The History of Ayutthaya

For 416 years this island was the capital of Siam, and for one afternoon in April 1767 it was on fire. Everything you walk past in the park is either what survived that, or what the Fine Arts Department has since put back. The guided tours of Ayutthaya on this list all cover some of it; this page is the part they have time to summarise.

A city built on a river island, 1351

King U Thong founded Ayutthaya on 4 March 1351 and took the regnal name Ramathibodi I. The site was chosen for water: the Chao Phraya, the Lopburi and the Pa Sak meet here, and a canal cut across the neck of a meander turned the ground between them into an island. That gave the new capital a moat it did not have to dig and a river road to the Gulf of Siam.

The palace came first. Building began in 1350 and finished the year the kingdom was declared, on the ground that later became Wat Phra Si Sanphet.

Four centuries as the capital of Siam

Ayutthaya grew into one of the largest cities in the world. European visitors of the sixteenth century ranked it with Vijayanagara and Ming China among the great powers of Asia, and by about 1600 the kingdom it governed held an estimated two and a half million people. Portuguese, Dutch, French, Japanese and Chinese communities each had their own quarter outside the walls.

What made it work was the same water that defended it. Ocean-going ships could reach the island up the Chao Phraya, which made a city eighty kilometres inland into a port.

The kings who built what you walk through

Almost every monument in the park is signed by a reign, and the dates are worth carrying around with you.

Two of those entries are family stories rather than building projects. Wat Ratchaburana stands where Borommarachathirat II cremated his two elder brothers, who had fought each other to death on elephant-back over the succession to their father. And the great chedi at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon was raised by King Naresuan to mark his own victory over the Burmese crown prince.

The siege and the fire, 1767

The Burmese army invested the city and held it for fourteen months. Ayutthaya fell on 7 April 1767. The city was burned, the court scattered, and the capital never returned — within fifteen years the seat of government had moved downriver to what became Bangkok.

That is why an entire capital survives as a field of ruins. Nothing was rebuilt on top of it, because there was no longer any reason to be here.

What the Burmese took

What they came for was metal. The Phra Si Sanphet image inside the royal temple stood sixteen metres high on an eight-metre pedestal, a bronze core of roughly sixty-four tonnes carrying about 343 kilograms of gold. The building was set alight and the gold was melted off it. Two of the three chedi beside it came down in the process; the eastern one stayed up.

What the ground kept: the robbery of 1957

Not everything went in the fire. In 1957 thieves broke into the crypt beneath the central prang at Wat Ratchaburana. The official excavation that followed recovered more than 2,000 objects, over 100,000 votive tablets and more than 100 kilograms of gold, along with rare Buddha images. That material is now in the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum, and the crypt itself still holds faded frescoes from the early Ayutthaya period.

Rediscovery, restoration and 1991

Serious conservation is a twentieth-century story. The Fine Arts Department restored the three chedi at Wat Phra Si Sanphet in 1956, and only began work at Wat Chaiwatthanaram in 1987, reopening it to visitors in 1992. In 1991 UNESCO inscribed the Historic City of Ayutthaya on the World Heritage List under criterion (iii).

The park you walk through is therefore younger than it looks as a visitor attraction, even though the brick is six hundred years old. Which temples are open, consolidated or still fenced changes slowly and is worth checking on the day.

The floods of 2011 and what they changed

In the 2011 floods Wat Chaiwatthanaram stood under two metres of water and was badly damaged. The repair cost 200 million baht. The episode is the reason conservation here now thinks about water first, and it is a useful thing to know if you are choosing a month: the rivers that made the city are also the ones that periodically take it back.

Nothing about that should keep you away. It is simply why the wet season is the one to plan around rather than ignore — the numbers are on the weather page.