Thailand, a Short History PDF

2; -David K. Wyatt -.%A Short:Histo ry aS Thailand Second edition first published by Yale University Press in 2003. First edition published by Yale University Press in 1982. Second edition copyright © 2003 by David K. Wyatt. First edition copyright © 1982, 1984 by David K. Wyatt. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Cycles with Arepo display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress and the British Library. ISBN 974-9575-44-X This Thailand edition is published by Silkworm Books in 2004. Silkworm Books 104/5 Chiang Mai-Hot Road, Suthep, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand E-mail: www.silkwormbooks.info Printed in Thailand by O. S. Printing House, Bangkok HOO. Ou 7 Org 4s eo aL 7 Ealond A Short History SECOND EDITION David K. Wyatt Silkworm Books Chiang Mai Contents List of Illustrations vii List of Tables ix Preface to the Second Edition xi Preface to the First Edition xiii Editorial Note xv The Beginnings of Tai History 1 The Tai Village and Muiang 6 Nan Zhao 10 Mainland Southeast Asia in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries 13 Tai and the Classical Empires 17 Dvaravati 17 Angkor and the Tai 21 The Yonok Country of the Upper Mekong 25 The Tai World ini200 28 A Tai Century, 1219-1350 30 The Kingdom of Lan Na 33 The Siamese, Sukhothai, and the South 39 Ayutthaya and Its Neighbors, 1351-1569 50 The Rise of Ayutthaya 52 The Renewal of Lan Na 63 The Rise of Lan Sang-Luang Prabang 72 Universal Monarchs, Universal Warfare 72 The Empire of Ayutthaya, 1569-1767 86 Ayutthaya, Burma, and the West 87 Lan Naina Time of Tumult 104 Ayutthaya—Sources of Strength and Instability 107 Burma and the Tai World 115 The Early Bangkok Empire, 1767-1851 122 The Abortive Reconstruction of King Taksin 122 Rama I’s New Siam 128 vi Contents Interlude: Rama II 1809-1824 144 Rama III: Conservative or Reactionary? 149 Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, 1851-1910 166 King Mongkut’s Cautious Reforms 166 A New King versus the “Ancients” 175 Internal Power and External Challenge 184 From Reforms to Modernization 192 Siam in 1910 197 The Rise of Elite Nationalism, 1910-1932 210 King Vajiravudh and the Thai Nation 211 The Last Absolute Monarch 222 The Military Ascendant, 1932-1957 232 The Early Constitutional Period 234 Phibun’s Nationalism and the War, 1938-1944 241 Between Hot and Cold Wars 250 Phibun’s Second Government, 1948-1957 256 10 Development and Revolution, 1957-1982 266 Sarit as Paradox 267 In the Shadow of Vietnam, 1963-1973 276 The Social and Political Costs of Development 281 Revolution and Reaction, 1973-1976 287 11 Fresh Starts, 1976-2002 293 Hesitation and Uncertainty, 1976-1980 293 Stability and Growth in the 1980s 298 The Crisis of 1991-1992 304 More Democratic Regimes 306 Appendix A: Kings of Sukhothai 309 Appendix B: Kings of Lan Na, Chiang Mai, and Nan 310 Appendix C: Kings of Ayutthaya, Thonburi, and Bangkok 312 Appendix D: Prime Ministers of Thailand, 1932-2002 314 Notes 317 Suggestions for Further Reading 323 Index 335 Illustrations PLATES Note: wWLB_ photo from William L. Bradley FAD _ photo from Thailand, Fine Arts Department PVE photo from Penny Van Esterik DKW _ photo from David K. Wyatt Dsw_ photo from Douglas S. Wyatt cuL photo from Cornell University Library Ban Chiang painted vessel, late period. Private collection, Bangkok. (PVE) 4 Buddhist monastery boundary stone (sima) of the Dvaravati period. (DKW) 20 Image of the Buddha, bronze. (FAD) 47 The foundation of Ayutthaya, from a nineteenth-century Siamese painting. National Museum, Bangkok. (FAD) 55 Maha Chedi Luang, Chiang Mai, modern renovation (2000). (DSsw) 69 Battle of Nong Sarai, nineteenth-century painting. (FAD) 90 French Jesuits join King Narai and his court in observing a lunar eclipse, 1685. (CUL) 100 Urban view of Bangkok, early nineteenth century. (DKW) 150 “A Siam Nobleman dictating a dispatch.” (WLB) 171 King Mongkut being carried in royal procession. (WLB) 173 King Mongkut and Crown Prince Chulalongkorn, 1865. (WLB) 174 Somdet Chaophraya Si Suriyawong (Chuang Bunnag), 1865. (WLB) 175 The judicial system under extraterritoriality, ca. 1900. (FAD) 191 King Chulalongkorn giving public audience in Ayutthaya. (FAD) 208 King Vajiravudh on the bridge of the royal yacht. (FAD) 213 Police misbehavior in the Seventh Reign. (DKW) 229 Army members of the group of Promoters of the Thai revolution of 1932. (FAD) 233 vii viii Jlustrations Field Marshal Phibun as wartime leader, conferring a decoration on a soldier. (FAD) 246 Prime Minister Khuang Aphaiwong addressing a public meeting. (FAD) 255 The Manhattan coup, 1951. The warship Sri Ayudhya under attack by the air force. (FAD) 259 King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat. (FAD) 272 The October revolution of 1973. Crowds assemble at the Democracy Monument commemorating the revolution of 1932. (FAD) 289 Company 561, People’s Liberation Army of Thailand. 300 MAPS General physical map xvii Mainland Southeast Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries 14 Main Dvaravati sites 18 The classical empires: Angkor and Pagan by 1200 27 Major Tai states in the late thirteenth century 32 The Tai world, ca. 1540 75 The Burma invasion of 1592-93 and the Battle of Nong Sarai 89 The Burmese invasion of 1763-67 119 The Burmese invasion of Siam in 1785 133 The empire of Ramalin1809 142 Thai territorial losses, 1785-1909 193 Contemporary Thailand 268 Tables United States Economic and Military Assistance to Thailand, 1958-1967 274 Ranking of Major Exports, 1961-1978 284 Educational Attainments, 1937-1980 285 Total Population of Thailand, 1910-2000 301 Urban Populations, 1947-2000 302 Ranking of Major Exports, 1978-2001 303 ie ictal r - act ae aA. sft Se ee vhetn SERTILS Pan ss Lids Seinenritacse® tosaet > 2 tT ea San vaec Sper - iar ned wi alt ws goede | atemanitnd Leavitt. pattie somalube’ lanst + att seh aucdelt Preface to the Second Edition It took twenty years to revise this volume. I foolishly believed that some- thing would happen to create a magical turning or ending point, but such a moment never occurred. I did redo all the maps on computer and substantially cut the whole book to make more room for a new conclusion. Along the way, I incurred many new debts of gratitude. I must thank especially Rujaya Abhakorn, Aroonrut Wichienkeeo, and Trasvin Jittide- charaks. I remain especially grateful to Alene, to our sons, and to several long-time friends —Chiranan Pitpreecha, Takeko Iinuma, Kamala Tiyava- nich, Tamara Loos, Betsy Schermerhorn, and Teresa Sobieszczyk. Dr. Adam Law and Dr. David Schwed will know why I thank them again. David K. Wyatt Lansing, New York December 2002 xi Preface to the First Edition To try to encompass several thousand years in a few hundred pages is rather like trying to capture the essence of a sculpture in a single photo- graph. Most pages of this book might easily be expanded with the work of several generations of scholars. This book, however, is directed primarily to the general reader, those who develop some interest in Thailand for whatever reason, and the beginning student. For this audience an exten- sive scholarly apparatus, with dense clouds of footnote references to Thai sources and arcane tomes, would be both superfluous and confusing. Seri- ous students of Thailand will either recognize the sources from which I have worked or be guided to them by the “Suggestions for Further Read- ing” at the end of the volume. By aiming this history at the general reader, I trust that my specialist colleagues will not feel that Ihave ignored them. One of my friends suggested that I might have done better to struc- ture the book differently, to write separate chapters dealing with economic questions in each time period and so forth. Had I done so, this book would have run on for many times its present length. I chose instead to weave, as artfully as my skills allow, what I think is a wide variety of themes through what is basically a chronological framework. Topical concerns arise only when it seems necessary to deal with them; and the lowly Thai peasant farmer, I am afraid, emerges from the shadows only here and there over the many centuries with which we deal. I trust that the many deficiencies that remain in this book will detract only from my good name, not from the names of those on whom I have relied in writing it. Over the past twenty years I have continually picked up ideas, information, suggestions, and even inspiration from a host of friends and acquaintances. A special few proved to be ready sources of assistance, even those I see only at three- or five-year intervals. The late Dr. Kachorn Sukhabanij was among the first of these, a good friend and a good man to argue with. Tri Amatyakul, Praphat Trinarong, and Kul- lasap Gesmankit were always helpful. Charles Keyes, A. Thomas Kirsch, and Lauriston Sharp have, I hope, given me some anthropological sensi- xiii xiv Preface to the First Edition tivities. Nidhi Aeusrivongse has been a superb correspondent and a valued source of intellectual stimulation. A few were generous enough to allow me to read their unpublished manuscripts, and I am especially grateful to the late Chester Gorman in this regard. I have learned most from my graduate students, primarily but not ex- clusively those who have worked in the field of Thai history. Their theses and dissertations are in a prominent position on my study shelves, partly because I am proud of them but mainly because I use them so often; and most of them are listed in the bibliography of this volume. These include the alumni of three institutions where I had the privilege of teaching: the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, the University of Michigan, and Cornell University. When one talks and ar- gues with others, week after week and year after year, it becomes difficult to remember who first came up with what idea or suggested a new way of looking at a complicated phenomenon. I am indebted to them all. A handful of people took the time and trouble to read and comment on part or all of the manuscript. Anthony Diller was especially helpful on linguistic matters and Hiram Woodward and Lorraine Gesick on some points of early history. The most helpful critics of the entire manuscript were Craig J. Reynolds, Nidhi Aeusrivongse, Benjamin A. Batson, David P. Chandler, and Ruth McVey who are especially appreciated. It is not their fault that this book is not better than it is. Work on the book was begun under the tenure of a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1973-74, and I am grateful for their support, as well as for the continuing assistance of the Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, the Department of History, and the University Libraries’ John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia. Procuring illustrations proved much more difficult than I had imagined it would be. Three old friends were especially helpful: Mrs. Kullasap Ges- mankit, acting for the National Library of Thailand and the Fine Arts De- partment; Penelope Van Esterik, and William L. Bradley. The maps were skillfully drawn to my specifications by Stephanie Voss. Douglas, Andrew, and James Wyatt repeatedly rescued me from the arcane perversities of the computer, while writing software that will serve me for years. And I am especially grateful to the Cornell Savoyards for the staff of life, and to a few good friends for their encouragement, constancy, and smiles. David K. Wyatt Ithaca, New York October 1983 Editorial Note Romanization Throughout this work, the Thai Royal Academy’s “General System of Pho- netic Transcription” is used to romanize Thai names and words. Diacritics have been held to an absolute minimum, maintaining only i (for the Royal Academy’s 1), thus blurring the distinctions between 9, @, and g. Personal names and titles are romanized following the preferences of the individu- als concerned, when known; thus King Chulalongkorn and Prince Deva- wongse (not Chulalongkon and Thewawong). Geographical nomenclature usually follows the standardized forms of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, as employed, for example, on the maps of the National Geographic Society. - The aspirated consonants p, t, and k are written ph, th, and kh, but they are not pronounced as they would be in English. Thus, Thai phon is like English cornpone, not telephone, and Thai that is pronounced tut, not that. Names, Ranks, and Titles Surnames are a twentieth-century innovation in Thailand, and Thai usu- ally are referred to by their given name, not their surname—even in tele- phone directories and library catalogs. Sarit Thanarat thus is referred to as Prime Minister Sarit, not Prime Minister Thanarat. In premodern times, various terms were used to denote royalty. The oldest are such terms as chao, khun, and thao. Modern Thai royalty is gov- erned by a rule of declining descent, by the terms of which each suc- cessive generation diminishes one degree in status, until members of the sixth generation are commoners. The children and grandchildren of kings, termed chao fa or phra ong chao, and mom chao, are usually referred to as XV xvi Editorial Note princes and princesses. The next two generations are not. They are mom ‘ratchawong (M. R. W. or M. R.) and mom luang (M. L.). Ranks and titles were conferred on the bureaucratic and military no- bility until the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932, a rank and title usu- ally being associated with an office. The chaophraya were highest on the list, the equivalents of cabinet ministers, generals, and the governors of the most important provincial cities. On a descending scale came phraya, phra, luang, and khun. While individuals usually were referred to by their ranks and titles, the individual’s personal, given name was written after it to distinguish him from others with the same rank and title; thus, Chao- phraya Yommarat (Pan, surname Sukhum) was distinguished from Chao- phraya Yommarat (Thong-in). Many who were conferred titles under the absolute monarchy perpetu- ated those titles as surnames, for example, Phibunsongkhram and Wichit- wathakan. Money and Measures The only unit of Thai currency referred to in this study is the baht. It was valued at eight baht to the pound sterling before 1880 and ten baht through the 1880s; then followed a period of fluctuating rates that sta- bilized around thirteen baht in the World War I period and dropped to eleven baht until World War II. After World War II, it remained constant at around twenty to the U.S. dollar, falling to twenty-five to the dollar in the mid-1980s, and falling further to around fifty-six to the dollar in 1997- 98 and around 4:3 to the dollar by 2002. The only unit of Thai measure used here is the picul, equivalent to about 60 kilograms or 132 pounds. The rai, a measure of land area, is equivalent to about 0.16 hectares, or 0.4 acres. Chronology All dates have been expressed in Western terms, converted from the com- plicated Thai luni-solar calendar. The key to their conversion is the book of J. C. Eade, The Calendrical Systems of Mainland South-East Asia (Leiden, 1995, Handbuch der Orientalistik, 3rd pt., vol. 9), and its companion, his The Thai Historical Record: A Computer Analysis (Tokyo, 1996). a, LAOS 2. \ Vientiane ‘¢ THAILAND Gulf of Martaban KHORAT PLATEAU \ RAL: PLAIN ; Bangkok GulfofThailand Y \Y 0 gd : Bay of Bengal ‘ South China Sea % % 0 50 100 150 200m. ——— i xs 0 100 200 300 km. et Copyright 2002 © David K. Wyatt General physical map y »| ?.- 3 oa os o mas7 a }a edgomdee ~ ded ; —? j ‘ii a ae a Ci ~ te a St betat genre asweee isn A. a eahauee papell ¢~tew » , be os Pe a Vie oe | ‘. Sy haan leigh tee jcna m 5 tiger —aggaa La)par enaenp Aseria ie soe needle olalpapa Seley lhl on ae ed ie 7 ee, hag Pw va ieee’ oe CHAPTER ONE ‘The Beginnings of Tai History he people of modern Thailand are as varied as those in any nation. They are of all shapes and sizes, complexions, and statures and in- clude farmers and computer programmers, soldiers and bus driv- ers, merchants and students, princesses and monks. Virtually all would call themselves “Thai” and would define “Thai” as primarily political: as “Thai” they are citizens of Thailand, subjects of the Thai monarch. The term might take on a cultural and linguistic sense as well: as “Thai” they are speakers of the Thai language and participants in Thai culture. How- ever, the “Thai” identity, along with its political, cultural, and linguistic components, has developed slowly through many centuries, and what the modern citizen refers to as “Thai” existed only recently. Indeed, the people who brought the core elements of the contemporary Thai identity to what is now Thailand did not arrive in the central por- tion of the Indochina peninsula until about a thousand years ago; for them we had best reserve the word Tai, a term used to denote the various Tai peoples in general, peoples sharing a common linguistic and cultural iden- tity that in historic times has become differentiated into a large number of separate but related identities. The modern Thai may or may not descend from the late-arriving Tai but may instead descend from the region’s still earlier Mon or Khmer inhabitants or the much later Chinese or Indian im- migrants. Only over many centuries has a “Thai” culture, a civilization and identity, evolved as the product of interaction between Tai and indigenous and immigrant cultures. In tracing Thai history, we must focus on people, culture, and society, but we must also pay attention to environment. Thai history is complex because it has taken place in environments that are as much social and 2 The Beginnings of Tai History cultural as they are geographical. We here begin by considering Tai experi- ence outside Thailand prior to the eleventh century; later will we ask what sort of world they entered upon spilling into the Chaophraya River basin. The Tai peoples today are widely spread over several million square kilo- meters of the southeastern corner of the great land mass of Asia. Their most visible representatives are the Thai (or Siamese) of Thailand, of whom there are 35 to 40 million. Many others who speak related Tai lan- guages and recognize themselves as Tai call their own ethnic and linguis- tic groups by other names: Lao, Shan, Lu, Black Tai, Zhuang, and Nung, among many others. With 100 million Tai peoples in the region, this lin- guistic and cultural group is comparable in numbers to the French or Ger- mans. The most obvious characteristic that serves to identify the Tai as a sepa- rate people is their language. The relationship between the Tai family of languages and the neighboring languages of East and Southeast Asia has not been definitely established, and it is not yet possible to speak of Tai languages as belonging with any certainty to any larger linguistic grouping like “Romance languages” or “Indo-European languages.” The relation- ships among the Tai languages themselves, however, are relatively clear, even to the point that there is some degree of mutual intelligibility among speakers of Lao, Siamese, and Shan, for example. No such striking re- lationships exist, however, between Tai languages and such neighboring tongues as Burmese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, or Chinese. The Tai languages are generally monosyllabic and tonal. That is, the basic vocabulary of any Tai language or dialect is made up of single syl- lables. Over a long course of development early Tai languages lost many of the consonants that helped distinguish words one from another, leaving tone as the distinguishing feature instead. Thus maa, “to come,” spoken in Bangkok Tai with a level tone of voice, is distinguished from maa (high tone), “horse,” and maa (rising tone), “dog.” The number of tones, which can be as many as nine, varies from one Tai dialect or language to another. For all its variation, the basic language, with its grammatical structure and vocabulary, is common to all the Tai groups. The cultural identity of the Tai is not so easily defined, for the Tai share a great deal of their culture with other Southeast Asian peoples, a culture that is markedly different from the cultures of India and China. Both the cultural and the linguistic origins of the Tai peoples seem best to be ex- plained by reference to the existence in prehistoric times of a Southeast Asian cultural pool, or heartland, located perhaps in the extreme northern portions of Southeast Asia and in central and southern China. The Beginnings of Tai History 3 As long as forty thousand years ago, the progenitors of Southeast Asian peoples were inhabiting relatively permanent sites through much of that region. They hunted and gathered their food from the streams and for- ests, using many of the wooden and bamboo tools still in use in Southeast Asia. With stone choppers and knives, they fashioned such tools as the blowpipe, the bow and arrow, animal and fish traps, and baskets. By ten to twenty thousand years ago, they had begun to engage in agriculture, cul- tivating peas and beans and domesticating such animals as the chicken. It was only around ten thousand years ago that the individual ethnic groups of Southeast Asia began to be differentiated, linguistically and culturally, over the broad span of territory from the plains of central China to the islands of the Indonesian Archipelago. This process of differentiation and separation, however, took place on the basis of a common culture formed over the preceding thirty millennia. Here we have the technological core of Southeast Asian civilization, together with much of its culture. Swine, cattle, and fowl were domesticated and rice was cultivated; and Southeast Asians invented the outrigger canoe, enabling navigation to be undertaken as far afield as Japan, Melanesia, India, and even East Africa. Sophisticated metallurgy also developed in Southeast Asia as early as anywhere in the world. Copper and bronze working is attested by the excavation at a site in what is now northeastern Thailand of a mold in which bronze axes were cast, dating back to more than five thousand years ago. There was also iron-working in the same region around three thousand years ago as well as pottery-making technology. By two thousand years ago the peoples of Southeast Asia shared a com- mon, distinctive, and advanced civilization. Like their neighbors, the Tai conducted subsistence rice agriculture, supplemented by fishing and the gathering of forest products. They lived as nuclear families in small vil- lages, among which there was regular communication and some trade in such items as textiles, metal tools, pottery, and salt. Because the region was underpopulated, labor was highly valued and women enjoyed a rela- tively high social status, certainly by contrast with the low social and eco- nomic status of Chinese and Indian women. In determining inheritance, for example, equal value was accorded the maternal and paternal lines, and sons and daughters usually received equal shares of their parents’ estates. Throughout the region, folk beliefs were remarkably consistent. The world was regarded as being peopled with good and evil spirits that had the power to aid or harm humans and thus had to be appeased by ceremonies or offerings of food. Women frequently were believed to have a special power to mediate between human beings and the spirit world, and they 4 The Beginnings of Tai History Ban Chiang painted vessel, late period. Private collection, Bangkok. were called upon to heal the sick or change unfavorable weather. Nature and the world were regarded as unpredictable and hostile, and humans had to cope with them as best they could. The earliest Chinese references to the Tai peoples are consistent with this picture of prehistoric Southeast Asian culture. Tai whom the Chinese encountered were always referred to as inhabitants of the valleys and low- lands rather than of the hillsides and uplands, and they usually were re- ported as having an economy based on irrigated rice cultivation. Many Tai groups considered cattle (or buffalo) as significant, often more as a mea- sure of status and wealth or for their use in ritual than for their useful- ness as draft animals. Tai always were reported as having lived in houses raised on piles above the ground, in contrast to their Chinese and Viet- namese neighbors. Young people customarily were allowed free choice of marriage partners and were given wide sexual license in an annual spring The Beginnings of Tai History 5 festival. Tattooing, associated with the passage to adulthood, was widely practiced among men, and a form of poison-doll sorcery was widespread among the Tai. The Chinese references were to the Tai scattered over much of south and southwest China in the early centuries A.D. There is no clear evidence that there was any Tai “state” prior to the early centuries A.D., and cer- tainly none with any relationship to the Tai principalities that appeared in northern Southeast Asia in the first millennium A.D. These are still con- troversial theories, but a consensus seems to be emerging among linguists that on some points bears striking resemblance to Tai legendary accounts of their own origins. By the last centuries of the first millennium B.c., the major linguistic and cultural families of Southeast Asian peoples had become differenti- ated from one another. The peoples of island Southeast Asia, from the Phil- ippines to the Malay Peninsula, spoke Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) languages, and Austroasiatic languages, such as Mon and Khmer (Cambo- dian), were spoken in the central and southern portions of the Indochina peninsula from lower Burma to the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam. Burmese were located in northern Burma and southwestern China, and Vietnamese lived along the coasts of what is now northern Vietnam and southeastern China. Between the Vietnamese and Khmer speakers was a pocket of Austronesian-speaking Cham in central and southern Vietnam. At about the same time, there existed a large and fairly homogeneous population in the inland river valleys of extreme southeastern China, in the present-day provinces of Guizhou and Guangxi, speaking what we might call “Proto Tai” languages. These people lived under mounting demographic, economic, and political pressure from their neighbors, the Vietnamese and the Chinese to their north and east. As populations grew and groups became isolated from one another, the languages they spoke began to diverge. The dispersal of the Proto Tai speakers, perhaps in the earliest centuries of the Christian Era, must have been precipitated by Im- perial China’s expansion along the south China coast to the Red River delta of what is now northern Vietnam. This Chinese expansion probably co- incided with, and undoubtedly hastened, a southwestward movement of some Tai speakers into the upland portions of what is now northern Viet- nam and perhaps also into extreme northeastern Laos. When, in the first few centuries A.D., the Chinese and Vietnamese gradually tightened their administrative and military control and moved northwestward up the Red River valley, they had the effect of dividing the early Tai into two major groups. Those remaining to the north and northeast of the Red River val- oat 6 The Beginnings of Tai History ley, such as the Zhuang people of Guangxi and the Tho and Nung of Viet- nam, developed separately both in their language and, under the influence of the Chinese and Vietnamese, in their culture. The second, southern Tai group probably should be localized in the valley of the Black River and extreme northeastern Laos and neighbor- ing portions of China around the fifth to eighth centuries a.p. This Tai group, whom we can notionally associate with the region of Dien Bien Phu (Miiang Theng), was the ancestor of all the Tai peoples of Laos, Thai- land, Burma, northeastern India, and southern Yunnan—the Lao, Siamese, Shans, and upland Tai. In what to them was a new environment, their concerns, habits, and ideas came to be oriented in new directions. They were increasingly isolated from their kinsmen to the north, to the point ultimately even of forgetting their kinship with them. In the centuries to come, perhaps between the seventh and the thirteenth, they were to spread seven hundred to one thousand miles to the west.and the south. Yet all of them, as we shall see, preserved in their folk memories and tradi- tions a sense of their common descent that is borne out by their linguistic affiliation. The Tai Village and Muang In the first millennium 4A.D., the base of Tai life was the farming house- hold, probably composed of a simple nuclear family. Families eked out a bare subsistence, growing rice.and vegetables, tending cattle and domestic animals, fishing in nearby streams and hunting in the forest, and weaving cloth or fashioning pottery and tools. A few dozen such households shared their labor for harvests or to repair bridges or build houses, their efforts being coordinated by an informal council of the village elders, who also resolved disputes and arranged communal festivals. Such villages could not sustain themselves in isolation. Rural Tai were dependent on trade, for example, for salt or metal, and alone they were highly vulnerable in time of war. The miiang was the primary unit above the simple village level. Muang defies translation, for it denotes as much social as it does spatial relationships. It can mean both the town located at the hub of a network of interrelated villages and also the totality of town and villages ruled by a single chao, “lord.” Such miiang arose out of a set of political, economic, and social interrelationships. Tai villages banded together for mutual defense under the leadership of the most powerful vil- lage or family, whose resources enabled it to arm and supply troops. In The Beginnings of Tai History 7 return for such protection, villages rendered labor service to their lord or paid him quantities of local produce or handicrafts. This was a mutually beneficial relationship, one in which the advan- tages would grow over time. It would have been natural for miiang centers, though initially villages not much larger than those around them, to have been more prosperous and powerful than surrounding villages. The orga- nization of upland Tai society also might have been regarded as advanta- geous to imperial powers, such as Vietnam and China, who preferred deal- ing with a few miiang rather than innumerable villages. Vietnamese and Chinese alike adopted the practice of recognizing Tai lords as the leaders of their communities, either as enemies or as allies or tributaries. In re- turn for their recognition of Chinese supremacy and the annual rendering of tribute, a Tai lord was left alone to preside over the life of a relatively isolated and (from the viewpoint of nearby Chinese officials) unimportant community. Again, this was yet another level of mutually advantageous relationship by which rural Tai communities, already beginning to be inte- grated among themselves, were at least loosely tied into a larger world outside. There was also another world nearer at hand. It is clear that from the earliest times, the Tai were never the sole inhabitants of the interior up- lands. Their irrigated rice agriculture kept them to the lower-lying valleys, and the hills above them were inhabited by other peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic stocks. From a very early time, Tai lords established relationships with such neighboring groups, employing them as slaves and menial laborers and taking on their chiefs as “vassals,” just as the Tai them- selves were “vassals” of Chinese rulers. Such patterns are significant both in the immediate context of their upland existence in early centuries and as an early stage in the development among upland Tai peoples of politi- cal skills and patterns that later became part of their “technology” of state building. The structure of the upland Tai miiang gradually evolved. Successful miiang defended themselves against neighboring miiang and hill peoples as well as against major states. They maintained order in their own re- gions and imposed some system of justice to punish malefactors and settle intervillage disputes, for example, concerning land or water rights or cattle thefts. They provided an economic framework within which exchanges of produce and manufactures could take place; and they certainly must have benefited from the payment of tax obligations by villages in return for security and order. Miiang ruling families could be supported in a style 8 The Beginnings of Tai History at least one level above surrounding villages. A lord built up his own ad- ministrative apparatus for collecting tax revenues and settling legal com- plaints. He regularized the succession to his office, often by appointing his heir (usually, but not always, his eldest son) to a high administrative position so the young man could familiarize himself with and control the personal relationships upon which the cohesion of the mulang depended. The Tai miiang was an instrument for the efficient use of labor in a re- gion where land was plentiful but labor was not. In this world, wealth like cattle or precious metals or grain might disappear overnight in a bandit raid or in warfare. Security, wealth, and life all depended on the relations among individuals and families that provided order. Although muang so- ciety was hierarchical, people clearly needed each other. Pushed to a con- frontation, the lord could rely upon superior force, but the village farmer could resort to flight to the surrounding wilderness or to a neighboring miuiang eager to gain his labor. Such extreme recourses were avoided on both sides in favor of mutual accommodation and compromise. During the first millennium of the Common Era, the population of the Tai communities of upland, interior Southeast Asia steadily increased. Under prevailing ecological and political conditions, it was natural that there should have been expansion of this population. The coastal lowlands to the east and northeast were controlled and densely settled by well- organized and powerful Chinese and Vietnamese states, and the upland river valleys to the west and southwest were only sparsely populated by people whose technology, weapons, and social and political organization ill-equipped them for successful competition with the Tai. The early chronicles of Tai groups are filled with stories of demographic and political movement. Characteristically, a ruler gathered together the. men of his mtiang and formed them into a military expedition, usually under the leadership of his sons. They conquered or colonized a distant re- gion and settled it with families from the parent muiang, who would “turn the forest into rice-fields” and settle in organized communities ruled by a young prince. That ruler might organize such campaigns for a whole suc- cession of his sons, giving each a principality of his own to rule while en- hancing the power of the parent mtiang. Sons could be sent out in order of their seniority, leaving the youngest son to inherit the domains of his father. In northern Vietnam and Laos, the mountain valleys suitable for rice cultivation were small and narrow, separated by difficult, mountain- ous territory. The demographic and political center of gravity of the Tai population moved rapidly to the west and southwest. After their father’s death, brothers found it difficult to hold together their principalities, and The Beginnings of Tai History 9 they were unable easily to defend themselves against Chinese or Viet- namese attempts to control them. Moreover, a prince frequently wished to provide for his own sons as he himself had been provided for. In this fashion, chains of Tai principalities slowly may have stretched across the northern reaches of Indochina. : A folk memory of this early Tai expansion is conveyed by origin legends like the Khun Borom story told by the Lao. According to this story, early in the earth’s history humankind was uncivilized, rude, and brutal and not yet settled to agriculture. Man’s ingratitude to the Heavenly Spirit so an- gered the chief of the gods that he unloosed a flood upon the earth from which only three chiefs escaped. They made submission to the chief of the gods and remained with him in heaven until the floods subsided. At that time, they returned to earth with a buffalo, which helped them lay out rice fields in the great plain around Dien Bien Phu and then died. From the nostrils of the dead buffalo there grew an enormous plant bearing gourds or pumpkins from which there soon came loud noises. When the gourds were pierced, humankind came pouring out to populate the earth. The Lao explain that those who came out of the gourds through holes made with a red-hot poker are the dark-skinned aboriginal populations, and those who came through the holes made with a chisel are the lighter-skinned Lao. With the assistance of the gods, their chiefs taught the Tai (and only the Tai) to build houses and practice rice culture and to observe proper con- duct and ritual. The population soon grew so numerous that it required assistance in governing. So the chief of the gods sent to earth his own son, Khun Borom, who arrived on earth accompanied by courtiers and teachers, tools, and the useful and fine arts. After a prosperous reign of twenty-five years, Khun Borom appointed his seven sons to rule over the Tai world—the eldest to Luang Prabang, and the others to Siang Khwang, Lavo-Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, the Sipsong Pan Na (of southern Yunnan), Hamsavati (the Mon state of Pegu in lower Burma), and a region appar- ently in north-central Vietnam (Nghe-an province?).One version of this tale from Siang Khwang dates this event in A.D. 698. The Khun Borom legend sheds important light on the early history of the Tai. Many of the states to which it refers were founded only centuries later, whereas the archeological record dates Tai culture much earlier. Nonetheless, the legend conveys a spatial relationship among widely scat- tered Tai groups that is echoed in the findings of modern scholarship. Lin- guistic and documentary evidence suggests that some such split and dis- persion of Tai peoples did occur between the seventh and tenth or eleventh centuries along geographical lines consistent with the legends. We note 10 The Beginnings of Tai History that although Khun Borom is said to have come to earth in the Dien Bien Phu region, none of his sons was left to rule there, and that the upland Tai world of what is now northern Vietnam is omitted from the lists of lands over which his sons were sent to rule. The Black Tai, White Tai, Red Tai, and similar groups must have been separated from the parent tongue of the Lao and Siamese languages extremely early, and from such northwest- ern languages as Shan, Ahom, Lu, and Northern Thai (Tai Yuan) between, say, the eighth and eleventh centuries. By the eighth century a.D. the Tai world already extended across.north- ern Southeast Asia, differentiated into five linguistic groups. First, the northern groups left behind in China were evolving into the ancestors of the present Zhuang group. Second, there remained another grouping of upland Tai peoples in northern Vietnam, the ancestors of the Black, White, and Red Tai. Third, another grouping of Tai peoples was localized some- where in northeastern Laos and adjacent portions of Vietnam, the ances- tors of the Tai of Siang Khwang and of Siamese Ayutthaya. A fourth group was located in northern Laos, perhaps in the vicinity of Luang Prabang. A final, fifth group was located west of them, in extreme northern Thailand and adjacent portions of Laos, Yunnan, and Burma. How can we know that speakers of any Tai language might have inhab- ited the regions specified at such an early date? How do we know they were not much further north by the eighth century, perhaps in Yunnan? Since the turn of the previous century, many have argued that the Tai peoples entered Southeast Asia only in the thirteenth century, and that prior to that time they had formed the population of the powerful state of Nan Zhao in Yunnan. When the Mongols conquered Yunnan in 1253, the argu- ment runs, the Tai dispersed. Both to deal with this argument and to con- sider the environment in which the early Tai peoples developed their cul- ture and institutions, it is necessary to take up the “Nan Zhao question” and to depict the world in which the Tai peoples lived during an important epoch in their history. Nan Zhao The Chinese gained control over what is now the province of Yunnan, especially in the second century A.D. There the Chinese found an assort- ment of peoples they called “barbarians” (man), some of whom adopted Chinese civilization. One local ruling family was the Zuan family, cen- tered in the region extending southward from Kunming to the present Vietnamese frontier. They became the hereditary governors of the prov- The Beginnings of Tai History 11 ince after the fall of the Han Dynasty in the third century A.p., in a re- gion inhabited by Tai and Miao-Yao peoples. The western and southwest- ern portions of the province were for the most part dominated by people the Chinese termed Wu-man, “black barbarians,” peoples speaking Tibeto- Burman languages akin to those of the Lolo and Lahu peoples who still in- habit the region. It was the Wu-man of western Yunnan who in the seventh century were at the center of the state of Nan Zhao. By the seventh century the Chinese controlled about half of Yunnan, their rule extending as far west as the Mekong River. The Chinese soon were put on the defensive by an expanding Tibet that threatened China’s southwestern frontiers in Yunnan and Sichuan. The Chinese tried to main- tain their frontier security through alliances with local principalities. One such ally was Pi-lo-ko, the ruler (chao) of Meng-she, one of six small prin- cipalities around Ta-li Lake in western Yunnan. Pi-lo-ko united these six small states under his rule in the 730s and in 738 gained recognition from the Chinese court as “Prince of Yunnan.” Relations between China and the “Southern Prince (Nan Zhao)” remained friendly through the 740s but rapidly deteriorated in the following decade under Pi-lo-ko’s son, Ko-lo- feng. Four Chinese armies were sent against Nan Zhao between 752 and 754, but each time they were defeated by Ko-lo-feng’s forces. Nan Zhao then extended its control over eastern Yunnan and western Guizhou. Once China was preoccupied with rebellion, Chinese pressure on Nan Zhao eased. The foundations of the new empire in the southwest were built with the establishment of a secondary capital at present-day Kunming in 764. The most extensive contemporary account of Nan Zhao was the Man Shu, written by a Chinese official in the 860s. It depicts a well-organized, quasi-military state, ruling over many ethnic groups. The administration had six “boards,” like ministries, in charge of war, population and reve- nue, the reception of foreign guests, punishment, works, and assemblies. The power and status of the boards was exceeded by twelve “great gen- erals,” who “every day... have audience with the Nan Zhao and deliber- ate on [public] affairs,” and six “pure and just officials” who seem to have served as the privy councilors of the king. The administration included a hierarchy of officials ranging from the officer in charge of a hundred households to the governor in charge of ten thousand households. Male householders paid annually a tax of eighteen liters (sixteen quarts) of rice and in addition were liable for call to military service. The army had its attractions for rural lads, who practiced their skills “whenever there is a break in agricultural work.” Nan Zhao armies were proficient, powerful, well-disciplined, and effective on the field of battle. 12 The Beginnings of Tai History For several centuries, Nan Zhao was a major power in the affairs of northern Southeast Asia and southern East Asia. Its armies maintained pressure on the Pyu kingdom of central Burma; attacked what is now southern Burma and northern Thailand; mounted an expedition against Khmer Chen-la, which is reported to have gone “as far as the seashore;” and sent repeated expeditions against the Chinese Protectorate of An-nam (northern Vietnam). Thereafter, Nan Zhao’s power receded in the face of Chinese revival, newly independent Vietnam (from 939), and new devel- opments that began to reshape northern Southeast Asia. The significance of Nan Zhao for Tai history is not due to the iden- tity of its rulers, who were not Tai. The chao of Nan Zhao followed the patronymic linkage system in choosing their names, the first syllable of each ruler’s name being the same as the last syllable of his father’s name thus, Pi-lo-ko, Ko-lo-feng, Feng-chia-i, I-mou-hsun, and so on, a pattern common among the Lolo and other Tibeto-Burman groups but unknown among the Tai. Moreover, the lists of Nan Zhao words mentioned in the Man Shu are identifiable as Lolo and untraceable as Tai. No Tai legend or chronicle mentions Nan Zhao or any of its rulers, but nineteenth-century Lolo chiefs in central Yunnan traced their ancestry back to the Nan Zhao ruling house. Instead, the significance of Nan Zhao must be sought in its effects upon the Tai peoples living in the southern and eastern portions of its empire and along its periphery. Nan Zhao opened lines of overland communications between India and China. Its intellectual and cultural consequences were important. Nan Zhao became a Buddhist polity and must have contributed to the spread of Buddhism in the region it dominated, as well as the spread of Indian arts and sciences. The rise of Nan Zhao blocked the northern portion of inland South- east Asia from direct contact with China. At the same time, the power of Nan Zhao facilitated the overland trade between China and India and stimulated local trade in northern Southeast Asia. Local princes must have grasped new political opportunities. They could gain a powerful benefac- tor or protector and use that relationship against their neighbors. They could also imitate some of the administrative and military features of Nan Zhao. Even those Tai lords who did not fall directly under the power of the rulers of Nan Zhao might have been pressed to mobilize their labor in order to defend themselves. Nan Zhao was not the first major state to in- trude upon the Tai world, and it certainly was not the last. But it was the first major regime to become involved in the interior uplands of mainland Southeast Asia, that is, the regions that are now the Shan states of Burma, The Beginnings of Tai History 13 northern Thailand and Laos, and northwestern Vietnam. In the centuries immediately following Nan Zhao’s heyday in the eighth and ninth cen- turies, however, the pressure was to come from the south, from very dif- ferent sorts of major empires. The surviving records concerning Nan Zhao mention nothing that can be taken as Tai polities in upland Southeast Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries. They do, however, identify most of the polities that were to be the southern neighbors and rivals of the Tai in the ensuing centuries and that were to make critically important contributions to the formation of Tai civilization. These included, from east to west, a Vietnamese unit cen- tered in the Red River valley and delta of northern Vietnam; the kingdom of Champa, on the coast of central Vietnam; the Khmer Empire of Ang- kor; the kingdoms of central and northern Thailand; and the Mon and Pyu kingdoms of Burma. For the most part these faced the sea, forming a ring around the Tai in the uplands. Particularly from the beginning of the ninth century they grew in power and territorial extent, and the Tai increasingly became involved in their lives and their politics. Mainland Southeast Asia in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries In northern Vietnam the Vietnamese kingdom that became independent of Chinese administration and control in 939 was based on the coastal plain and the Red River delta. It was flanked in all directions by major em- pires: China to the north, Nan Zhao to the northwest, and Champa and Angkorean Cambodia to the south and southwest. The upland zones sepa- rating the Vietnamese from their rivals were inhabited by third parties, especially Tai peoples; and successive Vietnamese rulers impressed upon them their power and gained at least their neutrality. Vietnam mounted a major diplomatic effort on its northern frontiers, entering into alliances with local chiefs, alliances sealed by bestowing Vietnamese “princesses” upon them. Champa by the ninth and tenth centuries was fighting against the en- croachments of its powerful neighbors. It had been able briefly to threaten both Chinese Vietnam and Cambodia at the beginning of the ninth cen- tury, but soon it was on the defensive against both, its territory reduced to a shrinking slice of central Vietnam. It had overland communications with the middle Mekong and what is now southern Laos and northeast- ern Thailand; and it must have been through such connections, involving trade and warfare, that Tai (Syam) slaves reached Champa, to be men- tioned in an inscription of 1050. 0 50100150200 mi. 0 100-200 300 km. Copynght 2002 © David K. Wyatt Mainland Southeast Asia in the ninth and tenth centuries The Beginnings of Tai History 15 Of all the empires of the region it was the Angkorean Empire that was expanding most rapidly, beginning after the accession of Jayavarman II in about 802. During two centuries, he and his successors, particularly Yaso- varman I (r. 889-900) constructed an empire that dwarfed all its rivals. From a heartland that included both the core of Cambodia, centered on the Tonle Sap, and the southern half of the Khorat Plateau, it expanded outward in all directions. To the east it controlled the Mekong Delta and pushed against the Cham on the Vietnam coast. To the north it came to extend at least as far as the Vientiane Plain of what is now Laos, and even exerted some influence in the regions of Luang Prabang and Chiang Sen, and through the latter into the region called the Sipsong Panna, bordering on Nan Zhao. To the west and northwest the empire took control over the lower valley of the Chaophraya River in Thailand and extended its suze- rainty over the kingdom of Haripufjaya, near present-day Chiang Mai. Yasovarman I even established a strong presence on the Malay Peninsula, through which Angkorean royalty may have ruled over communities of settlers or military garrisons at Grahi and Tambralinga. To the west, in what is now Burma (technically Myanmar), in the ninth and tenth centuries there was no great single empire. The strong mili- tary pressure from Nan Zhao had diminished. The Pyu kingdom, centered on Prome (and later the Shwebo area in the north),-had collapsed, and into their commanding position in the Irrawaddy valley the Burmans were moving. The Burmans, based on the irrigated rice lands of the Mandalay region, established a small new kingdom centered on Pagan in the mid- ninth century. On the coast, at the head of the Gulf of Martaban, a new kingdom was rising at Pegu around the same time in the wake of another Nan Zhao invasion around 835. Neither of these states appears to have been at all concerned with the upland valleys in what were later to be called the Shan states. Finally, Nan Zhao after the middle of the ninth century seems to have confined its military and political energies to its heartland in southwest- ern China, after decades of exhausting warfare in Burma, Vietnam, and Sichuan that ended with a peace treaty with China in the 880s. Nan Zhao fell into some political instability, with thirteen kings in the next 120 years, none of whom appears to have taken an active interest in the region to the south. During the ninth and tenth centuries, we must envision the Tai peoples as living in the largely untroubled reaches of upland Southeast Asia, in the spaces between the major states. Because Nan Zhao earlier had driven through this region in military expeditions against various Burma states, 16 The Beginnings of Tai History Cambodian Chen-la, and Vietnam, and because there is some evidence of Angkorean interest in the same region during this period, we can assume that the Tai at this time were not isolated either politically or culturally. Perhaps like the Pyu and Burmans, various Tai groups had been impressed into Nan Zhao armies and had seen military service far from their homes. Tai probably were taken as war captives and slaves by the parties to these conflicts, and some may have traveled to distant capitals for trade or on religious pilgrimages. The Tai had begun to become a part of Southeast Asian history, but they had as yet little history of their own. This would come only when they formed their own kingdoms and empires. CHAPTER TWO ‘Tai and the Classical Empires he eleventh and twelfth centuries were the golden age of the clas- sical Indianized empires of mainland Southeast Asia. It was then that they constructed their greatest monuments and left many stone inscriptions testifying to their learning. This was the great age of Angkor and Pagan; the age of Suryavarman I, Suryavarman II, Jayavar- man VII, Anorahta, and Kyanzittha; the age of Angkor Vat, Angkor Thom, the Bayon, and the myriad temples of Pagan. Angkorean and Pagan civili- zation, moreover, was not simply an elite phenomenon, confined to capi- tals remote from the lives of ordinary people. It spread far out over the countryside to touch and penetrate the outlying regions that were inhab- ited by groups of Tai, as well as many others. Considering the classical civilizations of the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the Tai peoples in mind, we can appreciate the circumstances of their Indianization and their acculturation into the civilization of lowland Southeast Asia. Even today there is a sharp dividing line between those Tai who under- went Indianization and those who did not, between Buddhist and non- Buddhist Tai, and between those whose languages incorporated words taken from Sanskrit and Pali and those whose languages did not. It would appear that the same line separates those who fell under the sway of Ang- korean and Pagan civilization in the eleventh and twelfth centuries from those who remained outside their reach. Dvaravati The basis of a Buddhist civilization in central Southeast Asia was laid earlier, between the sixth and ninth centuries. During that period, a dis- 17 18 Tai and the Classical Empires O/Phon Hong Si Thep OChan Sen wen OChaibadan sy Miiang Fa Det Lopburi © Ose : ONakhon Pathom __QPhutthaisong Dong Lak Miiang Sima © ADong Si Mahapho Phanat Main Dvaravati sites tinctive Buddhist culture complex developed in central and northeastern Thailand associated with the Mon people and with the name Dvaravati. Little is known of its history, its geographical extent, or even the location of its capital, if there was a single capital. Many of its inscriptions, how- ever, were in the Mon language; and it is supposed that Dvaravati arose late in the sixth century, more as a civilization than as an empire, to take advantage of the overland trade between the Gulf of Martaban and the Gulf of Thailand (via the Three Pagodas Pass). Characteristically Dvara- vati sites are clustered most densely, and date the furthest back in time, along the fringes of the Central Plain of Thailand. Those to the west— sites in the vicinity of Nakhon Pathom and Suphanburi—are particularly well known, and it is there that coins bearing the inscription “Lord of Dvaravati” have been found, the only local evidence of the name of that state. The dispersal of Dvaravati sites, and the nature of the objects uncovered at them, provides considerable information concerning Dvaravati civili- zation. The central group of Dvaravati sites rings the edges of Thailand’s Central Plain, extending outward along what must have been the overland trade routes westward to Burma and eastward to Cambodia, northward up the Chaophraya River valley toward the Chiang Mai region and up the Pa Sak River valley toward northern Laos, and northeastward toward the Tai and the Classical Empires 19 Khorat Plateau. This particular configuration of sites suggests a commer- cial orientation; and the discovery of items foreign to Southeast Asia— beads, coins, lamps, and even imported statuary —indicates their foreign connections, important both economically and culturally. The northeastern group of Dvaravati sites extends across the Khorat Plateau from Miiang Sima (Nakhon Ratchasima) at least as far as Miiang Fa Deet in Kalasin province, and probably onward to Phon Hong on the northern fringe of the Vientiane Plain, where a characteristic Dvaravati Buddha image has been found. It is tempting to suppose that these sites lay on an overland route connecting the Gulf of Siam with northern Vietnam. Finally, a small northern group of sites, centered around Lamphun and Chiang Mai, traditionally is thought to have been founded in the eighth century as an offshoot of the major Dvaravati center at Lopburi. These northern sites involved the overland trade between the Chaophraya River valley and Yunnan. Common to virtually all these sites, including even the one at Miiang Fa Deet, are inscriptions in the Mon language, towns (usually circular or oval in plan) fortified by earthen ramparts and moats, and abundant Buddhist remains, including religious buildings and Buddhist statuary, sculpture, and baked clay or metal votive tablets. The Mon inscriptions are uninfor- mative on the political history of the region, which must be inferred from other evidence. The fortified towns often included within their walls as much as ten square kilometers, suggesting extensive populations. These town dwellers probably lived off the labors of the surrounding rural people and were involved in a carrying trade in metals, spices, forest products, and textiles. They supported extensive religious establishments, usually but not always Buddhist. Their religious life probably was refreshed from time to time by contacts with India through traveling monks and the im- portation of such things as sacred scriptures and works of art. Dvara- vati Buddhist sculpture, hewn from local rock by indigenous sculptors or fashioned in terra-cotta or stucco, is especially distinctive. Stone Buddhas seated in the European fashion are well known and were widely distrib- uted. Less common were the carved stones placed to mark the boundaries of the sacred precincts of monasteries, particularly fine examples of which come from Miiang Fa Deet. Few Dvaravati sites are lacking in large num- bers of small clay votive tablets bearing an image of the Buddha, some- times inscribed with a Pali religious formula in Mon script. These archeo- logical remains attest to the presence, over a wide area of what is now Thailand and portions of Laos, of an extensive, populous, and prosperous Buddhist civilization. Perhaps deriving partly from its ethnic and linguis- 20 Tai and the Classical Empires Buddhist monastery boundary stone (sima) of the Dvaravati period (sixth to ninth centuries, A.D.) from Muang Fa Deet, Kalasin province. tic identity as Mon, Dvaravati’s civilization had distinctive qualities of its own that sharply contrasted with those of the neighboring Khmer. - Of perhaps more immediate relevance to the history of the Tai, who were living on the fringes of Dvaravati and probably were beginning to become involved in its life, is the fact that during the Dvaravati period cer- tain patterns of relationships between the local regions of central South- east Asia became well established. It was during the period of Dvaravati’s flourishing that regular contacts were established between the head of the Gulf of Thailand and the upper Mekong (via Chiang Mai and Lamphun) and the middle Mekong region (via the Khorat Plateau), perhaps extend- ing onward to Yunnan, Champa, and Vietnam. Two examples will serve to suggest the importance of these relations. Tai and the Classical Empires 21 First, according to traditions embodied in the chronicles of northern Thai- land, the state of Haripufjaya was founded at Lamphun by a number of holy men, former Buddhist monks with connections in Lopburi, far to the south, on 19 February A.D. 661. (This date is clearly spurious, and scholars are inclined to date the event in the early ninth century.) They turned to the Buddhist king of Lopburi to provide them with a ruler. He sent them his daughter, Camadevi, who arrived in Haripufjaya with a large retinue of Mon and established a dynasty that lasted until the middle of the eleventh century. Both during the rule of this Mon dynasty and afterward, Lopburi continued to serve Haripunjaya and the north as a cultural and religious center where Buddhist monks went for training and study and with which some commercial and political relations presumably were maintained. The Dvaravati period of the sixth through ninth centuries remains prob- lematic because of unanswered questions concerning its political consti- tution and ethnic composition. We do not know what areas were included within its sway at any particular period, nor can we be certain who its people were. We do not even know if it had a single capital or where that might have been. There is a high degree of probability that the Tai were moving into the northern portions of the region with which Dvaravati civilization is associated, but of this we cannot be certain until the eleventh century, when Tai began to appear in the epigraphy of the lowland mon- archies. The important things are that Buddhism was well established and that strong connections with the “outside world” were forged and per- sisted. Angkor and the Tai It would be temptingly easy to depict the Angkorean period in terms of contrasts with the earlier Dvaravati period. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Angkor, after all, had a clearly defined capital and left numer- ous inscriptions; its political history appears as clear as Dvaravati’s is dim. We know that after the establishment of the capital in the Angkor region by Jayavarman IJ in the early ninth century, the empire quickly expanded westward and northward. It is reasonable to assume that, either by captur- ing the Dvaravatt capital or by conquering its territories piecemeal, Ang- kor succeeded in replacing Dvaravati’s hegemony over central Southeast Asia by the end of the ninth century; and there is good reason to conclude that Angkor had become the single most important power in most of the region by that time. In assessing the significance to this region of the Angkorean Empire, Sea 22 Tai and the Classical Empires it is useful to make a distinction, however arbitrary, between the core Khmer provinces of the empire and the surrounding fringe provinces that probably were inhabited by a substantial non-Khmer population. Working backward in time from the situation at the end of this period—the begin- ning of the thirteenth century—we can guess that during the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Khmer formed a majority of the population within the limits of present-day Cambodia, in the lower Mekong valley as far north as about Savannakhet, in the Chi River valley north to about Roi Et, throughout the Mun River valley west to the Khorat region, and in the region immediately to the north and east of present-day Bangkok. Such Mon-Buddhist-Dvaravati populations as remained probably were concen- trated mostly in the west, in the lower Central Plain and in the upper Ping River basin of the Lamphun-Chiang Mai region. Their brethren further to the east, in what is now northeastern Thailand, would during this period have been absorbed either into the Khmer population or into the ranks of the Tai who were beginning to move into their midst. On the basis of major monumental remains and Khmer inscriptions, it seems that Angkorean rulers employed a variety of means to control the fringe areas of their empire. Establishing their supremacy by force and diplomacy, they placed governors in the most important provinces, sometimes even princes with claims to the Angkorean royal succession. These were accompanied by what could have been an extensive retinue of officials—inspectors, tax collectors, quartermasters, scribes, judges, legal scholars, assessors, and a military garrison—as well as by a party of reli- gious men to maintain the established religion, whether Brahmanical or Buddhist. Outside the core of the Angkorean kingdom, the main provin- cial centers of the empire seem to have been at That Phanom, Sakon Na- khon, and Sai Fong in the central Mekong valley; Phimai in the Khorat region; Lopburi, Suphanburi, Nakhon Chaisi, and Ratburi (and perhaps also Phetburi) in the lower Chaophraya valley; and Phitsanulok, Sawan- khalok, and Sukhothai/Satchanalai in the northern sector of Thailand’s Central Plain. Particularly from the reign of King Jayavarman VII (r. 1181-?1219), but certainly dating back much earlier, the Angkorean empire was held to- gether by a network of communications and institutions that must have affected the regions they reached. A system of highways, raised some meters above the plain and provided with bridges over watercourses, linked together the core of the empire. Traces of it are found both between Phimai and Angkor and between That Phanom and Sai Fong. We should assume that similar roads were built at least to Lopburi, from whence Tai and the Classical Empires 23 water transport both north and west would have been available. Under patronage extended by the king in distant Angkor and by the local gov- ernor, major religious institutions were founded in the fringe provinces. The most important of these are Mahayana Buddhist in inspiration, dating from a time when that form of Buddhism was in fashion at the court; but a considerable number also were devoted to Saivite or Vaisnavite cults served by Brahmanical priests and preceptors. In either case, the foun- dation of a religious institution meant more to the surrounding popula- tion than simply the undeniable architectural splendor erected in their midst. Their resources, both in labor and in kind, were called upon to con- struct these enormous monuments. Many families were assigned to the support of these institutions in perpetuity as temple slaves, gaining ex- emption from taxation and conscription in return for work on the upkeep of the buildings or in the service of the religion. These institutions were intended as homage to the god and religion and as religio-political devices to bind the society to the king who was both ruler and god-—Siva, Visnu, or Buddha. Thus, participation in the religious ceremonies that revolved around the temple was a political and a religious act. The composition of the population of the fringe areas of the Angkorean Empire became substantially Tai, both in the Lao areas of the central Mekong and the Siamese areas of central Thailand. In both these areas, today’s indigenous religious practices and beliefs, although increasingly influenced by Theravada Buddhism, still bear some imprint of an earlier Mahayana Buddhist exposure (expressed, for example, in the persistence of some Buddhist terminology in Sanskrit form rather than in the Pali- language forms of the Theravada) and, especially, are characterized by an admixture of Brahmanical religion. In ceremonies performed to en- sure a good harvest, to restore health, or to celebrate rites of passage (puberty, marriage, death), non-Buddhist formulae are used and beliefs are expressed that stem from the popular forms of Brahmanical religion known to have been practiced in Angkorean days. Moreover, there is ample evidence that the Sivalinga, the phallic representation of the god Siva, enjoyed a place of respect in most villages and many towns until com- paratively recent times. We must assume that the Siamese and central Lao underwent a fairly early and lengthy exposure to and involvement in these religious traditions in order for them to have proved so durable. We might imagine that this occurred when, gradually absorbed into provincial Ang- korean society as part-time laborers on great public works or as soldiers or as temple slaves, they were not yet its ruling class. But who were the ruling classes of provincial Angkorean society? Most 24 Tai and the Classical Empires must have been Khmer, the representatives of a distant capital sent out to the provinces for the glory of god and king. Take, for example, Lopburi, during this period undoubtedly the most important of the fringe prov- inces, Earlier a major center of Dvaravati civilization and presumably with its own ruling house, Lopburi maintained independence as late as the first years of the eleventh century. At that time it was attacked by an army from Haripufijaya. The Angkor monarch, Udayadityavarman (r. 1001-2), came to the aid of Lopburi and undertook a campaign against Haripun- jaya. Thereupon a Cambodian prince, Jayaviravarman, coming from the ancient state of Tambralinga (at Nakhon Si Thammarat on the Malay Peninsula), seized Lopburi and moved on to take control of Angkor. He provoked a counterreaction in the eastern and northern provinces of the empire, where another claimant to the Angkorean throne, Suryavarman | (r. 1007?-50), based a major military campaign that succeeded in taking the capital region and incorporating Lopburi into the empire. As a province of Angkor, Lopburi apparently was ruled by governors and at least once by a son of King Jayavarman VII. Repeatedly, however, Lopburi attempted to assert its independence, which it signaled by send- ing diplomatic missions requesting recognition from China, first in 1001, then in the wake of internal conflict in Cambodia in 1115, and yet again in 1155 following the death of Suryavarman II (r. 1113-50). It may have been a king of independent Lopburi who left an inscription at Nakhon Sawan in 1167. Jayavarman VII, however, reestablished Angkor’s authority in cen- tral Siam before 1180 and even pushed southward some distance down the Malay Peninsula. Lopburi’s repeated attempts at independence reflect more than politi- cal factionalism or regionalism within the Angkorean Empire. Lopburi, after all, maintained a cultural and religious tradition as heir to Dvara- vati and seems also to have expressed a non-Khmer ethnic identity based on an earlier Mon-consciousness now tempered by an increasingly self- conscious Buddhist and Tai population. As far as Angkor was concerned, Lopburi seems to have represented Syam (i.e., “Siam” )whether as the cen- ter of, or more likely as the administration responsible for, that popula- tion. This is strikingly conveyed by a scene sculpted in the bas-reliefs of Angkor Vat around the middle of the twelfth century. There, on an exten- sive series of panels depicting Suryavarman II reviewing a long procession of troops, there is a certain Jayasinghavarman leading the troops of Lop- buri and a group of Syam Kuk mercenaries under their own commander. In contrast to the orderly, disciplined, and even severe Lopburi soldiers, those of Syam Kuk who immediately precede them are more relaxed, un- Tai and the Classical Empires 25 disciplined, and fierce. In the Angkorean Empire they were becoming a force to be reckoned with. How did the Syam and the Lao view the imperial society with which they were coming into contact? Neither contemporary Tai inscriptions nor chronicles have much to say on this question. There are indications, from the way in which early Tai kingdoms seemed almost perversely to devise public institutions that contrasted sharply with Angkorean institu- tions, that Tai chafed under the heavy exactions of Angkorean rule, the im- personality and arbitrariness of Angkorean law, and the rigid hierarchy of Angkorean society, all of which contrasted with the simpler and more per- sonalized qualities of their own society. The chief memory of Angkor that is preserved in the early portions of Tai chronicles, however, is simply an impression of warfare, conflict unwillingly entered into to preserve their independence. The Yonok Country of the Upper Mekong Of all the early Tai chronicles, only a few seem to preserve some folk mem- ory of contact with the Angkorean Empire. Most of these come from and are concerned with the Yonok country in the Chiang Szn region where north Thailand today borders on the Mekong River {and including ter- ritory to the north of the river). There, sometime after the seventh cen- tury (the chaos of chronicle chronology permits no precision), a polity arose that was in contact with Vietnam in the east, north with Nan Zhao, and south with Angkor or its predecessors. One chronicle relates that a polity in this region was attacked and subjugated by a “Khom” (Khmer?) army coming from Umangasela (in the headwaters of the Ping River). The Khom ruler “was anti-Buddhist and foolish. He observed none of the ten royal precepts, and oppressed the people with taxes. He sought pretexts to inflict fines or punishments upon foreign merchants who came into the country. Thenceforth there was great confusion in Suvanna Khom Kham.... that city was plunged into the shadows of ignorance.”* Another chronicle twice repeats a similar story concerning a Tai chief who entered the same region, perhaps from the Sipsong Panna, with a large retinue of Tai and convened the chiefs of the indigenous hill peoples to recognize his authority. When the Khom ruler of Umangasela refused to accept his power, the Tai prince defeated him in battle and went on to the conquest of all Lan Na—the traditional name for northern Thailand. The kingdom thus formed bordered on Vietnam in the east, Nan Zhao to the north, and Lavarattha (apparently Haripufjaya, though the name is a 26 Tai and the Classical Empires form of Lopburi) to the south and extended into the Shan regions of the upper Salween to the west. In the second retelling of this story, there is a strong image of Tai suffering at the hands of the Khom ruler of Uman- gasela. The Tai prince, Phang, was defeated by the Khom and sent to serve as a village chief over (apparently) a village of Lawa people near Me Sai, northwest of Chiang Szen. Prince Phang was required to render an annual tribute of four measures of gold to the Khom; and, as the chronicler re- ports, “We Thai suffered, whether prince or commoner, for all had to wash for gold to pay tribute to the Khom.”? Prince Phang’s first son, born a year later (in A.D. 918?), was named Suffering Prince. After nearly two decades of suffering, another of Phang’s sons, Prince Phrom (Brahmakumara), led a massive attack that expelled the Khom from the Yonok town of Chiang Sen. They fled to the south and were chased for a month through all the hill-tribe villages of the north, “as far as the frontiers of old Lavarattha,” where the god Indra, taking pity on the fleeing Khom, erected a wall of stone to stop Prince Phrom and allow the Khom to return to Angkor (Inda- pathanagara). Having reinstalled his father as ruler of Chiang Szen and his elder brother as heir-apparent, Prince Phrom then retired to found a new city, Wiang Chaiprakan, on the site of present-day Fang. Around the end of the tenth century or the beginning of the eleventh, in a time of peace and prosperity, a religious revival swept over the Yonok country, probably brought through trading connections that seem to have gone via Haripufijaya to the Mon cities of Thaton (Sudhammavati) and Pegu (Hamsavati) in coastal Burma. This was a development of immense cultural significance, for it transformed a weak and localized folk Bud- dhism, characterized more by isolated hermits than by major monas- teries, into a universal, institutionalized religious tradition, linked with the Theravada Buddhist civilization of the Mons and Ceylon. It integrated the Tai into a wider “community of the faithful,” in which Tai could feel they belonged. It supplanted local animistic spirits with more universal values and encouraged an ethic with social dimensions that transcended the village and miiang. The Buddhization of the northern Tai must at the same time have been associated with changes in their style of life. For the first time in their history, they were moving onto extensive, lowland plains suitable for the irrigated cultivation of rice. This made possible the development of urban centers and the proportional growth of an urban ruling class freed from direct involvement in agriculture. These were still, however, societies of ruling families (chao) and freemen (phrai) bound together by personal, reciprocal bonds of obligation and responsibility. City-states were formed veer Satchanalaiie “.f } Sai Fong5 © @ Sawankhalok iC : Sukhothai), Sakon Nakhone —_«j-024 Phanom ‘ t Phitsanulok "3 Reis. ; : we TE 4 ‘ay } : , iY ae : Nakhon Sawai wes XK? y Lopburi “\ Nakhon Si Thammarat 0 50100 150_ 200 mi. ‘ &David- K Wrst Gepthyght 200 0 100 200 300 km. The classical empires: Angkor and Pagan by 1200 28 Tai and the Classical Empires on the basis of social organization more than on the basis of simple terri- torial control. When Prince Phrom moved to the Fang region and founded Wiang Chaiprakan, for example, he presumably took with him his per- sonal retainers and their families and on the basis of his control over them established a new miiang. There he erected dwellings and fortifications, and the whole community saw to its moral security by providing support for a community of Buddhist monks. The Tai World in 1200 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Tai were organizing new states throughout northern Southeast Asia. Both their own chronicles and the records of the lowland empires convey this point. The grandiose claims of empires and conquests made by, or on behalf of, various Tai kings and princes mean less than the testimony such claims give concerning the hori- zons of the Tai. Of warfare and battles there was a great deal, but we must avoid interpreting these in twentieth-century terms. Angkor, Pagan, and Vietnam conquered territory and then laid down civil administration in the lands they captured, supported by military garrisons and fortifications. The Tai groups staged raids, moving quickly through the countryside on their ponies and elephants, looting and plundering and taking captives, but then moving on or returning home. The threat of their return might induce a defeated chief to send regular tribute to the prince who had con- quered him; and an exchange of daughters between suzerain and vassal might work to form a personal and political bond between them. What- ever “empires” were formed by such means, however, were fragile and short-lived. Especially in these centuries, when no Tai ruler developed a centralized administration by which to incorporate distant territory into his state, the individual principalities were much more important than the larger units into which they sometimes temporarily coalesced. As late as the end of the twelfth century, no regional Tai states had yet emerged to dominate their neighbors. Though now spread quite widely over the region, none of the Tai miiang had yet descended to the great plains that alone would sup- port the expansion and enrichment of a population to the point where it could form the basis of a major kingdom on the scale of Angkor or Pagan. That day, however, was rapidly approaching, as Tai began to settle in the rural provinces of the Angkorean and Pagan empires and on the plains of upper Laos. What local Tai chieftains and princes had in these areas was control Tai and the Classical Empires 29 over labor, which was always in short supply throughout Southeast Asia. Their ability to mobilize a population was both a danger to the major em- pires and a source of potential strength to them. It was natural that Tai chiefs were recognized as local rulers or district chiefs and given a place in the imperial society, perhaps (as in more than one case) even receiving an “emperor’s” daughter in marriage. They retained, however, a sepa- rate ethnic identity, especially vis-a-vis the Khmer, that was reinforced by a separate language, a separate social organization, and a distinctive religious tradition, Theravada Buddhism. In their relationship with the indigenous population into which they had moved, Buddhism played a critically important role in assimilating indigenous groups into the Tai population. Slowly, the countryside of the lowlands became increasingly Tai and Buddhist, and it was only a matter of time before they would chal- lenge the old empires on equal terms. CHAPTER THREE A Tai Century, 1219-1350 hrough the early decades of the thirteenth century, the great clas- sical Indianized empires of Pagan and Angkor had held firm, their glories still undiminished. Great architectural monuments were constructed; works of art were produced; stone inscriptions lauding meri- torious acts of the great monarchs were incised. Then, in the second quar- ter of the century, the imperial momentum collapsed in Angkor and soon thereafter in Pagan. By the end of the century, both those great empires were but golden memories of a past that would never be recaptured. That transformation of mainland Southeast Asia around 1300 was asso- ciated with three developments. The most important was the movement of the Tai down from the upland valleys onto the plains and their found- ing of powerful new states, in an attempt to imitate and supplant their rivals. These new states stretched all the way from the plains of Assam in northeastern India to central Laos in the east and to Nakhon Si Thamma- rat on the Malay Peninsula in the south. Their early vigor itself suffices to make of this period “a Tai century.” A second major development, closely associated with the rise of the Tai, was the reviving of the Buddhism already professed by the Tai through contacts with Sinhalese Buddhism and the foundation of strong, well-supported Buddhist monastic institu- tions throughout the region. Finally, particularly in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the political transformation of continental Southeast Asia was paralleled by the rise to power of the Mongols in China and the extension of that power into Southeast Asia by diplomatic and mili- tary means. The most striking new quality of mainland Southeast Asia was the dif- fusion of power. Where the region had been dominated a century earlier 30 A Tai Century, 1219-1350 31 by two major empires, Pagan and Angkor, its political landscape now was fractured into numerous, much smaller states, relatively more equal in their political and military power. This diffusion of power, moreover, in- volved cultural and religious power as well. Many smaller communities now regained autonomy in their religious and cultural decision making. These new communities lived according to Theravada Buddhism, of the Sinhalese variety, adopting it as their own religion and way of life. In the plastic and performing arts, they expressed their own styles and, in the lit- erary arts, their own idioms and languages. Through a century and a half of rapid and fundamental change, the political and cultural maps of con- tinental Southeast Asia were transformed. Many of the patterns so estab- lished were to endure into early modern times. This was no temporary break in the grand earlier traditions of the region, but rather a fundamen- tal transformation. Elements of earlier traditions persisted, but they were recast in a new mold shaped partly by the circumstances of the era and partly by the character of Tai tradition. Nowhere is the significance of this clearer than in the vicinity of Bang Sanuk, now in Phre province. There around 1219 a local ruler demon- strated what was thought to be the daring to expose and enshrine a relic of the Buddha. People believed that only a pure ruler could dare to touch a religious relic. He was sufficiently proud of himself to-brag of his act ina stone inscription carved in that year, in an alphabet otherwise first known from Sukhothai in 1292. As we shall see, his religious daring soon was ex- pressed in political daring by mid-century. Not all the Tai groups underwent these changes to the same degree, nor did everything occur immediately. The Tai peoples most affected by such changes were those already in a position to profit from the decline of Pagan and Angkor. For those who lived beyond the fringes of the classical Indianized empires, the thirteenth century probably did not mark a break in the continuity of their history. For most Tai, real history must in some sense have begun in the thir- teenth century, for at that point nearly every chronicle changes in char- acter. Whereas most of their chronicles up to that time are simply lists of kings or collections of legends, usually undated, in the thirteenth and four- teenth centuries they become the annals of states, replete with detailed accounts of religious events and wars, of dynastic conflicts and popular movements. While far from being completely reliable, the Tai chronicles, now supplemented by stone inscriptions, begin to paint in human colors a picture of a Tai world. ch Méng Mao. Sagaing , Mekiaya L;

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