the capital ran the older Theravada current of renunciation: the forest-dwelling monk, the araññavāsī, withdrawn from the town monastery to the discipline of the wilderness and the meditation that the village order could crowd out. Ayutthaya, like every Theravada polity, held both vocations in tension — the monk of books and the monk of the forest, the merit-field at the city’s heart and the ascetic at its margin. That forest-monastic ideal, carried into Siam with the Sri Lankan lineage, is the same canonical root from which the modern Thai wandering-ascetic revival, the Thai forest tradition, would later draw its self-understanding when it reactivated the ancient austerities in the northeastern forests at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Theravada that Ayutthaya professed was the common faith of a belt of contemporaneous mainland kingdoms. To the north the Mon city-realm of Hariphunchai in the Lamphun valley had kept a Dvaravati-descended Buddhism alive for centuries before the Tai expansion overtook it; up the Mekong, the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang shared the same Sri Lankan ordination line, the same merit-economy, the same script-family and chronicle culture. Ayutthaya was the largest and richest of these Theravada courts, but it was one current in a single Buddhist world that ran from the Salween to the Annamite range.

The administration of a kingdom

The institutional shape of Ayutthaya was set, more than by any other ruler, by King Borommatrailokkanat, who reigned from the mid-fifteenth century and promulgated the body of law that became the constitution of the kingdom for the rest of its existence. His Palatine Law of 1455 and the reforms around it centralized and rationalized a state that had been a loose hierarchy of tributary lords. He separated the civil and the military administration into two great ministries, fixed a ladder of titular and functional ranks, and ordered the realm into a graded geography — the inner provinces governed directly, the outer provinces under appointed governors, and the tributary states beyond.

The instrument that bound this society together was sakdina — literally field power, a number assigned to every person from the highest prince to the lowest bondsman that fixed his place in the hierarchy and, in principle, the extent of rice-land he might hold. A slave stood at five units; a freeman at twenty-five and upward; a great minister in the tens of thousands; the heir apparent at a hundred thousand. Sakdina was at once a tax register, a rank-order, and a measure of legal worth, and it organized the obligations of corvée labor and military service that the crown drew from its subjects. The legal corpus that codified all of this — the dhammasattha, the Buddhist-Brahmanical law-book tradition adapted from the Indian dharmaśāstra — gave the kingdom a written jurisprudence that would survive its fall and be recompiled, generations later, in the law-code of its successors.

The cosmopolitan port

What made Ayutthaya extraordinary among the mainland kingdoms was the sea. The island-capital sat far enough inland to be defensible but was reachable by ocean-going ships up the Chao Phraya, and it became one of the great entrepots of the maritime world — a clearing-house where the products of the interior (deerskins, sappanwood for dye, aromatic woods, tin, rice, and hides) met the silver and the manufactures of the wider trade. The crown ran much of this commerce as a royal monopoly through its treasury department, and the kings grew rich on the duties and the exchange.

This placed Ayutthaya at a hinge of the longer history of Southeast Asian sea-power. The Gulf and the Strait had been worked for centuries before by the great archipelagic thalassocracies — the Buddhist maritime empire of Srivijaya on Sumatra, which had once controlled the chokepoint of the Malacca Strait, and the later Javanese empire of Majapahit, whose commercial reach had spanned the islands. By Ayutthaya’s heyday those powers had receded, and the Siamese port drew into its own orbit much of the trade that had once flowed through them, dealing eastward with the Cham coast of Champa and the Vietnamese realm of Dai Viet and southward down the peninsula it claimed as far as the Malay sultanates.

The merchants came from everywhere and were given their own quarters along the riverbanks south of the walled island. The Chinese were the oldest and largest presence, integrated into the kingdom’s junk-trade with the Ming and Qing courts. The Portuguese arrived first among the Europeans: from 1511 the crown employed Portuguese gunners against its enemies, and by 1540 they held a granted settlement on the west bank of the river. The Dutch came in 1601 and built the trade of the United East India Company — the VOC — into the kingdom’s most powerful commercial partner, with their factory and the village of Baan Hollanda established in 1634, moving Japanese and Chinese porcelain, Indian cloth, and Siamese hides between Ayutthaya, Batavia, Japan, and Europe. The Japanese settled the Ban Yipun, a community of perhaps a thousand traders and mercenaries on the eastern bank, whose most famous figure, Yamada Nagamasa, commanded the Japanese volunteer corps in the king’s service in the 1620s and rose to be governor of Nakhon Si Thammarat before he was poisoned. From Persia came the Shia Muslim merchant Sheikh Ahmad of Qom early in the seventeenth century; he entered the royal service, and his descendants — the Bunnag — became one of the great noble families of Siam. Estimates of the population of the metropolis at its height run past a million souls in the city and its environs, which would have made Ayutthaya, in the seventeenth century, among the largest cities in the world.

Narai and the French

The cosmopolitanism of the port reached its most spectacular pitch under King Narai, who reigned from 1656 to 1688 and held a second court upriver at Lopburi. Narai’s reign is remembered as a first golden age of Thai literature and as the high-water mark of Siamese engagement with the wider world. Its central and most controversial figure was a foreigner: Constantine Phaulkon, a Greek adventurer who rose from the service of the English company to become Narai’s chief minister with the Siamese title Chao Phraya Wichayen, and who steered the kingdom’s foreign policy toward an alliance with the France of Louis XIV.

A succession of embassies crossed the world in both directions. Siamese missions went to Versailles, and in 1685 the Sun King returned the courtesy with the grand embassy of the Chevalier de Chaumont, accompanied by the Abbé de Choisy and the Jesuit Guy Tachard, charged both with treaty-making and with the hope — encouraged by Phaulkon — of converting Narai to Catholicism. In 1686 a Siamese embassy led by the minister Kosa Pan was received in audience by Louis XIV at Versailles and toured France to wide acclaim, an event recorded in French engravings and memoirs. In 1687 a still larger French expedition arrived carrying six hundred soldiers in its warships and the diplomat-scholar Simon de la Loubère, whose account of the kingdom became one of Europe’s principal sources on Siam.

The alliance overreached. The presence of French troops, the conspicuous power of Phaulkon, and the pressure toward conversion provoked a deep reaction among the Buddhist nobility. When Narai fell mortally ill in 1688, the commander Phetracha seized power, executed Phaulkon, and on the king’s death expelled the French garrison and the embassy. Phetracha took the throne and founded the last royal house of Ayutthaya, the Ban Phlu Luang. The kingdom turned inward from the European entanglement, but its trade with China, Japan, and the Indian Ocean continued, and the city remained, for another seventy years, the rich and crowded capital that the French had described.

The Burmese wars and the fall

Ayutthaya’s enduring military antagonist lay to the west, across the mountains, in the successive Burmese empires. In 1569, after a long contest, the armies of Bayinnaung of the Toungoo dynasty took the city in a third great siege and reduced Siam to a vassal, installing Maha Thammaracha on a tributary throne. The recovery was led by his son. In 1584 the prince Naresuan declared Ayutthaya’s independence, and in a series of campaigns through the 1580s and 1590s he broke the Burmese hold; the tradition fixes the turning point at the elephant-back encounter of 1593 in which Naresuan met and killed the Burmese heir-apparent Mingyi Swa — an episode central to Thai national memory, though its precise character is debated by historians.

The second and final Burmese catastrophe came two centuries later from the Konbaung dynasty. In the war of 1765-1767 the armies of King Hsinbyushin closed on Ayutthaya from two directions in a pincer, the columns of Maha Nawrahta and Nemyo Thihapate converging on the capital and laying siege from early 1766. The siege held for fourteen months. King Ekkathat sued for terms and offered to make Siam a tributary once more, but the Burmese commanders carried orders that the city was to be not subdued but erased. On 7 April 1767 Ayutthaya fell, and the Burmese sacked and burned it — the palaces, the libraries, the gilded monasteries, the standing Buddha of Wat Phra Si Sanphet stripped of its gold and fired. The population was killed, scattered, or carried off. The capital that had stood for four hundred and sixteen years was left an emptied ruin, and it was never rebuilt on its island.

Aftermath and endurance

The fall did not end the Siamese state; it relocated it. Within months a general of the broken kingdom, Taksin, gathered the scattered forces, drove out the Burmese, and re-established the monarchy downriver at Thonburi, on the very approach to the sea that Ayutthaya had commanded; and within a generation the founder of the next dynasty moved the capital across the river to Bangkok and built it as a conscious resurrection of the old city — its island-and-canal plan, its grand royal monasteries, its consecration ritual, and its recompiled law-code drawn deliberately from the Ayutthayan model, so that the new capital was understood as Ayutthaya raised again. The form of kingship that U Thong had assembled on the island in 1351 — the Brahman-consecrated, merit-making, bodhisatta-king of a Theravada realm administered by sakdina and the dhammasattha — was the thing the founders of Bangkok carried out of the fire and rebuilt downstream: when the new dynasty laid out its island and dug its canals and consecrated its first king with the Ayutthayan rite and recompiled the Ayutthayan law, it was not imitating the old capital but continuing it under another name. The chronicles the refounders ordered written begin the story of the present kingdom on the island in 1351; in the reckoning of the throne, Ayutthaya never quite ended on the seventh of April 1767. It was moved, the way a relic is moved from a burned reliquary into a new one built to hold it, and reconsecrated to keep doing the work it had always done — to be the still center around which a Buddhist realm turns.

Sources and scholarship

The history of Ayutthaya rests first on its own chronicle tradition — the several recensions of the Phra Ratcha Phongsawadan, the royal chronicles, which survive in versions of varying date and reliability and whose textual problems are themselves a major field — and on the substantial body of European eyewitness description that the cosmopolitan port generated. The most important of the latter is Simon de la Loubère’s Du Royaume de Siam (1691), the report of the 1687 French embassy, a detailed account of the kingdom’s government, religion, and customs at the zenith of the Narai period; the embassy literature of de Chaumont, the Abbé de Choisy, and the Jesuit Guy Tachard, together with the records of the Dutch VOC factory, give Ayutthaya one of the richest external archives of any pre-modern Southeast Asian state.

The modern synthesis descends from George Cœdès, whose The Indianized States of Southeast Asia established the framework of an Indic court-culture transmitted through the Khmer; David K. Wyatt’s Thailand: A Short History remains the standard narrative of the dynastic arc. The institutional and economic history of the kingdom is the work above all of Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, whose A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2017) is the authoritative recent treatment, and of Dhiravat na Pombejra on the seventeenth-century trade and the Dutch sources. The conception of the kingdom as a galactic or mandala polity — concentric, ritually ordered, its power graded outward from the sacred center — is the contribution of S. J. Tambiah’s World Conqueror and World Renouncer (Cambridge, 1976), which reads the Theravada monarchy through the relation of the chakravartin king and the renouncing Sangha. For the religion as it was actually professed, the Pali sources are the bedrock: the canonical discourses and the merit-and-monastic teaching of the Theravada tradition are accessible in the early scholarly translations, and the cosmology that ordered the Ayutthayan moral imagination, the Three Worlds, was edited and rendered into English by Frank E. and Mani B. Reynolds as Three Worlds According to King Ruang (1982). The standard institutional account of the kingship and its law remains H. G. Quaritch Wales’s Siamese State Ceremonies and Ancient Siamese Government and Administration for the Brahmanical and sakdina apparatus. The ruined capital itself, inscribed as the Historic City of Ayutthaya on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991, is the primary monument of the kingdom and the ground of its continuing archaeology; the eyewitness record of the Japanese presence is treated in the Journal of the Siam Society, whose archive is the principal venue for Ayutthayan scholarship.

→ In the library: Buddhist Suttas (Rhys Davids, 1881) — discourses of the Pali Canon the kingdom professed · Buddhism in Translations (Warren, 1896) — Pali sources on the merit-and-monastic order

→ Related: Sukhothai · Khmer Empire · Angkor Wat · Buddhism Theravada · Thai Forest Tradition · Hariphunchai · Lan Xang · Champa · Dai Viet · Srivijaya · Majapahit · Dvaravati · Funan · Brahmanism · Hinduism