1 - Old Bangkok: An Ethnohistorical Overview

Summary

Bangkok, the capital of Siam since 1782, served from the outset as the kingdom's ceremonial, administrative, commercial, and demographic centre — a primate city in every sense of the term. In speaking of its “premodern” phase, 1782–1910, covering the first five reigns of the Chakri dynasty, the city is conventionally referred to as Old Bangkok, or more formally, Ratanakosin. Thus, the 129-year time span from 1782 to 1910 may be termed the Ratanakosin period. As Ratanakosin, the city is often visualized as the walled and moated artificial island that still carries its name, but the physical contours of Old Bangkok reached well beyond those confines to incorporate the densely populated urban periphery. From the very outset, the Bangkok conurbation expanded progressively in area and population, attracting a diverse citizenry representing a multiplicity of ethnic communities while expediting Siam's growing prosperity and accelerating modernization. Yet, until the rise of the absolute monarchy and nationalism in the decades crossing into the twentieth century, Old Bangkok retained much of the feudal political and social alignment that had in former centuries characterized the ancestral capital of Ayutthaya. This introductory chapter briefly surveys Old Bangkok's spatial design, political structure, social organization, and ethnic diversity in their historical context as background to the five historical studies of the city's principal ethnic minorities that follow in Chapters 2 to 6, plus the five summary ethnohistories of lesser communities contained in Chapter 7. In fact, the present chapter can be considered to add yet a further ethnohistory in its discussion of the role played by Old Bangkok's Thai ruling elite and Thai commons in the city's nineteenth–twentieth century modernization.

RATANAKOSIN, THE JEWEL OF INDRA

City of Angels, Great Metropolis, Excellent Jewel of Indra [demiurge of the Vedic heavens], Capital of the World, Endowed with the Nine Precious Gems [divine virtues], Happy City Abounding in Great Royal Palaces, Replica of the Celestial City Founded by Indra and Built by Vishvakarman [Indra' architect], City Wherein Dwell Vishnu's Avatars [the Chakri dynasty kings, also associated with such kindred celestial avatars as Rama and Buddha] (Thipakorawong 2009a, p. 75).