Ayutthaya Kingdom

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ayutthaya Kingdom rose from a cluster of port towns on the Lower Chao Phraya Valley and lasted from 1351 to 1767. European travellers in the early 16th century ranked it among the three great powers of Asia, alongside Vijayanagara and Ming China. Yet Chinese chronicles listed this same kingdom as merely one of their tributary states. The two views barely seem to describe the same place.

  In April 1767, after a 14-month siege, the city of Ayutthaya fell to Burmese forces and was destroyed completely. That ended a kingdom 417 years old. The Buddha image of Phra Si Sanphet, the palladium of the realm, was melted down for its gold.

  How does a confederation of rowdy port towns become a rival to Ming China? Why did a kingdom that survived siege after siege finally collapse so totally? And how did Siam recover so fast that within fifteen years a new seat of power had risen at Thonburi-Bangkok? The answers run through trade, succession, and the slow undoing of an old system of controlling people.

• 2. A City Of Many Names

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  The Fra Mauro map of the world, made around 1450, marks Ayutthaya under the Latin name Scierno. That word came from the Persian Shahr-I-Naw, meaning New City. The name reveals how far this place reached into the trading imagination of distant cartographers.

  Iberian and Italian compilers preserved a scatter of variant spellings for the same kingdom. Portuguese and Spanish sources carried forms like Cernouem and Cernome, while others wrote Xarnauz and Sarnau. A handwritten nautical chart attributed to Vesconte de Maggiolo, dated around 1508, labelled the city Zerena. Some early Portuguese descriptions even called Xarnauz a Christian kingdom, a wording that likely reflected European assumptions about non-Muslim states rather than any local faith.

  The Dutch saw it differently again. A bird's-eye painting of Ayutthaya attributed to Johannes Vingboons, made around 1662 to 1663 and commissioned by the Dutch East India Company, called the place Iudea. A 1683 illustration by Alain Mallet rendered it Iudia. Foreigners labelled the kingdom Siam, but its own people called themselves Tai and their realm Krung Tai, meaning Tai country. The capital itself carried the formal name Krung Thep Dvaravati Si Ayutthaya.

• 3. Before The Founding

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  Pottery shards dug from the island of Ayutthaya date as early as the 1270s, and some temples east of the island predate the traditional founding of 1351. The kingdom that chronicles describe as beginning in one year had clearly been a place long before. Archaeological surveys near Wat Khun Mueang Chai turned up traces of buildings from before the 1100s.

  King Uthong supposedly founded Ayutthaya on the 4th of March 1351, though that fact has been argued over for a long time. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit count at least seven legends about who Uthong was: a Northern Thai prince, a fugitive Chinese prince from the sea, a Khmer noble from Angkor, a ruler of a gulf city, or a Chola. Beyond being the legendary founder, the only thing the chronicles record about him is the year he died.

  The Khao Kop Inscription, dated to the 14th to 15th centuries, names a pre-Ayutthaya city as Ayothaya Si Ram Thep Nakhon. Royal decrees from that earlier period name a King Uthong II who reigned from 1205 to 1253, not to be confused with the later founder. Chinese and Vietnamese texts referred to the area as Xian, with merchants from a Xian Kingdom requesting permission to trade in Vietnamese ports as early as 1149. Charnvit Kasetsiri argued the kingdom was a merger of four port polities: Lopburi, Suphanburi, Ayutthaya, and Phetchaburi.

• 4. The Maritime Confederation

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  From the 1290s through the 1490s, Ayutthaya sent forces down the peninsula and demanded tribute from Malay principalities as far as Temasek, modern Singapore, and Sumatra. The early polity was a maritime confederation, closer in spirit to the Malay states of the seas than to inland kingdoms like Sukhothai. Muslim and European mapmakers drew the Malay Peninsula up to the Tenasserim coast as part of Ayutthaya in the 15th and early 16th centuries.

  Ma Huan, a scribe on Zheng He's voyages, described Ayutthaya in the early 15th century as a rowdy port town. Its men practised fighting on water, and the affairs of everyday life were arranged by the women. The cities on the peninsula regularly complained to the Chinese court about constant Siamese attacks during this period.

  King Uthong held the patchwork together through family. He made his son Prince Ramesuan ruler of Lopburi, a brother ruler of Praek Sriracha, and his brother-in-law Khun Luang Pa-ngua ruler of Suphanburi. A city governed by a prince was called Muang Look Luang. Each ruler swore loyalty to the King of Ayutthaya yet kept certain privileges. Politics turned on rivalry between two dynasties: the Uthong line based at Lopburi and the Suphannabhum line based at Suphanburi.

• 5. Elephants And Reform

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  In 1500 the Portuguese counted 100 elephants at Ayutthaya. Fifty years later the kingdom had 50,000. That leap captures a period from the 1430s to 1600 of rising warfare across Mainland Southeast Asia, when guns, elephants, and mercenaries made conflict both more chronic and more deadly. The Palace Law Codes under Borommatrailokkanat even listed rewards for the number of enemies beheaded.

  King Borommatrailokkanat centralized the kingdom through his Palatine Law of 1455, which served as the constitution of Ayutthaya for the rest of its life and shaped Siam until 1892. The court was run by the Chatusadom system, the Four Pillars, led by two prime ministers: the Samuha Nayok over civil affairs and the Samuha Kalahom as Grand Commander of Forces. In the regions, the king now sent governors drawn from the nobility rather than rulers with hereditary privileges.

  Borommatrailokkanat moved his capital to Phitsanulok during the Ayutthaya-Lan Na War over the Northern Cities, and sued for peace in 1475. He also performed some form of coronation ceremony in the 1460s, the first in Ayutthaya's history. Before the 15th century, Ayutthaya's palaces and temples were less grand than those of Sukhothai and Phitsanulok. By the early 16th century the city rivalled its neighbours with magnificent wats and palaces, and the wealth that fed them also gave birth to a chronic struggle for the throne.

• 6. Burmese Sieges And Survival

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  From the middle of the 16th century, the Taungoo dynasty of Burma struck again and again. A second siege from 1563 to 1564, led by King Bayinnaung, forced King Maha Chakkraphat to surrender in 1564, and the royal family was taken to Pegu. A third siege captured Ayutthaya in 1569, after which Bayinnaung installed Maha Thammarachathirat as vassal king and brought in the Sukhothai dynasty.

  In May 1584, less than three years after Bayinnaung's death, Naresuan proclaimed Ayutthaya's independence. The wars that followed reportedly ended in an elephant duel in 1593, in which Naresuan slew the Burmese heir-apparent Mingyi Swa, though scholars such as Sulak Sivaraksa have challenged whether that battle happened. The victory is still marked each year on the 18th of January as Royal Thai Armed Forces Day.

  Siam then went on the attack, taking Tanintharyi in 1593 and the cities of Moulmein and Martaban in 1594. A Siamese assault on Pegu in 1599 was driven back by Burmese rebels who had killed King Nanda Bayin. From 1569 to 1584 the kingdom had been a vassal of Toungoo Burma, but it had clawed its independence back. A treaty in 1618 ended the fighting, leaving Burma with Lan Na and Ayutthaya with southern Tanintharyi south of Tavoy.

• 7. Persians, French, And A Coup

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  Around 1600 the wars ceased, and the reign of Ekathotsorot opened a long stretch of peace and commerce. The Portuguese and Dutch conquest of Malacca pushed Asian traders to cross the mid-peninsula portage route that Ayutthaya controlled, making the kingdom the middleman between the great empires of the early modern world: the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, Ming and Qing China, and Tokugawa Japan. This era brought mercantile absolutism, with the king holding a virtual monopoly on incomes into the kingdom.

  The peace made the throne a richer prize and a more dangerous one. When Songtham died in 1628, Prasat Thong used his alliance with the Japanese mercenaries of Yamada Nagamasa to purge rivals, and through a chain of regicides he extinguished the Sukhothai dynasty sixty years after the Burmese had installed it. He then assassinated Yamada Nagamasa in 1630 and banished the Japanese from Siam.

  The reign of King Narai, from 1657 to 1688, made Siam outward-looking once more. Narai favoured the French, leased the ports of Bangkok and Mergui to them, and welcomed French Jesuits into a new palace at Lopburi. His Greek prime minister Constantine Phaulkon became the focus of resentment among Siamese courtiers and Buddhist clergy. When Narai fell ill in May 1688, his elephantry commander Phetracha had him arrested with Phaulkon and the royal family. Narai died in captivity in July, Phetracha crowned himself on the 1st of August, and after the Siege of Bangkok the French retreated from Siam for good.

• 8. Golden Age And Final Fall

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  The Late Ayutthaya Period, from 1688 to 1767, became the kingdom's most prosperous, driven by trade with Qing China. As China's population grew and rice shortages spread through the south, China bought rice from Ayutthaya, and the Chinese population in the city possibly tripled to 30,000 between 1680 and 1767. The arrival of Chinese farming settlers introduced capitalism to Siam. A new figure even appeared in the records: the phrai mangmi, a rich serf.

  That same wealth corroded the old order. Between 1600 and 1767, all but two royal successions were contested with a mini civil war in the capital. Phrai fled the bonds of government control to farm the countryside, entered the monkhood, or vanished into the wilderness. By the time the Burmese opened the Ayutthaya treasury in 1767, they were amazed by the huge stockpile of cannons and arms, but the kingdom lacked the men to fire them.

  The Konbaung dynasty delivered the end. King Alaungpaya invaded in 1759 to 1760 but withdrew when the rainy season came, dying on his way back to Burma in 1760. His son Hsinbyushin sent two armies converging on Ayutthaya in January 1766. Phraya Tak, a Siamese military man of Chinese heritage, broke through the siege in January 1767 to seek a new position in Eastern Siam. In April 1767 the Burmese tunnelled under the walls and set fire to their foundations, collapsing the north-eastern wall. The capital fell on the 7th of April 1767. An estimated 200,000 Siamese died, and 30,000 to 100,000, including the temple king Uthumphon, were deported to Ava. Yet Phraya Taksin, the former governor of Tak, retook the ruined capital from the Burmese garrison at Pho Sam Thon in June 1767, drew on his ties to the Chinese community, and established a new capital at Thonburi, the seed of modern Bangkok.