GoKawiilAt the beginning of the 1833 dry season, a monk named Mongkut set out for Sukhothai, the old capital of Siam. Long journeys by boat and on foot for study, teaching, and religious observance were common for monks like Mongkut. Theravada Buddhism was a huge part of life in premodern Siam, and at any given time, a small percentage of adult men were ordained as monks. As they traveled around the kingdom, locals provided them with food, clothes, and lodging.
But Mongkut was no ordinary monk. He was the 43rd child of King Rama II. Born to one of Rama II’s senior consorts, he was a high-ranking son and in the running to inherit the throne. As such, he would have been traveling with a retinue of attendants as well as fellow monks. The kingdom to which Mongkut was an heir covered most of modern-day Thailand, plus parts of Laos, Cambodia, and Malaysia, and contained around five million subjects. Though most of these subjects were poor rice farmers, Siam’s largest city, Bangkok, was a major trading port, with a dense network of canals lined with houses on stilts, and an ethnically diverse population.
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In contrast to the bustling capital, Sukhothai was by this time largely abandoned. From the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Sukhothai had flourished as a political, cultural, and religious center, but it had since been eclipsed by Ayutthaya to the south and, since its founding in the eighteenth century, Bangkok. When Mongkut arrived there, he would have been greeted, as visitors are today, by crumbling stupas (religious buildings), serene Buddha statues, and rust-colored brickwork weathered by centuries of blistering sunshine and tropical rains.
At some point during his stay, Mongkut came across a remarkable object: a four-sided, black stone monolith, about a meter high and inscribed with an unusual script. The stone would become known as the Ramkhamhaeng Stele. Purported to date from 1292, it is often cited as the oldest surviving example of Thai writing.
The Ramkhamhaeng Stele is thought to be the earliest surviving example of Thai writing. Image Wikimedia Commons.
Mongkut brought the Stele to Bangkok and assembled a committee of scholars to decipher its enigmatic inscription. They compared it to known forms of old Thai and other related scripts, analyzed linguistic patterns, and collaborated with learned monks to interpret unfamiliar words and characters. What they found was extraordinary: the 124 lines of archaic text told of an ancient Thai kingdom ruled by a wise monarch, Ramkhamhaeng. According to the Stele, Ramkhamhaeng’s kingdom combined a literary tradition, a sophisticated legal and political system, independence, sovereignty, secure geographic boundaries, Buddhist kingship, and just rule.
The discovery of the Stele was, as it turned out, serendipitous. Over five centuries, European powers colonized virtually every other territory on Earth, with exceptions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Japan is the best known example. Siam, perhaps the next clearest case of a state that resisted foreign occupation and retained sovereignty, is much less publicized. Siam held out through a combination of diplomacy, reform, and careful image management. By providing evidence of a longstanding complex civilization, the Ramkhamhaeng Stele was just the sort of brand asset the kingdom needed.
The Siamese Holdout
By the 1830s, the Siamese court was watching nervously as British power radiated outward from India. Just a few years before Mongkut’s discovery, during the First Burmese War of 1824–1826, British gunboats sailed up the sacred waters of the Irrawaddy River and humiliated the ancient kingdom of Burma, extracting huge territorial concessions from Siam’s long-term rival. To the east, French missionaries were active in Vietnam and Cambodia, representing the earliest phase of France’s colonial ambitions and its mission civilisatrice. One by one, Siam’s neighbors began to fall and it found itself the sole Southeast Asian holdout against European colonialism.
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