The Homeland

Ayutthaya was the ancient capital of central and south Siam built  on a manmade island created by cutting a canal  to close a loop of the Lopburi river.  It  would have been a small city probably with mud walls and a Royal Palace of timber, as only sacred edifices were built of stone, but it grew in splendour from its dedication  by king Utong in 1351 to its destruction in 1767.  In the 17th century the city became known as "the Venice of the East".    The  density of water traffic astonished Western observers.  Written accounts of 16th century water festivals - boat races, receptions, funeral  processions, describe  many hundreds of boats and thousands of people on the water at any one time.  The rowers sang at the tops of their voices as they handled their craft with perfect ease.    

Joachim Bouvet , a Jesuit ,  wrote; "They are good people without any serious failing but they do not like to work.  However they become full of energy when rowing which sometimes can last several days or nights running without a rest".   He could have been describing Tahitians.   Captain Cook never visited Thailand.  If he had, he might have made a connection  between the state barges of  Thai nobles and  those of the Tahitian arii.   The grand and noble war fleet of Tahiti was painted by William Hodges, the artist on Captain Cook's second voyage, in 1774.  The canoes with rakish upcurved bows and sterns are strictly comparable to the royal and ceremonial barges of ancient Thailand, indeed they seem a warlike  version of the swan-necked Thai vessels, with  platforms for fighting men that linked the twin hulls. The motive power is the same - teams of paddlers.  In modern Tahiti at festival time, teams of paddlers, both men and women,  also race across the lagoons singing at the tops of their voices.

Royal barge procession (courtesy of Thai Government Public Relations Dept.)

Today Ayutthaya is a vast expanse of ruins, pagodas, terraces, walls, great stumps of brick protruding out of fields, almost impossible to imagine in its original stuccoed and gilded splendour,  as one stoops to pick up the tiny sherds  of stucco and pottery that litter the ground.   The encircling water was  a defence against constant sieges laid by the Burmese but in 1767 the city  was captured and razed  in an orgy of destruction.  Saddest of all a treasure house of irreplaceable historical records was lost,  leaving great gaps filled only by myth and legend. 

The ancient city of Ayutthaya

Through archipelagoes of a hundred tongues, and with a habit of name changes  after a death in the family, Polynesian names do mutate, but the great wars that triggered the migration from Atia took place in the reign of king Atonga and this sounds very like  Utong.  There was a background of constant war and demographic pressure, the classic motives for emigration, in 14th century Thailand.  The first Tai kingdom was Nanchao in South China and after Kublai Khan swept down and conquered Yunnan in 1253, a huge wave of Tai people migrated south and west to what is now Northern Thailand, Burma and Laos. In this turbulent era the Tai conquered a Khmer town in North central Thailand and called it Sukhothai -Thai happiness.  

Sukhothai was Hsien to the Chinese  and the  Chinese Tao I Chih Lao chronicle says:  "The people of Hsien are much given to piracy;... they at once embark in as many as a hundred junks with full cargo of sago (food) and set off and by the vigour of their attack they secure what they want. Thus in recent years they came with 70 junks and raided Tan-ma-hsi (Singapore) and attacked the city moat".   It  looks as if  the Thai of Sukhothai were bold adventurers who pushed their sea-raids very far to the south. 

 Ramhamkhaeng of Sukhothai was a gifted ruler who abolished slavery and brought Chinese potters to his country to teach the art of fine ceramics that were exported to Java and the Philippines, but his country  later became a vassal of  Ayutthaya.  His grandson was T'ammaraja, a good king, a road and canal builder, a lover of peace and an astronomer, but his name was forgotten until 1833 when an inscribed stone was found. This is actually not a name but a title, the Thai version of Dharma raja.  The date of T'ammaraja's death is not known but 1368 has been suggested.  Yet there are enigmatic references.  A son or grandson of Ramhamkhaeng is also known as "the drowned king".  I suggest that a lost astronomer king took his followers and  left his war-torn homeland to become poetically renamed Tu-te-rangi-marama - Stability of the Moonlit Sky.

Follow the royal navigator to  Tahiti -The Links.