Introduction
Following a tradition he himself had initiated, Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (1862–1943), the celebrated ‘father of Thai history’ and the architect of Siam's administrative centralization at the turn of the century,Footnote 1 wrote and printed for free distribution at his mother's cremation in 1926 a memorial volume entitled, ‘A history of Buddhist monuments’.Footnote 2 After surveying in chapters one to eight the history of Buddhism in India and in the countries of Theravada persuasion, the book's ninth and final chapter examines Buddhist sculpture and architecture in Siam by dividing it into seven ‘periods’ (samai), spanning the first century BCE, through to the nineteenth century.Footnote 3
Prince Damrong's choice of subject matter for the memorial volume was not accidental, for the revamped Bangkok Museum opened to the public in November 1926 with a collection of antiquities that was arranged according to his classification. The museum's director at the time was the renowned French scholar, George Coedès (1886–1969), who, in his own monograph about the collection published two years later, fine-tuned the classification and replaced ‘periods’ with ‘schools’ (écoles), whose output he appraised according to the notion of the evolution, culmination, and decay of art styles.Footnote 4 Coedès, however, retained Damrong's nomenclature, which has the periods/schools named after principalities in control of the various regions that at the turn of the twentieth century were incorporated into Siam's national territory as a result of the boundary demarcation carried out with the British and the French. In fact, the surveying of Siam's historical topography preceded that of its physical landscape—and, like the latter, saw the crucial involvement of Europeans.Footnote 5
Siam's formal sovereign status vis-à-vis its neighbours underlies, along with many other claims to uniqueness, the following assertion: ‘The colonial powers introduced their traditional methods for archaeological research. . .Only Thailand stood firmly against the tide, and in consequence, looked to its own resources. This came with royal inspiration’.Footnote 6 This narrative of autarchic achievement obscures the contiguities and literal overlaps of archaeological investigation in Siam and colonial Southeast Asia—one aspect of the Siamese elite's wider engagement with Western power and Western knowledge. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Siam's rulers came to regard themselves as purveyors of a civilizing project that, not unlike colonialism's purported mission civilisatrice, served the double purpose of validating their political authority and boosting their self and public image. Vernacular expressions came into use to express the positivist ideas of material progress (khwam charoen) and civilized norm (khwampen siwilai) that were central to the ideologies of nationalism and imperialism.Footnote 7 At the turn of the twentieth century, indigenous knowledge gave way to modern ‘sciences’ (sat; Pali satta/Sanskrit sastra), whose reputed superiority rested on empirical verification. Geography and history were the first foreign sciences to be localized in the Siamese intellectual landscape by means of archaizing neologisms—phumisat (‘earth-science’), borankhadi (calqued on ‘archaeology’ though initially employed in the literal sense of ‘antiquity studies’) and the somewhat later prawatisat (‘past-science’)—with the objective of producing knowledge about as well as in the service of the ‘Thai nation’ (chat thai), as Siam (muang sayam or prathet sayam) was increasingly characterized in official discourse from the early twentieth century.
The epistemic transmutation of religious icons from devotional objects (khong saksit) into antiquities (boranwatthu) by way of collection, classification and exhibition in the space of the Bangkok Museum was functional to the propagation of Siam's international reputation as a progressive nation-state with a distinctive civilizational lineage, or cultural heritage (to use the contemporary phrase), as well as the knowledge to conserve, study and present it. ‘The museum’, writes art historian Donald Preziosi, ‘has been a social instrument for the fabrication and maintenance of modernity, and of those ideologies of modernization and progress indispensable to the self-definition of modern nation-states initially in Europe and eventually everywhere in the world’.Footnote 8 Within this international trend, Siam paralleled closely Meiji Japan, where Okakura Kakuzo and his American mentor, Ernest F. Fenollosa, established in the 1880s the chronology of ‘Japanese’ art and an attendant canon of masterpieces.Footnote 9 Organic to the mobilization of collective belief in the emerging nation-state, these epistemological endeavours were in turn embedded in scientific racist theories, which posited the existence of national races whose expressions included distinctive cultural and artistic traditions. But whereas Okakura's narrative ‘tied the beginning of art to territory (Japan), [so] those who populate it also became Japanese’,Footnote 10 Damrong and Coedès acknowledged Siam's ethnic and consequently artistic plurality prior to the Thais’ immigration. The art and architecture they created was thus historicized as the original synthesis of prior ‘ethnic’ styles by the Thai ‘national’ genius.
The formulation in the 1920s of the now canonical classification of Siamese antiquities as the combined product of epigraphic scholarship and museological practice reflected a growing national as well as international interest in the archaeology of Siam and the rest of Southeast Asia. It also marked the culmination of decades of royal antiquarian investigations, which had began in the 1830s in response to ideas introduced by Western missionaries, and were built on the preliminary mapping of Siam's historic topography conducted by French explorers in the century's latter half to facilitate colonial penetration of Cambodia and Laos.Footnote 11 These preceding stages are reviewed in the paper's first two sections to trace the intellectual and ideological genealogy of the art history of Thailand as a domain of knowledge. The final section examines in detail Prince Damrong's and George Coedès’ periodization of art styles and the narrative of national origins it subtends, whose tenets inform to a large degree the contemporary image of Thailand's early history.
Royal antiquarianism as a civilizing pursuit
Despite having been acquainted with Europe's material and ideational culture since the seventeenth century, when the kingdom of Ayutthaya exchanged embassies with Holland, France and the Vatican, the Siamese court developed a sustained interest in Western science, technology and culture only from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the elite's worldview and self-identification moved away from the civilizational spheres irradiating from India and China to one centred in Europe.Footnote 12 As in the rest of the Theravada world, Siam's premodern rulers modelled their personas after Indian emperor Asoka who, in the third century BCE, had erected hundreds of Buddhist inscriptions and monumental reliquaries (stupa) throughout his realm; accordingly they sponsored the construction of monasteries and stupa by donating land and providing manpower under the corvée labour system. The intimate association between Buddhism and charisma led to some Buddha images being worshipped as palladia—their material integrity standing synecdochically for dynastic stability, their destruction or forcible removal (as in the relocations of the Phra Kaeo image from Chiang Rai to Vientiane to BangkokFootnote 13) representing inauspicious omens of political turmoil and dynastic collapse. But whereas rulers demonstrated their piety primarily by casting new images and erecting new religious monuments, inscriptions and royal chronicles suggest that dilapidated stupa and images were occasionally repaired.Footnote 14
The attack waged since the 1830s against the Hindu-Buddhist cosmology by Christian missionaries, who supported their arguments with maps, globes, and models of the solar system, made an illustrious victim in the thirteenth-century treatise, ‘The Three Worlds of King Ruang’ (Thrai phum phra ruang).Footnote 15 Prominent in the circle of Buddhist reformists was Prince Mongkut, King Nangklao's brother, who spent the 1830s and 1840s in the monkhood developing close relations with some Western missionaries, before he ascended the throne in 1851. In 1833 Mongkut claimed the discovery, amidst the ruins of Sukhothai overgrown with vegetation, of an inscribed stele, which was attributed to the thirteenth-century King Ramkhamhaeng, along with his stone throne. The Chronicles of the Fourth Reign relates the reconstruction in Mongkut's reign of the Phra Pathom Chedi, in Nakhon Pathom (west of Bangkok), whose remains were incorporated in to a new structure, which was also rebuilt after it collapsed in 1860, according to the prevalent practice of restoring religious monuments to their full integrity in order to reactivate their symbolic and supernatural potency. According to the Chronicles, Mongkut had advocated the restoration of Phra Pathom Chedi for some time on the grounds that its imposing dimensions indicated it contained an authentic relic (since fake relics were also routinely enshrined). He also allegedly inferred from the contrast between its circular base in the Sinhalese style and its Khmer-style tower that the dilapidated stupa had already been rebuilt in the past.Footnote 16
Such remarks suggest a departure from the Buddhist idea of cosmic time, and specifically the tenet of the impermanent nature of existence (anitchang; Pali, anicca), towards modern conceptions of time, space and human action taking place in both space and time, which accounts for King Mongkut's interests in antiquity as well as modern science—astronomy in particular.Footnote 17 This epistemic shift is exemplified by the ‘Book Explaining Various Things‘ (Kitchanukit), written in 1867 by the same court official who authored the Chronicles, and which presented a defence of Buddhism as a rational faith by rejecting popular superstition and foregrounding common grounds with Western science.Footnote 18 During his mission to Bangkok in 1855, John Bowring, Queen Victoria's envoy, was shown a hall in the royal palace where the king had gathered scientific instruments and curios into a tropical Wunderkammen. Bowring noted on the hall's doorway the inscription ‘phiphithaphan’ (literally, ‘assorted objects’), the term eventually used to translate ‘museum’.Footnote 19 In 1874, Mongkut's collection was transferred by the order of his successor, King Chulalongkorn (r. 1868–1910), to the newly built Concordia Hall, in the Grand Palace's outer court. Self-consciously designated in English as a ‘museum’, Concordia Hall complemented the palace's Wachirayan Library, opened that same year, in providing a space for the cultural edification of the royalty. The collection's subsequent relocation in 1887 to the Palace of the Front (across from the Grand Palace), following the death of its occupant, the last uparatcha (or ‘second king’), laid the basis for what would become the Bangkok Museum. Henri Alabaster, a British merchant who had long resided in Bangkok, was appointed overseer of the collection, which housed in two buildings zoological specimens, bronzes, ceramics and some Buddhist and Hindu images. In 1889 the museum was upgraded to a directorate and four years later placed under the purview of the new Department of Education, headed by Prince Damrong.Footnote 20 In 1896, a year before King Chulalongkorn's first visit to Europe, the museum's director, Chamun Sisorarak, was sent on a mission to England, France and Germany to study local museums; his selection of the Imperial Institute in London as a model suggests that the museum in Bangkok was originally envisaged to exhibit ethnographic and natural history objects rather than antiquities.Footnote 21
The efflorescence of national museums in nineteenth-century Europe bespoke ‘an era when the passions of historical collecting had shifted from personal, idiosyncratic, and elite networks to nationalist, collective and representative ones. . .from stories to histories, from fragments to totalities, from cabinets to museums’.Footnote 22 Modern museums fulfilled two main purposes: ‘the systematic historical relation and display of old and treasured objects and, later, the embodiment of the historicist ideals of historical totality and linear progression’.Footnote 23 In Bangkok, however, the main depository of antiquities throughout the mid 1920s was Wat Phra Kaeo, the monastery adjacent the royal palace which, along with the eponymous image (known in English as the Emerald Buddha) and King Ramkhamhaeng's stele and stone throne, housed several bronze images far more valuable than those kept then in the museum, and also a number of sculptural fragments, including one from the Buddhist complex of Borobodur in Java, donated to King Chulalongkorn by the Dutch colonial authorities on the occasion of his 1896 visit.Footnote 24 It is instructive to compare the assemblage of Buddha images in Wat Phra Kaeo with that put together at King Chulalongkorn's request by Prince Damrong in Wat Benchamabophit, also known as the Marble Temple, the monastery built at the turn of the twentieth century in the then suburban Dusit district, north of the Grand Palace.Footnote 25
In his account of the undertaking, Prince Damrong writes that the king told him that the statues should be ‘selected from among numerous old and beautiful images made in various countries at different periods, and should be displayed in such a way that the public might acquire knowledge of Buddhist iconography’.Footnote 26 Elsewhere Prince Damrong wrote that the images served ‘for public worship and as models for people to copy when making new images’.Footnote 27 Art historian A. B. Griswold also relates that Damrong kept the antique images amongst the 50 he had assembled as they were ‘so as to serve as examples of style to students and archaeologists’,Footnote 28 rather than having them gilded afresh according to the prevailing mode of restoration. Images in ‘foreign’ styles (Burmese, Japanese and Gandhara) and even a copy of the much-venerated fifteenth-century image of the Buddha Chinarat (located in Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat in Phitsanulok) were also cast by individual patrons as an act of merit-making for display in the monastery.Footnote 29 Wat Benchamabophit's assemblage of images could thus be regarded as a conscious attempt at reconciling devotionalism with aestheticism—or, to use Walter Benjamin's terminology, the artwork's ‘cult value’, typical of a religious worldview, with its ‘exhibition value’ born out of a secularized mentality.Footnote 30 However, the arrangement of images in Wat Benchamabophit did not follow any stylistic periodization—the dominant representational regime of the nineteenth-century museum.
During the inspections to the provinces he regularly conducted as minister of the Interior, Prince Damrong also gathered archaeological findings, including several fine small Khmer bronzesFootnote 31 which, before being moved to the Bangkok Museum in the mid 1920s, were exhibited in the atrium of the Ministry of the Interior's building, where they stood as boundary markers of the kingdom's territory that was under the ministry's guardianship. But royal antiquarianism at the turn of the century pursued a quest not just for historic artefacts but also for verifiable, ‘scientific’ historical knowledge that could buttress Siam's civilizational lineage vis-à-vis other countries’. In December 1907, in the wake of the discovery earlier that year of the only contemporary version of the chronicles of Ayutthaya, the Antiquarian Society (borankhadi samoson) was launched to mobilize the recently created bureaucratic corps with the aim of documenting the past thousand years of Siamese history. This objective was spelt out by King Chulalongkorn in his inaugural speech which, besides highlighting the fragmentary nature of available historical evidence and the limited reliability of the royal chronicles, painted ancient Siam not as an unitary kingdom but as a composite of multiple power centres (muang):
Siam was divided at some times and united at others. Its rulers came from various races and various dynasties. The chronicles choose to deal only with that time when Siam was united as a single kingdom in the later period, and choose only the Thai ruling dynasty which came down from the north. Even the Thai dynasty established in Sukhothai is not mentioned except once. . .Even though this is only the first meeting of the society, I'd like to persuade all of you to make up your minds that we will collect the historical materials of the country of Siam for every city (muang), every race (chat), every dynasty, every era to compile a history of Siam over the past 1000 years. This history must start from the capital sometimes known as Hang Hang or Chang, which was the old settlement of the Thai race, down through Chiang Saen, Chiang Rai, Chiang Mai, Sawankhalok, Sukhothai, old Ayutthaya, new Ayutthaya, Lavo, Lopburi, Nakhon Chaisi, Nakhon Si Thammarat, and cities which ruled other cities such as Kamphaeng Phet, Chainat, Phitsanulok, Muang San, Suphan, Kanchanaburi and Petchaburi, which were important at some era in the past and are now joined together as united Siam.Footnote 32
King Chulalongkorn's call to expand and validate Siamese history was functional to asserting Siam's political and cultural independence as the kingdom's borders were being demarcated for, as Tanaka remarks in relation to Meiji Japan, ‘In this process of writing history, qualities that give a nation-state its goals, commonalities (and hence cultural boundaries), and autonomy are inscribed’.Footnote 33 Even though the Antiquarian Society eventually achieved little of consequence, its creation points to the ruling elite's awareness that empirical knowledge of ancient history was required for its nation-building project.
The other central text of elite antiquarianism is Crown Prince Vajiravudh's versified account in the nirat genre of his visit to the ruins of Sukhothai, ‘Journey to the city of Phra Ruang’ (Thiao muang phra ruang), written in 1908. In it, Vajiravudh (who acted as the Antiquarian Society's vice-president) lamented the dilapidated state of monuments that testified to the power and cultural accomplishments of the Thais in the past: ‘It is my hope that, as a result of this book, the Thai people will understand that our Thai nation (chat thai) is not a young country and not a country of savages (khon pa, literally ‘forest people’) or, to put it in English, uncivilized people. Our Thai nation has been prosperous and thriving for a long time’.Footnote 34 While recent scholarship has challenged the notion of Vajiravudh's exclusive paternity of Thai nationalism,Footnote 35 the nineteenth-century idea of the nation as a racially homogenous community rooted in an ancestral territory, denoted in Thai by the term chat (from Sanskrit jati, meaning ‘birth, ancestry’, related via the Greek cognate genos to the Latin word natio), did provide the ideological template for the discursive construction of Siam as a ‘Thai nation’ in the early twentieth century. This was a marked departure from the picture of a polycentric, multiracial polity still upheld by King Chulalongkorn in his speech to the Antiquarian Society. Reflective of the worldwide nationalist fervour at the turn of the century, this racial conception of Siam was also the reaction to and the appropriation of the knowledge about the people and the early history of the region produced by colonial ethnography and archaeology.
Colonial archaeology, scientific racism, borders and ruins
The Antiquarian Society had a precedent, and arguably a model, in the Siam Society, founded in February 1904 by 37 expatriates (mostly government officials) and two Thais, for ‘the investigation and encouragement of art, sciences, and literature in relation to Siam and neighbouring countries’. By the end of that year, the Siam Society comprised 134 members; Crown Prince Vajiravudh and Prince Damrong were entrusted with the honorary positions of patron and vice-patron, but expatriates remained the society's driving force until 1940.Footnote 36 Membership fees supported the publication, which also started in 1904, of the Siam Society's journal. Inspired by eighteenth-century learned societies of Orientalists, such as the Batavian Society of Arts and Letters (established 1778) and the Asiatic Society of Bengal (established 1784), the Siam Society came into existence, however, at a time when colonial states, strengthening the nexus of power and knowledge, established archaeological services for the study and conservation of the monumental remains found in the colonies.Footnote 37 In this context, the Journal of the Siam Society was critical for situating the study of the kingdom's history, archaeology, epigraphy, geology, botany and zoology within the domain of colonial knowledge by providing an outlet for research articles in English and occasionally French, but—notably—not in Thai.
Siam's participation at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, held too in 1904, occasioned a volume about the kingdom for the international public, which contained essays by Western advisers on a range of subjects. Colonel Gerolamo E. Gerini, an Italian instructor at the cadet academy in Bangkok and founding member of the Siam Society, contributed an essay on archaeology. Gerini started by lamenting the scarcity of prehistoric finds, which he blamed on ‘as yet insufficient and systematic exploration’ (indeed, only in the late 1960s were Neolithic finds discovered in Northeast Thailand). He then highlighted differences in the monuments’ style and religious character (Brahmanic and Buddhist) as well as building materials (laterite, sandstone and brickwork) utilized in Siam's various regions prior to ‘the phase of national Thai history’ centred in Sukhothai and Ayutthaya ‘as successive capitals’. Evidence for this phase, Gerini pointed out, came from inscriptions in Thai, the earliest being the Sukhothai inscription of circa 1300 CE. The notion of a ‘national Thai history’ within the broader timeframe of Siamese history was thus already in place by the early 1900s, even though the ethnic identity of Siam's early settlers was as yet unknown. In passing, Gerini could not avoid noticing that no monument in Siam equalled ‘in grandeur and artistic perfection those of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom’.Footnote 38
It was also in 1904 that a treaty was signed (but ratified three years later) which settled the border dispute between Siam and Cambodia, a French protectorate since 1863. The treaty obliged Siam to the retrocession of the Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siemreap, under Siamese suzerainty since the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Siemreap was specially coveted for there lies the monumental site of Angkor, the capital of the Khmer empire from the ninth to the early fifteenth century, which, following the posthumous publication of the travel journals of French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who between 1859 and 1861 had explored the upper Mekong region for the Royal Geographical Society of London, achieved the status of one of the world's archaeological wonders.Footnote 39 King Mongkut had reacted to the news of the ‘discovery’ by Mouhot (whose mission had moved from Bangkok) by having a scale model of Angkor Wat installed inside the Wat Phra Kaeo precinct—a symbolic claim to the Siamese ownership of Angkor that arguably sought to counter colonial expansionism and that ironically foreshadowed the routine display of replicas of Angkor Wat at international and colonial exhibitions since the 1880s.
The establishment in 1898 of the Mission archéologique d'Indochine, whose name changed two years later to École Française d'Extrême-Orient, signalled the transition from the phase of exploration and inventory of Cambodian monuments to that of their study and restoration.Footnote 40 But besides the archaeological fetishism generated by the ‘discovery’ of Angkor and its role in French imperialism,Footnote 41 archaeological investigations by the French were of major significance for Siam, too. In reviewing its first two decades of activity, the École Française d'Extrême-Orient also claimed (not without reasons): ‘the scientific knowledge of Siam is for the most part a French achievement’.Footnote 42 The lack until 1904 of a border between Siam and Cambodia had facilitated French missions whose aim was to survey monumental remains as a way of mapping the full extension of the Khmer empire and on that basis pursue territorial claims vis-à-vis Siam. Following the pioneering exploration of the upper Mekong region in 1866–1868 by Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier (who removed a large quantity of statues from sanctuaries in both Cambodian and Siamese areas), the mission of Louis Delaporte in 1873 reported that the most significant Khmer monumental remains were located on Siamese territory. In 1881 Etienne Aymonier led a mission whose findings were published 20 years later in two volumes dealing, respectively, with Khmer ruins found in Cambodia, and in the Cambodian provinces under Siamese suzerainty.Footnote 43 In the early 1890s, architect Lucien Fournereau inspected several ancient monuments in Siam, of which he drew plans and took photographs.Footnote 44 E.-E. Lunet de Lajonquière, who completed the inventory of Khmer monuments initiated by Aymonier, also conducted an archaeological survey in Siam from October 1904 to May 1905; from April to October 1908 he embarked on a second mission under the Siamese government's aegis and the personal supervision of Prince Damrong, who had made the acquaintance of the Frenchman in 1905. The missions’ findings were published between 1909 and 1912.Footnote 45
Archaeology at the turn of the twentieth century was intertwined with so-called race science, which regarded biological factors as the reason for physical as well as cultural differences amongst peoples.Footnote 46 So archaeologists developed a methodology whereby ‘stylistic features constituted reliable clues to the historical and often ethnic origins of the artefact in question’.Footnote 47 École Française d'Extrême-Orient scholars located the origins of the Cambodian monuments in three historical periods with distinct ethnic paternities: the period of the kingdom of Funan (whose name was derived from Chinese sources), which predated the appearance of the Khmers, progenitors of the Cambodians; and the pre-Angkorian; and Angkorian periods of Khmer power.Footnote 48 By attributing the paternity of monuments that Cambodians had been worshipping for centuries as Buddhist shrines to the Hinduized Khmers, colonial scholars denounced the long tradition of circulation of Buddhist texts, rituals and devotional objects between Cambodia and Siam as a degenerative trend that must be reverted and proceeded to do so by reforming the Cambodian Sangha and establishing a philologically ‘correct’ version of the Theravada canon.Footnote 49
Concurrently, French ethnographers classified the Khmers as a distinct race; the ‘Siamese’ (the Thais of Central Siam), instead, were assigned to the ‘Tai’ race together with the Shan and the Lao, from whom, however, the ‘Siamese’ were allegedly distinguished by prolonged racial intermixing (métissage) with Chinese settlers. Such racial categorizations were manipulated by Indochina's colonial authorities to claim protégé status for Siam's non-Thai subjects in the border areas even after the 1904 treaty, by which France had officially renounced to advance extraterritorial claims; but they also unwittingly furnished the ‘scientific’ basis for the Thai nationalists who purported Siam to be chat thai and began discriminating against ethnic minorities within the kingdom.Footnote 50 Prince Damrong himself supported colonial ethnography by distinguishing between the Tai Yai (‘Great Tai’), or Shan, who had settled along the Salween River, and the Tai Noi (‘Little Tai’), the ethnic group to which belonged Siam's ‘Tai’:
When the Tai [Thais] first came into Siam they travelled in small groups. Wherever they settled they submitted to the authority of the peoples who ruled the place. Others followed them, and the Tai population gradually increased. In the course of some time groups achieved self-government and finally became strong enough to set up independent states. . .They invaded Khmer territory and founded independent states in Lan Na. . .and in Lan Chang, i.e., Luang Pra Bang and Vieng Jan [Chiang]. Then they went south and founded a kingdom with its capital at Sukhodaya [Sukhothai], which shortly before B.E. 1800 (say 1250 A.D.) gained control of the whole of Siam.Footnote 51
By the 1920s more theories about the origins of the Thais had been advanced. American missionary W. C. Dodd, in his posthumous book The Tai Race (1923), proposed that the Tai (or Ai-Lao) race had originated in the Altaic region even before the Chinese; its members had then migrated southwards in seven waves, from the sixth century BCE to the 1230s, as a result of progressive displacement by the Chinese, the last wave of migration following Kublai Khan's overthrow of the Tai kingdom of Nanchao in Yunnan.Footnote 52 Dodd's theories were popularized domestically by Khun Wichitmatra's ‘The Origins of the Thai’ (Lak thai, 1928), a foundational text of the ethnic nationalism that by the early 1940s had eventuated into a pan-Thai ideology complete of territorial irredentism.Footnote 53
In 1925 art historian Alfred Salmony, then Deputy Director of the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, produced the first study of Siamese sculpture based on works belonging to public and private collections in Germany. The book's concurrent publication in both French and English can be taken as an indication of a growing international interest in Siamese antiquities. Salmony, who studied at the University of Vienna under the controversial Josef Strzygowsky (an advocate of the superiority of Eastern over Classical art),Footnote 54 confronted the predicament of the ethnic origins of Siamese antiquities at the very start of his study:
From such works of art as are found on Siamese soil it is often impossible to discover the racial affinity of their authors. This fact renders any historical classification by style especially difficult, whereas the European investigator is accustomed to look upon monuments as manifestations of a single race in its own particular habitat. On Siamese soil such a mode of procedure would be practicable only if the people of Upper India as a whole be taken as the originators. Siam would then appear as a part of the artistic province confined within the limits of Upper India. . . .An exact description of the several races recognizable in Siam in the course of history has so far proved beyond the powers of anthropology.Footnote 55
Accordingly, Salmony concluded: ‘Sculpture in Siam expresses the essential truth regarding many peoples. . .There is, therefore, no such thing as a Siamese sculpture with separate and distinct stylistic epochs—only a sculpture in Siam. . . .One preponderate occurrence set the final and definite stamp upon it. . .the immigration of the Thai’.Footnote 56 While Salmony inexplicably dated this immigration to the beginning of the Common Era, he considered it critical for the development of art in Siam; but his claim that there were no bases for identifying distinct stylistic periods in the ancient art of Siam was contradicted, only a few months later (and without apparent knowledge of his book), by Prince Damrong.
The history of Siamese art in the Bangkok Museum
Despite an increasing appreciation of antiquities as evidence of Siam's civilizational lineage, only in 1924 did the government make an institutional commitment to their recovery and conservation with the establishment of the Archaeological Service. A Fine Arts Department (krom sinlapakon), which is presently the agency in charge of museums, archaeological excavations and historic conservation, had already been established in 1912, but its task was reviving traditional craftsmanship, similar to art schools in colonial India. The only institution entrusted with historical investigation in the first quarter of the century was the Royal Capital City Library, where palm-leaf manuscripts, early printed material and also stone inscriptions were conserved.Footnote 57 Formed in 1905 by the amalgamation of the palace's Wachirayan Library and two monastic collections of manuscripts, the Royal Capital Library was directed by Prince Damrong from 1915, when he retired from his office as minister of the Interior, until 1933, when he exiled himself to Penang (British Malaya) following the overthrow of the absolute monarchy the previous year. During his term as the library director, Prince Damrong initiated the publication of manuscripts and the custom of printing volumes for distribution at the cremation of members of the court and the nobility. Following the Rankean injunction to approach historical documents philologically in order to recover the past ‘as it really happened’, Prince Damrong compared and collated extant versions of court chronicles, which were printed with his lengthy introductions. In so doing, he literally ‘edited’ Siamese history and created an image of the Thais as being characterized, in his own words, by ‘love of national independence, toleration and power of assimilation’.Footnote 58
At the end of 1917, after Siam had declared war against the Central Empires in October, the library's chief secretary, the German Oscar Frankfurter (also president of the Siam Society for a decade), left Bangkok to avoid internment. In search of a substitute, Prince Damrong (who, in the meantime, had become a corresponding member of École Française d'Extrême-Orient) approached George Coedès, a 30-year old epigraphist who had been working at the school's headquarters in Hanoi since 1911. The decision to hire a Frenchman must have been carefully weighted by Damrong; Coedès, on his part, needed the authorization of the Governor-General of Indochina, Albert Sarraut, to accept the Siamese offer. During his stay in Bangkok, which lasted until 1929, when he returned to Hanoi to head the school, Coedès was instrumental in effecting several institutional initiatives and also extremely productive in his research. By the time the Archaeological Service was created in 1924, he had established on the basis of epigraphic evidence the dynastic chronology of the kingdom of Sukhothai and redacted a complete edition of its inscriptions (dating in the process the Ramkhamhaeng stele to 1292 CE).Footnote 59 In the second half of the 1920s, whilst heading the Archaeological Service, Coedès also acted as president of the Siam Society.
One of the last official acts of the Sixth Reign, the Archaeological Service was instituted by royal decree on 17 January 1924 ‘in consideration of the many vestiges of monuments and artefacts created by past kings and artists, and of the fact that such archaeological remains have an important historical value and can contribute to increasing knowledge of the past for the country's benefit and glory’.Footnote 60 The decree specified the service's five objectives:
(1) inventorying the archaeological finds and ancient monuments worthy of study and conservation in the national interest;
(2) prescribing methods of conservation for such finds and monuments;
(3) overseeing and advising the officers assigned to conserve antiquities;
(4) liaising with officers, provincial commissioners and ministers on matters pertaining to the service's duty;
(5) submitting an annual report of activities to the sovereign.Footnote 61
The rationalization of government resources at the start of King Prajadiphok's reign (1925–1935), made necessary by the excessive expenditure of the previous reign, caused the merger of the Royal Library, the Fine Arts Department, the Archaeological Service and the Bangkok Museum into the Royal Institute for the Arts (sinlapakon sathan), founded in April 1926. Prince Damrong and George Coedès were nominated, respectively, the Institute's president and chief secretary, the latter being in charge of the Archaeological Section, which combined the museum and the former Archaeological Service. Coedès also drafted the first law regulating the export of antiquities, which was promulgated in October 1926. A month later, on 14 November, King Prajadhipok inaugurated the revamped Museum for the Royal Capital City (phiphithaphan sathan samrap phra nakhon). But even though the designation of National Museum (phiphithaphan sathan haeng chat) was adopted only after the institution of the constitutional government in 1932, Coedès described his curatorial efforts as aimed at ‘creating a truly national museum devoted to the arts and archaeology of Siam’ and entitled his monograph about it accordingly.Footnote 62
The creation of a ‘truly national museum’ was pursued on two parallel levels: museological and art historical. This synergy can be appreciated in the light of Preziosi's argument that ‘in a substantive manner the theoretical and methodological discourse of the new discipline of art history is in a variety of ways itself an artefact of museological practices, a product of all that the museum as an epistemological technology affords’.Footnote 63 Museologically, selected artefacts from monasteries and provincial museums, the Ministry of Interior's collection and archaeological finds stored in the Library, as well as 60 Buddha images donated by the king and Prince Damrong's loaned personal collection were transferred to the museum (whose holdings also included coins, ceramics, fabrics, and royal paraphernalia), and catalogued and exhibited according to curatorial practice.Footnote 64 Art historically, the stylistic and chronological classification of Siamese antiquities into eight schools—Dvaravati, Srivijaya, Lopburi, Chiangsaen, Sukhothai, Uthong, Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin—invested them with new meaning as documentary evidence of the nation's historical unfolding.
Because of Prince Damrong's and George Coedès’ close collaboration over the previous decade, this classification must be regarded as a joint endeavour, combining the former's knowledge of written sources and the monumental remains scattered throughout the kingdom and the latter's mastery of epigraphic records in Pali, Sanskrit, Khmer and Thai as well as his familiarity with Chinese texts. Indeed, the chronological framework on which the classification rested was drawn largely from epigraphic evidence. In the 1930s Coedès utilized this same method to establish the chronology of Angkor's monuments: ‘Its effectiveness’, he explained, ‘was due to a collaboration between epigraphy and the history of art. Epigraphy furnished the historical background and a few reliable dates as guideposts. The minute study of the evolution of artistic forms established a relative chronology of the monuments, which the epigraphic evidence corroborated’.Footnote 65 Coedès’ method adhered to the prevailing consensus on the order of importance of archaeological finds as including first manuscripts and inscriptions, next monumental sculpture and lastly artefacts (such as pottery and implements). This hierarchy, though partly dictated by official patrons, also reflected archaeologists’ sharing of ‘the historians’ presumption that only texts could generate legitimate scholarly interpretations, while artefacts supplied at best indirect, ambiguous proofs.’Footnote 66
By assimilating art styles to the rise and fall of polities, Prince Damrong and Coedès, however, conflated the history of art with political history, relying on the former to fill in the documentary lacunae of the latter and on the latter to provide a temporal framework for the former. The earliest school in the art historical periodization provides a good illustration of their circular approach. ‘Dvaravati’, a Sanskrit term meaning ‘eight-gated city’, appears in Ayutthaya's ceremonial name. In the early 1900s École Française d'Extrême-Orient's sinologist, Paul Pelliot, who identified ‘Dvaravati’ with the toponym ‘To-lo-po-ti’ that occurs in seventh-century Chinese sources, had attempted to identify the traces of a polity with this name in the Chaophraya basin—Ayutthaya itself being not ancient enough to match the Chinese sources. Damrong and Coedès posited that the kingdom of Dvaravati was centred at Nakhon Pathom, where the oldest antiquities had been discovered thus far: stone and bronze Buddha images, bas-reliefs and votive tablets in stone and stucco dating from the sixth to the eleventh century.Footnote 67 Coedès also identified the people of Dvaravati as being of Mon ethnicity.Footnote 68 A linkage was thus established between antiquities without clear historical origin and a kingdom without a certain territorial location.Footnote 69
The name ‘Srivijaya’ too had been derived from inscriptions as that of a kingdom centred in Palembang (southern Sumatra), which Coedès regarded as the suzerain of principalities in the Malay Peninsula from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.Footnote 70 The hypothetical kingdom of Srivijiya was then turned into an artistic style to classify Mahayana stupas and bronze images found in the peninsular cities of Chaiya and Nakhon Si Thammarat (named Ligor in inscriptions) and in the Suratthani province, dating from around 750 CE and showing similarities to contemporary Javanese bronze sculpture and architecture, typified by the Borobodur monumental complex.Footnote 71 But the stylistic diversity of the antiquities found in Peninsular Siam led Coedès to propose that the region must have been Indianized before the establishment of Srivijayan suzerainty—and, hence, through an alternative source of influence.Footnote 72
Given the mention of Lopburi (Lavo in Mon inscriptions) in epigraphic records as an outpost of the Angkorean empire, and the fact that in the very centre of the town stands the ruined Wat Phra Prang Sam Yot with its Khmer-style spires, its use as an art historical label was hardly controversial According to Prince Damrong, the Buddhist images of the Lopburi period ‘are characterized by a new style that results from a synthesis of Dvaravati and Khmer types’, even though ‘the style is closely related to that of ancient Cambodia, and it flourished when the Khmer were ruling this country’.Footnote 73 This explanation begged the question, raised by Coedès and which is still being debated today, of whether such images were the work of ‘provincial’ Khmer artisans, who spread Angkor metropolitan style in the empire's outer regions, or rather of ‘foreign imitators’, who appropriated and localized that style. At any rate, Coedès regarded the Lopburi school's production as signalling ‘a period of decadence or, more precisely, of transition’ as opposed to the ‘classic’ Khmer style of Angkor.Footnote 74
The Chiangsaen period, next, was intended by Prince Damrong as an umbrella term for the sculpture and architecture of the northern kingdom of Lan Na. Damrong distinguished on stylistic grounds two sub-periods: one coinciding with Burmese rule, when Indian styles had reached northern Siam via Pagan; and a subsequent period, starting with the Thai ‘conquest’ in the mid-thirteenth-century, when Sinhalese artistic influences were prevalent.Footnote 75 But Coedès, who traced the iconography of these Buddha images—seated cross-legged on lotus blossoms—to the Indian sculpture of the Magadha kingdom during the Pala dynasty (eighth to twelfth centuries), in the museum grouped under the label of Chiangsaen school only images that appeared to stylistically predate the diffusion of the Sukhothai school's style in northern Siam from the fourteenth century onwards.Footnote 76
Artistic originality and will to power converged in the emergence of the Thai kingdom of Sukhothai in the mid thirteenth century, whose sculpture and architecture were hailed accordingly as the apex of art in Siam and evidence of the national genius. This emplotment of the blooming of ‘Thai’ art within a triumphant political narrative was well served by the novel iconography of the Buddha images recovered in the area of Sukhothai, Sawankhalok and Phitsanulok: supple bronze images in seated, standing and, most characteristically, walking postures, with oval faces, hooked noses, arched eyebrows, and lowered eyelids, which were appraised as the ‘classic’ Thai statuary—the result of the skilful combination of Khmer, Burmese and Sinhalese stylistic and iconographic motifs. ‘The Siamese’, wrote Prince Damrong, ‘do not reject the good and the beautiful just because it is of foreign origin. They borrowed the good and the beautiful features of various different styles and merged them together. In this way the characteristic style of Sukhodayan Buddhist art was formed, whose qualities are unsurpassed by any other period’.Footnote 77 Three decades later, Griswold rephrased Damrong's ideas thus: ‘The profound originality of Sukhodayan art lies not in the invention of meaningless new forms, but in harmonious eclecticism’.Footnote 78
Noted Anglo-Ceylonese art historian, A. K. Coomaraswamy, in a book published just a year after that of Damrong, dated the appearance of Thai ‘classic’ images to the turn of the second millennium. According to Coomaraswamy, ‘quite definitely by the tenth and eleventh centuries the classic Siamese (Thai) type emerges and asserts itself. . . .The Buddha heads referable to the classic Thai period, as well as those from Phitsanulok, dating from about 1000 AD, are the supreme achievement of the Thai genius’.Footnote 79 But Coedès took issue with Coomaraswamy's (and Salmony's) early dating of ‘the classic Siamese type’ and countered that it was not possible to speak of ‘Siamese’ art before the thirteenth century, for the polished images praised by Coomaraswamy could have hardly been created by ‘tribes’ still subjected to Khmer authority and depicted in an Angkor Wat bas-relief with the outfits and demeanour of ‘véritable sauvages’.Footnote 80 Coedès invoked savagery to set the still barbaric twelfth-century Thais apart from their civilized Khmer masters and thus buttress the role of Sukhothai as the birthplace of the Thai nation. There, wrote Coedès in his masterwork, L’États hindouisés d'Indochine et d'Indonésie, ‘between 1250 and 1350, the Siamese were able to develop their own characteristic civilization, institutions and art’.Footnote 81
The canonization of the Sukhothai school as Siam's classic art entailed the dismissal of the Ayutthaya period (1350–1767) as being marked by the exhaustion of a stylistic formula and lack of creative power. And if Prince Damrong subdivided Ayutthaya's architecture into four sub-periods with distinct features,Footnote 82 Coedès, for his part, liquidated four centuries of sculpture under the single adjective ‘mediocre’. But he also made, within the museum's rooms, an addition to Damrong's classification: the Uthong school, so named after a principality in the lower Chaophraya basin whose last eponymous ruler was believed to be the founder of Ayutthaya. Uthong's supposed historical role as a trait d'union between the kingdoms of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya was translated by Coedès into a transitional art style that was employed to classify images recovered in the Chaophraya basin, which were reputed to be anterior to the Ayutthaya school and characterized by the mix of the Lopburi school's Khmer style and the Sukhothai school's Thai style.Footnote 83
Ten years later, the Damrong-Coedès art historical periodization was reworked by Reginald Le May—ex-British consul in Chiang Mai turned government adviser, turned art connoisseur, and avid antiques collector—into, in his own words, ‘a connected history of the different forms of Buddhist art which have flourished in Siam from the early years of the Christian era up to the end of the sixteenth century’. Le May too emphasized at the start the need ‘for a clear understanding of the racial movements which have given rise to all its [Siam's] various school of arts’ and went on to present a ninth-fold classification, building upon the scholarship produced in the intervening decade.Footnote 84 Le May notably proposed that the Chiangsaen school may have predated the Sukhothai school, even though it was only the latter that produced the ‘ideal’ form, and hence that ‘the artistic development of the Tai did not necessarily correspond with the period of their independence’.Footnote 85 Le May also used to great effect a botanical analogy to express the paradox of Sukhothai's single century of artistic splendour:
Once the Tai had firmly established their dominion over the country from Sawankhalok in the north to Nakhon Si Thammarat in the south, the national art which was formed out of a coalescence of all the earlier forces and currents quickly blossomed and as quickly faded, just as we see the brilliant, scarlet blooms of the Flamboyant tree suddenly burst upon us in April in all their glory and then, within one short month, fall to the ground and wither away.Footnote 86
Le May's ‘organic’ view of Siam's artistic development was redolent of the periodization of Greek art as comprising an Archaic period, which prepared for the Classical period of the fifth century BCE, when stylistic perfection was achieved, as well as the protracted decadence of the Hellenistic period (fourth to first century BCE). King Ramkhamhaeng's Sukhothai thus implicitly paralleled Pericles’ Athens as the golden age of an archetypical nation to which the modern nation looked as the source of its identity. In a public lecture on ‘Sukhothai Culture’ in March 1940 to divulge his neologism for ‘culture’ (watthanatham), Luang Wichit Watthakan, the chief nationalist ideologue, praised King Ramkhamhaeng's achievements, from roads and irrigation works to religious monuments and the alphabet, and opined: ‘Thailand was a strong and vibrant nation in the Sukhothai period. . .and in the time that has elapsed since then we should have made great progress. . . .[But] it was not possible, since we cast off our fundamental culture’. Tellingly, Luang Wichit blamed this decline on the prevalence of Khmer cultural influences during the Ayutthaya period which, except for the reigns of the two warrior-kings Naresuan and Narai, he curtly dismissed as ‘but a waste of time’.Footnote 87
Conclusion
Recovered from oblivion since the 1830s by King Mongkut's antiquarian pursuits, the kingdom of Sukhothai was by the 1920s firmly established as modern Thailand's golden age: a place and a time when emancipation from Khmer rule was matched by the invention of the Thai alphabet and the creation of unparalleled works of art inspired by Theravada Buddhism—the ‘national’ faith. This myth of foundation had, moreover, a twin in the myth of the Thai adroitness at appropriating and inventively adapting foreign knowledge, as remarked by Prince Damrong: ‘The Tai knew how to pick and choose. When they saw some good feature in the culture of other peoples, if it was not in conflict with their own interests, they did not hesitate to borrow it and adapt it to their own requirements’.Footnote 88 Okakura Kakuzo too, when writing about Japanese art a few years earlier, had argued that the ‘special skill of harmonizing objects from foreign countries is unique to the Yamato people’.Footnote 89 Whereas these parallel claims about the ability to adapt foreign cultural materials to the local context as being a ‘national’ characteristic of both the Thais and the Japanese deserves separate analysis, it is easy to relate them to the two countries’ increasing dealings with the colonial powers since the 1850s, which led to the selective appropriation and adaptation of Western intellectual, scientific and material culture in support of the local monarchies and their state and nation-building projects. The involvement of Western scholars in the creation of art historical knowledge that was mobilized to the quest for national origins in both turn-of-the-century Japan and Siam further invites a reconsideration of the politics of Orientalist scholarship, given that its methodologies and institutions were deployed also in the service of indigenous projects of power and knowledge that countered Western imperialism.Footnote 90
The use of antiquities as physical evidence of the nation's ancient origins required that they be placed conceptually in an art historical narrative and physically inside museums. The formulation of the stylistic periodization of Siamese art cannot be separated from the concurrent re-foundation of the Bangkok National Museum, which served as both the model of and the model for such a project of knowledge. Within its rooms, Siam's historical landscape, as delimited by the territorial boundaries demarcated at the turn of the century, was mapped out spatially as well as chronologically. Concurrently, religious images that had been created as devotional objects, acquired the epistemic status of exhibits, each constituting an exemplar of interrelated classes of similarly classified artefacts that acted as signposts of Siam's national self-realization. In fairness, George Coedès himself, in reviewing Le May's book, openly stated that he intended the classification to be provisional and open to revision.Footnote 91 In fact, no revision has taken place; the four-fold classification into Mon, Khmer, Thai and Peninsular styles, proposed by art historian Piriya Krairikisch, in an exhibition held at the National Museum in 1977, caused sceptical and even hostile responses.Footnote 92
But whilst Prince Damrong's and Coedès’ canonical classifications continue to inform most art histories of Thailand,Footnote 93 the search for national origins has moved since the 1980s to the terrain of prehistory. Archaeologist Srisakra Vallibothama has rejected Sukhothai's foundational role as the first instantiation of the Thai nation and put forth the notion of a much earlier ‘basin of life in antiquity’ in Isan, Thailand's ethnically Lao northeastern region, where Bronze and Neolithic artefacts have been excavated since the 1960s.Footnote 94 Yet, even though prehistoric artefacts from Isan are on display in the Bangkok National Museum, the Ban Chiang culture (from the eponymous village where such archaeological finds were first excavated) occupies an uncertain place in the national narrative. The pervasiveness of Thailand's myth of foundation, validated internationally by the inscription of Sukhothai (and its satellite centres, Si Satchanalai and Khamphaneg Phet) on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991, shines through the following statement from a recent book by two archaeologists: ‘With the establishment of Sukhothai and the dynasty of which Ramkhamhaeng was a member, we encounter a society within which any modern Thai would have felt at ease’.Footnote 95 Not everywhere is the past a foreign country.
