7 - Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam

Summary

On the evening of 2 December 1907, before an audience of noblemen and state officials who had gathered in the ruined city of Ayutthaya for a three-day festive extravaganza, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V, r. 1868– 1910) gave the inaugural speech to the Archaeological (or Antiquarian) Society (Borankhadi Samosom). Its objective, the sovereign explained, was the recovery of physical remains of the past as a means to compensate for the dearth of written documents and thus make possible the compilation of a history of Siam covering the last thousand years. The exhortation was put into practice the following day, which was devoted to a sightseeing tour of the local ruins. As the culmination of several decades of royal antiquarian pursuits and a response to the establishment of the Siam Society by a group of expatriates in 1904, the founding of the Archaeological Society signalled the intention of systematically investigating the realm's historical landscape in the wake of its territorial and cartographic configuration as a modern state at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It is hardly surprising to see Siam's status as the only formally independent country in Southeast Asia highlighted at the very beginning of a recent book on Thailand's prehistory in order to distinguish the history of archaeology there from that of the rest of the region: “The colonial powers introduced their traditional methods for archaeological research. … Only Thailand stood firmly against the colonial tide, and in consequence, looked to its own resources. This came with royal inspiration.” Along with the three kings—Mongkut, Chulalongkorn and Vajiravudh—whose reigns spanned the period 1851 to 1925, much of this inspiration is credited to Prince Damrong Rachanubhab (1862–1943), the leading antiquarian of his time as well as the architect of the administrative centralization of the kingdom. Prince Damrong, who is memorialized in the national pantheon as the ‘father of Thai history’, wrote extensively on a variety of historical subjects, surveyed ancient sites, and played a pivotal role in the establishment of the cultural institutions (that is, the National Library and the National Museum) that were inherited by the constitutional government after the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932.