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King Borommakot
The death of the king of Siam in 1758 must have made a strong
impression upon his contemporaries, for he is still remembered as "the
king in the golden urn (bòrommakot)," a reference to when his remains
were held awaiting royal cremation, rather than the name he had
formally borne as king, King Song Tham or Bòrommathammikarat (the
"Just King" or the "King of Great Justice"). Indeed, while both his
predecessors and successors are judged harshly by the chroniclers who
wrote of them at the end of the eighteenth century, Borommakot
epitomizes the ruler of a golden age. It was to Borommakot's reign
that the founders of the Chakri Dynasty looked back for inspiration by
the 1780s and `90s.
For all the attractiveness of the subject, the historical evidence
concerning the reign of King Borommakot (r. 1733-1758) is relatively
thin and surprisingly under-explored. Those decades--the 1730s, `40s,
and `50s--conventionally are viewed as simply the prelude to the awful
calamities that were to follow in the 1760s, when the Burmese invaded
Siam and completely destroyed Ayudhya. The result has been that much
writing gives the impression that Siam withdrew from contacts with the
outside world after 1688, and that the country was fragmented and
progressively weaker until the Burmese destroyed the old Thai order in
1767.[1]
With the historical hindsight that tells us what happened in
1765-1767, we are inclined to search for the reasons for that disaster
in the decades that preceded the fall of Ayudhya. However, as useful
as it may be to discern what was "wrong" with the Siam of the middle
of the eighteenth century, which helps us to understand what King Rama
I (r. 1782-1809) changed, it also leads us to forget some aspects of
what was "right" about Siam in the earlier period, a period which is
vital to our understanding of what Siam had been and what it was
becoming. One of the many virtues of finding a "new" document like the
Dutch account of a visit to the Buddha-footprint shrine near Saraburi
in 1737 is that it raises interesting questions which are well worth
our attention; and at its best its publication might suggest some new
ways of thinking about the middle decades of the eighteenth century.
This essay is an attempt to outline and analyze some aspects of the
Siam of the 1730s, when Van den Heuvel traveled to Phraphutthabat with
the court of King Borommakot. We will look at King Borommakot and his
court, and tentatively try to describe the world that they knew,
helped not a little by Van den Heuvel's own account. We will discover
that Siam was more complicated, even exciting, and in more of a social
and intellectual transition, than is generally admitted.
King Borommakot
Like many of his predecessors on the throne of Ayudhya, Borommakot
came to the throne through turmoil and conflict. Born around 1682 to
Luang Sorasak (King "Tiger," r. 1703-09) as Phon, younger brother to
Phet, who was to reign as King Thai Sa (r. 1709-33), there were three
sons of the latter who on their father's death in January 1733 were
more likely candidates for succession to the throne than Phon was,
though Phon himself had loyally served his brother as uparat, or "heir
presumptive." Of his three nephews, one, Prince Naren, had been
serving as a Buddhist monk since 1716, and chose not to contest the
throne. Of the other two, Prince Aphai was his father's choice, and
was backed by most of the officials, and with his brother Paramet took
possession of the royal palace. When the battle between the two
factions began, Phon's forces were outnumbered five- or six-to-one.
Just as they were on the verge of defeat, a certain khun Chamnan
Channarong (personal name U), a leading official in his household,
took charge and mounted a lightning attack against the royal force,
killing their leaders, whereupon the attackers fled. Prince Phon then
took possession of the royal palace and ascended the throne.[2]
The new king, then aged about 51 years, thus came to the throne out of
a conflict in which the majority of his officials had been supporting
his nephews. Many of the leading officials died, either in the
conflict between the two armies or in the massive purge that followed
it (including the Chinese who had been serving as the Phrakhlang (or
minister of trade and foreign affairs) and also the Yommarat, the
Minister of the Capital). We also know that many other offices changed
hands at the beginning of Borommakot's reign, though how many of these
changes were due to the succession conflict and how many were due to
the usual rewarding of friends and punishing of enemies is impossible
to know.
The important thing about the bouleversement of 1733, however, is that
the new king, a mature and experienced man, seems for the most part to
have followed a dual policy of conciliation and rectitude. The quality
of conciliation can best be seen in connection with the king's
dealings with his officials, to which we will shortly turn. The
"rectitude" is suggested in the cyclical pattern of annual activities,
which regularly included pious works and an annual pilgrimage to the
Buddha's Footprint shrine between Saraburi and Lopburi,[3] as well as
in such extraordinary events as the special relationship between Siam
and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), by which Siamese aid was solicited to restore
Sinhalese Buddhism between 1751 and 1755.[4] In these regular and
irregular actions, the king demonstrated a public piety which would be
a model of kingly behavior for many generations. Indeed, there were
those in the 1780s and 1790s who would blame the fall of Ayudhya on
the failure of Borommakot's successors to maintain the high moral
standard which he had set for them.
But to whom were Borommakot's policies, actions, and demeanor intended
to "speak"? That is, whose approval did he seek, whom did he wish to
avoid offending, and whose favour did he hope to secure? To answer
such questions we must turn to an examination of King Borommakot's
court.
The World of Siam's Capital
All of this is to define Borommakot's world in a way that we might
call "objective"--that is, it involves identities and relationships
that in some way might be counted, whether in terms of social
mobility, or rates of intermarriage, or changing religious
affiliations, or economic class, or any other of a large number of
what might be termed "social indicators." It is much more difficult to
understand Borommakot's Siam in "subjective" terms; that is, in terms
of how they were thinking and feeling. To be sure, even the most
articulate of the members of Borommakot's court were not concerned to
allow future generations to enter into their minds and hearts. There
are, however, certain implications to their behavior that allow us to
make some tentative guesses as to their frame of mind, aided not least
by such accounts as Van den Heuvel's account of the visit to Phrabat.
Indeed, we might start with Van den Heuvel, and from there work our
way back to the capital.
The first aspect of the Siamese realm to strike the reader is the
ceremonial grandeur of the court, even on this brief excursion into
the countryside. The court was conveyed for part of the journey on
more than a hundred boats, each with forty or more oarsmen, and when
they moved onto land for the last half of the journey, there seems to
have been no shortage of carts, horses, and elephants. Similarly,
there was no shortage of Siamese officials, whom the Dutch referred to
as "mandarins." They seem to have been polite, and solicitous of the
comfort of their foreign guests.
But the "objective" aspects of Van den Heuvel's journey speak for
themselves. What, we must ask, was going on in the minds of their
hosts?
The first thing to strike us is the utter cultural self-confidence of
the Siamese. Many of the things that they did, and things that they
showed the visitors, were quintessentially Thai cultural
artifacts--from classical dance and cuisine to Buddhist belief and
conceptions of astronomy (and eclipses). Not only was there no
apparent defensiveness when the Thai were challenged with European
alternatives, but even more interesting is the fact that on several
occasions the Thai demonstrated a willingness to admit that other
cultures might see things differently. In conversations with their
escorts, with officials whom they met or about whom they heard, and
even in arguing with a Buddhist monk (16 March), the Dutch encountered
intelligence and intellectual curiosity.
Two aspects of the mind of the period are less directly conveyed in
the text. First, there are scattered references to foreign
imports--references to particular objects that were of foreign origin,
like Persian and Indian cloth, Arabian horses, Chinese fireworks, and
probably Western armaments. These "minor" artifacts should be allowed
to "stand for" a considerable expansion of Siamese tastes for imported
goods and technology, and, by extension, it should represent a
greatly-increased widening of foreign contacts in the preceding
century or more. This was not simply expanding contacts with the West,
but even more, expanding contacts with the rest of Asia. We have to
assume that more than just trinkets and consumer goods were moving in
this contact, and that an increasingly broad segment of at least the
capital elite was beginning to be "comfortable" with a wider world.
We might also suppose that there were increasing numbers of people
around who were familiar with languages other than their own. Van den
Heuvel makes no direct reference to this, but we have to assume that
there were numerous people around who had Dutch (or other foreign)
ancestors, and retained considerable language skills. From other
sources we know that there were beginning to be substantial numbers of
people around the Siamese capital who were familiar with foreign
languages.
And this takes us back to the question of the movement of women, which
we encountered earlier. It goes without saying that substantial
members of the capital elite were as children accustomed to hearing
spoken around them languages other than Thai. Even the future King
Rama I and his brother, born in 1737 and 1743 respectively,[18] whose
mother was Chinese, spent at least their childhood in an environment
that was not only linguistically diverse, but also had to have been
culturally and even intellectually diverse. They are likely to have
shared this background with considerable numbers of the men and women
of their generation; and when the country moved into crisis in the
1760s and 1770s, they responded to it as individuals, and as a group,
who were open to the possibility of alternatives.[19]
It is particularly unfortunate that the last century of Ayudhya's
history often has been portrayed as a period of "exclusion," during
which Siam is alleged to have retreated from the world. So long as
this is believed, it is very difficult to reconcile such "seclusion"
with the creativity, the cosmopolitanism, the wealth, the flexibility
of the early Chakri Dynasty period, whose leaders were men who had
been born and grew up in King Borommakot's Siam. Van den Heuvel's
account of his trip to the Phrabat in 1737 offers us a lively view of
this Siam, a land of considerable wealth, sophistication, and
intellectual vitality, and he thereby helps us better to understand
the sources of Siam's remarkable transformation later in the
eighteenth century.
[1]See, for example, D. G. E. Hall's standard A History of South-East
Asia, 4th ed. (New York, 1981), ch. 27; or The Cambridge History of
Southeast Asia, ed. Nicholas Tarling, vol. I (Cambridge, 1992), esp.
pp. 445-455. [2]This article is based first upon The Royal Chronicles
of Ayutthaya, a full translation of which, incorporating all of the
various versions, by the late Richard Cushman, is in press, to be
published by The Siam Society, Bangkok. References to the Chronicles
are to passages associated with dates, expressed in the Chulasakarat
Era (+ 638 = A.D.). An interesting, shorter version of the history of
the reign is in Prince Paramanuchit's short chronicle, David K. Wyatt,
"The Abridged Royal Chronicle of Ayudhya of Prince
Paramanuchitchinorot," Journal of the Siam Society 61:1 (Jan. 1973),
esp. pp. 48-49. The Thai evidence is summarized in David K. Wyatt,
Thailand: A Short History (New Haven, 1984), pp. 124-138. The first
full-length study of the period was in the still lamentably
unpublished dissertation of Busakorn (Lailert) Kanchanachari, "The Ban
Phlu Luang Dynasty 1688-1767: A Study of the Thai Monarchy During the
Closing Years of the Ayuthya Period," Ph.D. diss., Univ. of London,
1972. A great deal of new light has been shed on the period from the
Dutch sources by Dhiravat na Pombejr, especially in the collection
Court, Company, and Compong: Essays on the VOC Presence in Ayutthaya
(Ayutthaya, 1992), esp. pp. 44-62.
[3]Although as Simon de la Loubère notes (A New Historical Relation of
the Kingdom of Siam, London, 1693; repr. Kuala Lumpur, 1969, ed. D. K.
Wyatt, p. 5) King Narai frequently made pilgrimage to the Buddha's
Footprint near Saraburi, the kings immediately preceding Borommakot
did not do so, and were condemned by the chroniclers for their
un-Buddhist habits (as in fishing and hunting); and the chronicles
mention only one such pilgrimage (in 1764) after Borommakot's reign.
[4]P. E. Pieris, "An Account of King Kirti Sri's Embassy in 1672 Saka
(1750 A.D.)," Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society, XVIII, no. 54 (1903), 17-44.
[5]Though the king technically "appointed" provincial officials, most
such men were in fact local people whom the king simply confirmed in
office. The exception would have been the governors of the most
important provinces, and the yokkrabatwho in many provinces functioned
as an inspector on behalf of the king.
6On krom, see M.R. Akin Rabibhadana, The Organization of Thai Society
in the Early Bangkok Period, 1782-1873 (Ithaca, 1969), pp. 23-25.
[7]Busakorn, Ban Phlu Luang Dynasty, 164-173.
[8]King Taksin is reported to have been the son of the richest Chinese
tax-farmer in Ayudhya; B. J. Terwiel, A History of Modern Thailand
1767-1942 (St. Lucia, 1983), pp. 35-38. On social mobility (or its
absence), see M.R. Akin, Organization of Thai Society (Ithaca, 1969),
esp. pp. 155-156; and Decree #50 (7 August 1740) of the
"Phraratchakamnot Kao," in Kotmai tra sam duang (Bangkok, 1963), V,
146-163. Because this law specifically forbids admission to the Corps
of Royal Pages, which was a prerequisite for official appointments, to
those who tried to bribe their way in, we can assume that at this
time, early in Borommakot's reign, such attempts were being made.
[9]See D. K. Wyatt, "Family Politics in Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Siam," orig. publ. 1986, in his Studies in Thai
History (Chiang Mai, 1994), pp. 98-106.
[10]Mgr. de Cice to Hebert (1714), Archives des Mission Etrangères de
Siam, vol. 866, ffdeg. 213-214; as cited in an unpublished paper,
Dhiravat na Pombejra, "Princes, Pretenders, and the Chinese
Phrakhlang: An Analysis of the Dutch Evidence Concerning Siamese Court
Politics, 1699-1734," 1994, p. 14.
[11]See Wyatt, "Family Politics;" and Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History
, pp. 127-129.
[12]Dhiravat, "Princes, Pretenders, and the Chinese Phrakhlang."
[13]There is a good example of such hostility in the
otherwise-measured and fair account of Siam in 1719 by Alexander
Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies (1727; repr. London, 1930),
II, 98-101.
[14]The basic narrative of the rebellion is given in The Royal
Chronicles of Ayutthaya (Bangkok, forthcoming), pp. 437-438.
Additional contemporary evidence is reviewed by Dhiravat na Pombejr in
"Princes, Pretenders, and the Chinese Phrakhlang."
[15]Ibid., pp. 12-13.
[16]See, for example, Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies,, II,
p. 96, in a passage which begins, "The Women in Siam are the only
Merchants in buying Goods, and some of them trade very considerably."
[17]Sir John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam [London, 1855],
vol. I, p. 65.
[18]Saowanit, Phranam caofa phra-ong cao mòm cao nai ratchawong Cakri
læ rachasap (Bangkok, 1962), p. 2. The same source also mentions that
their father had, in addition to five children by this Chinese wife,
one more by that wife's sister, as well as one by an unspecified
woman. The same holds true of King Taksin (r. 1767-1782), whose father
was Chinese. Presumably not only those destined to become king had
such mixed parentage.
[19]See D. K. Wyatt, "The `Subtle Revolution' of King Rama I of Siam,"
in his Studies in Thai History, pp. 131-174.
02. December 2004