Ayutthaya

In 1685 an embassy sent by Louis XIV of France rowed up the Chao Phraya for days and arrived at a city the envoys struggled to describe in their letters home. An island wrapped by three rivers, cut by canals, crowned with gilded spires; along its banks a Dutch East India Company warehouse, quarters for Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Persian merchants, a Jesuit church. The king's most trusted minister was a Greek adventurer named Constantine Phaulkon. Ayutthaya was then among the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia; some visitors compared it to Paris. Within eighty years no one would live there at all.

A City The Rivers Chose

The city was founded in 1351 by a prince known as U Thong, who took the throne as Ramathibodi I. The site did the work. The Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak rivers meet here and enclose a natural island; with a moat completed around it, the city became a fortress that flooded its own surroundings every rainy season. A besieging army had a few dry months to get in before the water rose. The same river ran to the Gulf of Siam, and seagoing ships could sail all the way up to the quays. Unlike Sukhothai, the inland kingdom it eclipsed, Ayutthaya was built to face the sea.

For over four centuries, more than thirty kings from five dynasties ruled from this island. The palace stood at the northern end, and beside it the royal temple, Wat Phra Si Sanphet, whose three great bell-shaped chedis, built in the fifteenth century to hold the ashes of three kings, are still the most recognisable silhouette of the site. Rice went out to China, deerskins and sappanwood to Japan; Indian cloth and Japanese silver came in. Under King Narai in the seventeenth century the trade grew large enough that Siam and the courts of Europe were exchanging ambassadors.

Falling Twice

War with Burma to the west runs through the whole story. A Burmese army took the city for the first time in 1569, and Siam spent fifteen years as a vassal state before a prince named Naresuan reclaimed its independence. His duel with the Burmese crown prince, fought from the backs of war elephants, remains one of the founding scenes of Thai national memory.

The second fall was final. In 1765 King Hsinbyushin of Burma's Konbaung dynasty sent two armies converging on the city. The siege lasted more than a year, and this time the Burmese did not retreat when the rains came; they dug in on high ground and waited. In April 1767 the walls were breached. What followed is not softened even in the Burmese chronicles. The palace was burned, Buddha images were set on fire to melt the gold off them, libraries went up in smoke, and tens of thousands of inhabitants were marched away as captives. Everything made of wood disappeared. What survived were the brick chedis and prangs, and a great hole in the record: most of the written history of four centuries of Siam vanished in that week, which is why the city's past is now reconstructed partly from the diaries of foreign traders and missionaries.

The city was never the capital again. When the Burmese pulled back to fight a Chinese invasion, the general who rallied Siam, Taksin, built his capital downstream at Thonburi; in 1782 his successor crossed the river to found Bangkok and a new dynasty. Bricks for Bangkok's first palaces and temples were pulled from the ruins of Ayutthaya and floated down the river. The old capital became raw material for the new one.

The Room Under The Tower

Wat Ratchaburana was founded in 1424 by King Borommaracha II on the spot where his two elder brothers, fighting each other on elephant-back for the throne, had both died. Beneath the central prang lay a crypt that nobody entered for more than five hundred years. In 1957 a group of thieves did. They carried off part of what they found, gold vessels, jewelled swords, fragments of regalia, and were caught; the Fine Arts Department then excavated the rest, including thousands of small votive tablets. The walls of the crypt turned out to be painted with fifteenth-century murals showing Chinese and Sri Lankan influence, a physical record of how far the city's connections reached. The treasure is now in the Chao Sam Phraya Museum a short walk away.

The more famous detail sits at Wat Mahathat: a sandstone Buddha head held in the roots of a bodhi tree. Nobody knows exactly how it got there. The likeliest story is that it fell from a statue broken in 1767 and the tree grew around it over the following two centuries. The most photographed thing in Ayutthaya was made by no one, and not quite by nature either.

Today

The ruins have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1991 and are managed by Thailand's Fine Arts Department. The modern town occupies the east of the island, the historical park the middle, and visitors cycle from chedi to chedi. The main threat is the same water that made the city: when the Chao Phraya flooded in 2011 the park stood under water for weeks and brick foundations soaked up the mud. The rivers chose this place six hundred years ago, and they still decide who keeps it.