Thailand Travel: Exploring Ayutthaya

  • The towering prang of Wat Phra Ram.

    The towering prang of Wat Phra Ram.

  • Lopburi’s train station.

    Lopburi’s train station.

  • A groundskeeper at Wat Mahathat.

    A groundskeeper at Wat Mahathat.

  • A Buddha head cradled in the roots  of a bodhi tree at Wat Mahathat.

    A Buddha head cradled in the roots of a bodhi tree at Wat Mahathat.

  • The incongruous steeple of  St. Joseph’s Church.

    The incongruous steeple of St. Joseph’s Church.

  • A rank of scarf-draped bodhisattva statues at Wat Phutthaisawan, on the south bank of the Chao Phraya River.

    A rank of scarf-draped bodhisattva statues at Wat Phutthaisawan, on the south bank of the Chao Phraya River.

  • The glories of Ayutthaya, as advertised on the side of a local tuk-tuk.

    The glories of Ayutthaya, as advertised on the side of a local tuk-tuk.

  • One of the town’s many novice monks.

    One of the town’s many novice monks.

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Merchants from China, Japan, and India journeyed here to exchange silk, tea, and porcelain for sandalwood, spices, deer hides, and birds’ nests. Siam’s rulers—who monopolized the trade in items like ivory and cotton—grew fabulously rich. Some of that wealth underwrote the creation of oversize religious statuary, including the largest bronze casting of the Buddha ever known: an image commissioned in 1500 by King Ramathibodi II that stood 16 meters tall and was clad in more than 170 kilograms of gold. Adjacent to this, the king erected Ayutthaya’s most iconic ruin, Wat Phra Si Sanphet, a procession of three bell-shaped chedis (stupas) built to hold his mortal remains as well as those of his father and eldest brother.

My first stop is an even older temple, Wat Mahathat, a five-minute bike ride from Ake’s hotel. Begun in 1374 by King Borommaracha I, it bears a distinct Khmer influence, with a large central prang (a bud-shaped tower with decorative niches) surrounded by courtyards that are ringed by smaller towers, stupas, and crumbling laterite walls. The main prang, now collapsed, once rose more than 40 meters, but the ruin’s most enduring image is the beatific Buddha head enmeshed by the tentacle-like roots of a holy bodhi tree near the eastern entrance.

Echoes of Angkor are also apparent at Wat Ratchaburana, just north of Mahathat. Centered on another vaulting prang, this temple commemorates the royal cremation of two princes, who both died while dueling atop elephants to determine which would assume the throne. Instead, their surviving brother took the crown. Despite his unlikely ascendancy, King Borommaracha II proved an adept leader who consolidated Ayutthaya’s power in 1432 with the ultimate destruction of the rival Khmer Empire.

Three flights of steep stairs bring me to the entrance to Wat Ratchaburana’s main tower, where a series of narrow steps descends 17 meters into the gloom. In 1957, tomb raiders broke into this sanctuary during restoration work and made off with a king’s ransom in treasure. Luckily, a portion of the plunder was recovered and is now displayed in Ayutthaya’s Chao Sam Phraya National Museum. The trove includes votive tablets, Buddha images from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Java, and an incredible array of gold and gem-studded masterpieces—including a bejeweled elephant figurine—that offer a glimpse of the city’s fortunes and far-ranging networks.

The first Europeans to appreciate these wondrous riches were the Portuguese, the greatest navigators of the era, who called on the Siamese capital in 1511. The Portuguese provided artillery and gunners to ward off the always-bellicose Burmese. In return, King Ramathibodi II (he of the giant standing Buddha) granted land for a Portuguese concession just below the city walls, not far from where the Chinese and Japanese had already established trading posts. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of Ayutthaya.

That evening, I hire a long-tail boat to tour several temples outside the old city. The first, overlooking the confluence of the Chao Phraya and Pasak rivers, is Wat Phananchoeng, built in the 14th century and still a bustling monastery. Its chief attraction is the gleaming, 19-meter-tall sitting Buddha dedicated to a Chinese explorer who traveled to Ayutthaya in 1407. Described by a 17th-century Dutch visitor as “a frightfully large and heavy image” with “knees that seemed like small mountains,” the sumo-like figure is especially venerated by Sino-Thai pilgrims, who travel here by the hundreds to be sprinkled with lustral water by the monks, and to pay to have bolts of saffron-yellow cloth draped around the statue’s wide shoulders.

The boat motors west past the crenellated battlements of Phet Fortress, which once guarded the river approach to the capital. Upstream, the left bank of the Chao Phraya is lined with overwater restaurants offering Thai food and views of the constant boat traffic—cement-filled scows, small five-baht ferries, Bangkok party barges. Across the river, I soon spot the dome of a mosque and then an even greater architectural anomaly, the Romanesque steeple of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, established by the French nearly 350 years ago. Ayutthaya demonstrated a remarkable tolerance for religions beyond Buddhism, one of the reasons it became such an immense, multicultural crossroads. The leader of France’s first embassy to Siam was impressed by its cosmopolitan qualities. “There is no city in the Orient where one sees so many different nationalities as in the capital city of Siam,” wrote the Chevalier de Chaumont of his 1685 visit, “and where one speaks so many different languages.”

It was in this heady time that Samuel White had been appointed shahbandar of royal trade in Tenasserim (part of present-day Myanmar), a prosperous Andaman Sea port and a vital link to India. From this base, White also began raiding foreign merchant ships, accruing an enormous fortune and a reputation for piracy. Forced to flee for England in 1688, he hardly had time to enjoy his ill-gained fruits, dying during his first English winter after a dozen years in the tropics.

White’s boon companion at court had an even unlikelier backstory: a Greek adventurer, Constantine Phaulkon had sailed east and somehow insinuated himself in Ayutthaya after learning to speak fluent Thai, rising to head the department of foreign trade, and ultimately to become King Narai’s prime minister. East had met West, but these two very different worlds would soon collide.

The train ride from Ayutthaya north to Lopburi should take an hour, but the timetable seems only a rumor on this leisurely, third-class service. The conductor can only smile and tell me, “Next stop.”A millennia ago, Lopburi, which predates Ayutthaya by some eight centuries, served as an important regional capital on the edge of the Khmer Empire: the famed bas-relief galleries of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat contain a panel of the king reviewing his troops, which include a company of menacing-looking soldiers from Louvo, as the town was once called. Today, Lopburi is best known for its gangs of utterly fearless macaques, who strut the streets and raid the markets with such a sense of entitlement that many residents have installed primate-proof bars on their windows. I know I’ve arrived in Lopburi when I spy the huge, surreal gilded statue of a monkey—looking for all the world like an idol from Planet of the Apes—on the station platform.

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