Modern Asian Studies 47, 5 (2013) pp. 1520–1548.


c Cambridge University Press 2013
doi:10.1017/S0026749X12000224 First published online 1 February 2013

From Buddhist Icons to National

Antiquities: Cultural Nationalism and
Colonial Knowledge in the Making of
Thailand’s History of Art
M AURIZIO PELEGGI

National University of Singapore

Email: hismp@nus.edu.sg

Abstract
In the mid 1920s Prince Damrong Rajanubhab and George Coedès jointly
formulated the stylistic classification of Thailand’s antiquities that was employed
to reorganize the collection of the Bangkok Museum and has since acquired
canonical status. The reorganization of the Bangkok Museum as a ‘national’
institution in the final years of royal absolutism responded to increasing
international interest in the history and ancient art of Southeast Asia, but
represented also the culmination of several decades of local antiquarian pursuits.
This paper traces the origins of the art history of Thailand to the intellectual
and ideological context of the turn of the twentieth century and examines its
parallelism to colonial projects of knowledge that postulated a close linkage
between race, ancestral territory and nationhood.

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,1 wrote and printed for free distribution at his mother’s
cremation in 1926 a memorial volume entitled, ‘A history of Buddhist

1
In this paper ‘Siam’ is used as the country’s name prior to 1939 and ‘Thailand’
for the following period according to the official date of the name change; ‘Siamese’
is meant as adjectival of ‘Siam’, not as a noun for the country’s inhabitants except
when occurring in quotations; ‘Thais’ (and, in some quotations, ‘Tai’) refers to the
members of the ethnic group, not to Thailand’s inhabitants as a whole. Personal names
are Romanized according to each individual’s preferred form whilst Thai words are

1520
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1521
monuments’.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.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.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

Romanized according to the Royal Institute System of Phonetic Transcription, but

without diacritic marks.
2
Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, Tamnan phraphuttha chedi (Bangkok: Sophon
Phiphattanakon, BE 2469 [1926]).
3
This ninth chapter, ‘Phuttha chedi nai sayam prathet’ (Buddhist reminders in Siam),
and the previous eighth chapter, ‘Phutthasasana nai prathet sayam’ (Buddhism in Siam),
which together make up almost half the book, were first published in English with the
title A History of Buddhist Monuments in Siam, trans. Sulak Sivaraksa (Bangkok: Siam
Society, 1962); and republished in a revised translation as Monuments of the Buddha in
Siam, trans. Sulak Sivaraksa and A. B. Griswold (Bangkok: Siam Society, 1973; repr.
Bangkok: Diskul Foundation, 1982). Whereas the Thai word chedi (from Pali cetiya)
commonly indicates a stupa (a monumental reliquary), Prince Damrong follows the
canonical typology in which cetiya designates four types of physical ‘reminder’ of the
Buddha: dhatucetiya or bodily relics (including stupas containing relics); dhammacetiya
or doctrinal reminders (the Pali Canon and inscriptions); paribhogacetiya or reminders
by association (footprints, the Bodhi tree and sites associated with the Buddha’s life);
and uddesikacetiya or indicative reminders (iconic and aniconic representations of the
Buddha as well as copies of paribhogacetiya, that is, stupa that do not contain relics).
See Griswold’s introduction to Monuments of the Buddha, pp. v–vi, and his essay, ‘The
Sculpture and Architecture of Siam’, in Theodore Bowie (ed.), The Arts of Thailand
(Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University, 1960), pp. 25–165.
4
George Coedès, Les Collections archéologiques du Musée National de Bangkok, Ars
Asiatica Series, vol. 12 (Paris and Brussels: G. Van Oest, 1928). An abridged Thai-
language version was also printed as a guidebook to the museum: Boranwatthu nai
phiphithaphan sathan samrap phranakhon [Antiquities in the Royal Capital City Museum]
(Bangkok B.E. 2471 [1928]).
1522 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

topography preceded that of its physical landscape—and, like the

latter, saw the crucial involvement of Europeans.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’.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.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

5
See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
6
Charles Higham and Rachanie Thorasat, Prehistoric Thailand: From Early Settlement
to Sukhothai (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 7.
7
Thongchai Winichakul, ‘The Quest for “Siwilai”: A Geographical Discourse of
Civilizational Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Siam’,
Journal of Asian Studies 59:3 (2000): 528–549.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1523
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’.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.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’,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.11 These preceding stages are

8
Donald Preziosi, ‘In the Temple of Entelechy: The Museum as Evidentiary
Artefact’, in Gwendolyn Wright (ed.), The Formation of National Collections of Art
and Archaeology (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1996), p. 170 (original
emphasis).
9
Stephan Tanaka, ‘Imaging History: Inscribing Belief in the Nation’, Journal of
Asian Studies, 53:1 (1994): 24–44
10
Tanaka, ‘Imaging History’, p. 32.
11
See Maurizio Peleggi, ‘Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism and the
Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam’, in Srilata Ravi, Mario
Rutten and Beng-Lan Goh (eds), Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia (Singapore: Institute
of South-East Asian Studies and Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies,
2004), pp. 133–161.
1524 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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.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 Bangkok13 ) 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.14

12
Maurizio Peleggi, Thailand: The Worldly Kingdom (London: Reaktion Books, 2007),
pp. 10–12 and Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Public Image
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 11–14.
13
See Camille Notton, The Chronicle of the Emerald Buddha (Bangkok: Bangkok Times
Press, 1933).
14
Prasert Na Nagara and A. B. Griswold, Epigraphic and Historical Studies (Bangkok:
The Historical Society, 1992), p. 393; A. B. Griswold, What is a Buddha Image? (Bangkok:
Fine Arts Department, 4th edn, 1990), p. 16.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1525
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).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.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.17 This epistemic shift is

15
Craig J. Reynolds, ‘Buddhist Cosmography in Thai History with Special
Reference to Nineteenth-Century Cultural Change’, Journal of Asian Studies 35:2
(1976): 203–220; see also his Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian
Pasts (Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Singapore University
Press, 2006), Chapter 8.
16
Chaophraya Thipakorawong, The Dynastic Chronicles of the Fourth Reign, trans.
Chadin Flood, vol. II (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1966),
pp. 496–518. See also Denis Byrne, ‘Buddhist Stupa and Thai Social Practice’, World
Archaeology 27:2 (1995): 272, 274–275.
17
See Charnvit Kasetsiri, ‘Thai Historiography from Ancient Times to the Modern
Period’, in Anthony Reid and David Marr (eds), Perceptions of the Past in Southeast
Asia (Singapore: Heinemann, 1979), pp. 156–170; and Atthachak Sattayanurak, The
1526 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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.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’.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.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.21
The efflorescence of national museums in nineteenth-century
Europe bespoke ‘an era when the passions of historical collecting

Formation of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam: An Analysis of its Intellectual Aspects (Kyoto:
Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993).
18
Reynolds, ‘Buddhist Cosmography’, pp. 214–215.
19
John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam, vol. II (London: J. W. Parker, 1857),
p. 279.
20
Dhanit Yupo, The Development of National Museums in Thailand (Bangkok: Fine Arts
Department, 3rd edn, 1990), p. 3.
21
Thongchai, ‘The Quest for “Siwilai”’, p. 543.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1527
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’.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’.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.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.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’.26 Elsewhere
Prince Damrong wrote that the images served ‘for public worship
and as models for people to copy when making new images’.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’,28

22
Susan A. Crane, ‘Story, History, and the Passionate Collector’, in Martin Myrone
and Lucy Peltz (eds), Producing the Past: Aspects of Antiquarian Culture and Practice 1700–
1850 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 187.
23
Tiffany Sutton, The Classification of Visual Art: A Philosophical Myth and its History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 20.
24
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 8–9.
25
Peleggi, Lords of Things, pp. 86–87.
26
Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, ‘Wat Benchamabophit and its Collection of Images
of the Buddha’, Journal of the Siam Society 22 (1928): 19–28 (quotation from pp. 20–21).
27
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, p. 39.
28
Griswold, What Is a Buddha Image? p. 16.
1528 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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.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.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 bronzes31 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

29
Damrong, ‘Wat Benchamabophit’, p. 21.
30
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
his Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Hanna Arendt (ed.), trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Shocken Books, 1969), pp. 217–252.
31
See George Coedès, Bronzes khmèrs, Ars Asiatica Series, vol. V (Paris and Brussels:
G. Van Ouest, 1923). Coedès also remarked in Musée de Bangkok (p. 26): ‘On sait que
c’est à Bangkok qu’il faut venir étudier l’art du bronze khmèr.’ ‘It is said that one
must go to Bangkok to study Khmer bronze art.’
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1529
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.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’.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

32
‘The Antiquarian Society Speech of King Chulalongkorn’, trans. Chris Baker,
Journal of the Siam Society 89: 1–2 (2001): 95–99 (quotation from pp. 96, 97). The
Antiquarian Society was launched during royal celebrations, held in the former
royal city of Ayutthaya and staged by Prince Damrong and the provincial governor,
Phraya Boran Boranurak (Lord Preserver of Antiquities), with a historical mise en scène
that included a purpose-built wooden pavilion and olden entertainments, including
a bullock-cart race. For the king’s speech and an account of the celebrations, see
National Archives (comp.), Chotmaihet phra ratcha phithi ratchamangkhala phisek r.s. 126,
127 [Chronicles of the royal jubilee celebrations of 1907 and 1908] (Bangkok: Fine
Arts Department, 1984), pp. 18–25; and Peleggi, Lords of Things, pp. 129–132.
33
Tanaka, ‘Inscribing Belief’, p. 26.
1530 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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’.34 While recent scholarship
has challenged the notion of Vajiravudh’s exclusive paternity of Thai
nationalism,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

34
Quoted in Chawingam Majaroen, ‘Kan song soem khwam ru thang dan sinlapa
watthanatham prawattisat lae borannakhadi nai ratchakan thi 4–7’ [Promotion of
knowledge about art, culture, history and archaeology from the Fourth to Seventh
Reigns], Sinlapakon 18:3 (1974): 70, my translation (‘uncivilized’ transliterated from
English into Thai in the original text).
35
The classic but now badly outdated study in English is Walter Vella, Chaiyo! King
Vajiravudh and the Development of Thai Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1978). On the revisionist historiography on Thai nationalism, see Peleggi, Thailand,
pp. 117–120.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1531
and vice-patron, but expatriates remained the society’s driving force
until 1940.36 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.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

36
Until 1940 the Siam Society’s presidents were all Westerners: W. R .D. Beckett
(1904–1906), O. Frankfurter (1906–1917), H. Campbell Highet (1918–1921),
W. A. Graham (1921–1925), G. Coedès (1925–1930), F. Giles (1930–1938), and
E. Seidenfaden (1938–1940). Afterwards, in an era of nationalist fervour, Thais were
appointed, starting with Prince Dhani Nivat, who served two terms as president over
the next quarter century (1940–1944 and 1947–1965) intermitted by Prince Wan
Waithayakon’s term.
37
On colonial archaeological services, see the considerations in Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Considerations on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 3rd edn, 2006), pp. 178–182; and Tony Day and Craig J. Reynolds,
‘Cosmologies, Truth Regimes and the State in South East Asia’, Modern Asian Studies
34:1 (2000), pp. 18–24.
1532 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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’.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.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.40 But besides the archaeological fetishism
generated by the ‘discovery’ of Angkor and its role in French

38
G. E. Gerini, ‘Siamese Archaeology: A Synoptical Sketch’, in A. C. Carter (ed.),
The Kingdom of Siam (New York: Knickerbockers Press, 1904; reprint Bangkok: Siam
Society, 1988), pp. 213–226 (quotations from pp. 213, 224, 220).
39
Henri Mouhot, Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China (Siam), Cambodia and Laos,
2 vols (London: John Murray, 1864). The French missionary, Father Charles-Émile
Bouillevaux, had reported the existence of monumental ruins at Angkor already in
the 1850s, but failed to excite public interest.
40
See Catherine Clémentine-Ojha and Pierre-Yves Manguin, Un siècle pour l’Asie.
L’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1898–2000 (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient,
2001); Pierre Singaravélou, L’École française d’Extrême-Orient ou l’institution des marges
(1898–1956) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); and Gwendolyn Wright, ‘National Culture
under Colonial Auspices: The École Française d’Extrême-Orient’, in G. Wright (ed.),
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1533
imperialism,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’.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.43 In the early 1890s,
architect Lucien Fournereau inspected several ancient monuments in
Siam, of which he drew plans and took photographs.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 1912.45

Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (Washington, DC: National Gallery
of Art, 1996), pp. 127–142.
41
See Penny Edwards, Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945 (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 2007), Chapter 1.
42
‘. . .la connoisance scientifique du Siam est pour la plus grand part une oeuvre
française’. ‘L’École française d’Extrême-Orient depuis son origine jusq’en 1920’,
Bulletin de l’ École française d’Extrême-Orient [hereafter BEFEO], 21 (1921), p. 313.
43
Louis Delaporte, Voyage au Cambodge. L’architecture Khmère (Paris : Éditions
Delagrave, 1880); Etienne Aymonier, Le Cambodge I. Le royaume actuel and Le Cambodge
II. Les provinces siamoises (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1900–1901), recently published in
English translation as, respectively, Khmer Heritage in the Old Siamese Provinces and
Khmer Heritage in Thailand, trans. W. E. J. Tips (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1999).
44
Lucien Fournereau, Le Siam ancien. Archéologie, épigraphie, géographie, 2 vols, Annales
du Musée Guimet, no. 27 and no. 31 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1895–1908).
45
Étienne-Edmond Lunet de Lajonquière, Inventaire descriptif des monuments du
Cambodge, 2 vols (Paris: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1902–1907); ‘Le domain
archéologique du Siam’, Bulletin de la Commission archéologique de l’Indochine (1909),
1534 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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.46
So archaeologists developed a methodology whereby ‘stylistic features
constituted reliable clues to the historical and often ethnic origins
of the artefact in question’.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.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.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

pp. 188–262; and ‘Essai d’inventaire archéologique du Siam’, Bulletin de la Commission

archéologique de l’Indochine (1912), pp. 19–181.
46
Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. 111.
47
Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in German
Museums’, in Susan A. Crane (ed.), Museums and Memory (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000), p. 196.
48
George Coedès, Angkor: An Introduction, trans. E. F. Gardener (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 1963 [Hanoi, 1943]), pp. 4–5.
49
Edwards, Cambodge, pp. 132–134.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1535
minorities within the kingdom.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.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.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.53
In 1925 art historian Alfred Salmony, then Deputy Director of the
Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne, produced the first study of

50
David Streckfuss, ‘The Mixed Colonial Legacy in Siam: Origins of Thai Racialist
Thought, 1890–1910’, in Laurie J. Sears (ed.), Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths:
Essays in Honour of John R. W. Smail, Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monograph
no. 11 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1993), pp. 123–153. See also
Ronald Renard, ‘The Differential Integration of Hill People into the Thai State’,
in Andrew Turton (ed.), Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Thai States (London:
Curzon, 2000), especially pp. 78–79.
51
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, pp. 3–4, 43–44, and endnotes 19 to 22 (by
A. B. Griswold). The distinction between Tai Yai and Tai Noi is also found in G. E.
Harvey, History of Burma (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1925), p. 4.
52
William Clifton Dodd, The Tai Race Elder Brother of the Chinese: Results of Experiences,
Exploration and Research (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: The Torch Press, 1923). The theory
of the Tai kingdom of Nanchao, proposed by French Sinologists at the turn of the
twentieth century, is today discredited.
53
Peleggi, Thailand, pp. 120–123.
1536 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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),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.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’.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

54
See Suzanne L. Marchand, ‘The Rhetoric of Artefacts and the Decline of Classical
Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory 33:4 (1994), pp. 106–
130.
55
Alfred Salmony, Sculpture in Siam (London: Ernest Benn, 1925), p. 1; French
edition, La sculpture au Siam (Paris: G. Van Oest, 1925).
56
Salmony, Sculpture in Siam, p. 45 (original emphasis).
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1537
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.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’.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

57
See Patrick Jory, ‘Books and the Nation: The Making of Thailand’s National
Library’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 31:2 (2000): 351–373.
58
Prince Damrong Rajanubhab, Laksana kanpokkhrong prathet sayam tae boran [The
nature of government in Siam since antiquity] (Bangkok: 1927), pp. 6–7.
1538 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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).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’.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.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

59
George Coedès, ‘The Origins of the Sukhodayan Dynasty’, Journal of the Siam
Society 14:1 (1921): 1–11; and Recueil des inscriptions du Siam. Première partie: Inscriptions
de Sukhodaya (Bangkok: Bangkok Times Press, 1924). Before leaving Siam, Coedès
published a second volume on inscriptions in languages other than Thai: Recueil
des inscriptions du Siam. Duexième partie: Inscriptions de Dvaravati, de Çrivijaya et de Lavo
(Bangkok: Bangkok Times Press, 1929).
60
Prachum kotmai (Compendium of laws), vol. 36, B.E. 2466 (1923/4), pp. 222–
224. See also Coedès’ report on the Archaeological Service’s first year of activity
(April 1924 to March 1925, according to the traditional Siamese calendar) in Journal
of the Siam Society 19:1 (1925): 29–41.
61
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, p. 11.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1539
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.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’.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.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.

62
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, p. 17: ‘On voit que l’idée directrice qui a présidé à
l’organisation et à l’installation a été de faire un museé vraiment national consacré
aux arts et à l’archéologie du Siam’.
63
Donald Preziosi, ‘In the Temple of Entelechy’, p. 167.
64
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 9–10, 13.
1540 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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’.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.’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

65
Coedès, Angkor, p. 68.
66
Marchand, ‘The Rhetoric of Artifacts’, p. 109.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1541
images, bas-reliefs and votive tablets in stone and stucco dating from
the sixth to the eleventh century.67 Coedès also identified the people of
Dvaravati as being of Mon ethnicity.68 A linkage was thus established
between antiquities without clear historical origin and a kingdom
without a certain territorial location.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.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.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.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’.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

67
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, pp. 9–11. Prince Damrong proposed the
inexplicably high dating of 50 BCE onwards for Dvaravati antiquities.
68
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 20–24.
69
The discovery in 1964 of silver coins bearing the inscription ‘king of Dvaravati’
lent credit to the theory of the existence of a Dvaravati kingdom but its location
remained vague. See J. J. Boeles, ‘The King of Sri Dvaravati and His Regalia’, Journal
of the Siam Society 52:1 (1964): 100–102.
70
George Coedès, ‘Le royaume de Çrîvijaya’, BEFEO 18, 6 (1918), pp. 1–36.
71
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, p. 11.
72
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, p. 25.
73
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, pp. 12–13.
1542 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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.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.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.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’.77 Three decades later, Griswold rephrased

74
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 26–28.
75
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, pp. 14–17.
76
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 30–31.
77
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, p. 19.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1543
Damrong’s ideas thus: ‘The profound originality of Sukhodayan art
lies not in the invention of meaningless new forms, but in harmonious
eclecticism’.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’.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’.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’.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,82 Coedès, for his part,
liquidated four centuries of sculpture under the single adjective

78
A. B. Griswold, ‘Sculpture and Architecture’, p. 88.
79
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art (London: E.
Goldston, 1927), pp. 176–177 and plates 321, 322.
80
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 28–29.
81
George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, Walter Vella (ed.), trans.
Susan Brown Cowing (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1968 [translation of L’État
hindouisés, 3rd edn, Paris, 1964]), p. 222.
82
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, pp. 24–25. The first two sub-periods (1350–
1488 and 1491–1628) were characterized as marking a transition from Khmer to
Sinhalese stylistic influences in architecture and the latter two (1630–1733 and
1733–1767) by artistic decline and the tendency to restore old buildings rather than
build new ones.
1544 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

‘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.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.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’.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

83
Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, pp. 33–35. See also Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha,
p. 50, notes 81 and 82, and p. 56, note 152 (all by A. B. Griswold).
84
Reginald Le May, A Concise History of Buddhist Art in Siam (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1938), pp. xi, 13, 15. Le May proposed a nine-fold stylistic
periodization including: I. Pure Indian (i.e., imported): up to the fifth century CE; II.
Mon-Indian (Gupta): fifth to tenth centuries; III. Hindu-Javanese: seventh to twelfth
centuries; IV. Khmer and Mon-Khmer transition: tenth to thirteenth centuries;
V. Thai (Chiangsaen): eleventh to fourteenth centuries; VI. Thai (Sukhothai):
thirteenth to fourteenth centuries; VII. Khmer-Thai transition (Uthong): thirteenth
to fourteenth centuries; VIII. Thai (Lopburi): fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; IX.
Thai (Ayutthaya): fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.
85
Le May, A Concise History, pp. 108, 128.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1545
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.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’.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

86
Le May, A Concise History, p. 143 (emphasis added).
87
Scot Barmé, Luang Wichit Wathakan and the Creation of a Thai National Identity
(Singapore: Institute of South-East Asian Studies, 1993), pp. 160–162.
1546 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

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’.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’.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.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

88
Damrong, Monuments of the Buddha, p. 4.
89
Tanaka, ‘Imaging History’, p. 32, where he translates a passage from Okakura’s
Nihon Bijutshushi (p. 39), vol. 4 of the collected works, Okakura Tenshin zenshu (Tokyo:
Rokugeisha, 1939).
90
An analogous case is the art historical research of E. B. Havell and A. K.
Coomaraswamy, produced in the context of rising nationalism in colonial Bengal.
See Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Orientalism, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of
“Indian” Art in Calcutta’, in C. B. Asher and T. R. Metcalf (eds), Perceptions of South
Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi: American Institute of Indian Studies, 1994), pp. 47–65.
 FROM ICONS TO ANTIQUITIES 1547
Coedès himself, in reviewing Le May’s book, openly stated that he
intended the classification to be provisional and open to revision.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.92
But whilst Prince Damrong’s and Coedès’ canonical classifications
continue to inform most art histories of Thailand,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.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

91
George Coedès, ‘Review of Reginald Le May’s A Concise History of Buddhist Art in
Siam’, Journal of Siam Society 30:2 (1939). See also Coedès, Musée de Bangkok, p. 36.
92
Piriya Krairikish, Art Styles in Thailand: A Selection from National Museums and an
Essay in Conceptualization (Bangkok: Fine Arts Department, 1977).
93
See Jean Boisselier and Jean-Michel Beurdeley, The Heritage of Thai Sculpture (New
York: Weatherhill, 1975), which carries the dedication ‘In memory of the founder of
Thai archaeology, Prince Damrong Rachanuphap’; and Pisit Charoenwongsa and
Momchao Subhadradis Diskul, Thailand (Geneva: Nagel, 1978), the latter co-author
being a late son of Prince Damrong.
94
See Srisakra Vallibhotama, Aeng arayatham isan: chae lakthan borannakhadi phlik
chomna prawatsat thai [A northeastern site of civilization: new archaeological evidence
to change the face of Thai history] (Bangkok: Matichon, B.E. 2533 [1990]). See
also Hong Lysa, ‘Twenty Years of Sinlapa watthanatham: Cultural Politics in Thailand
in the 1980s and 1990s’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 31:1 (2000): 37–38. For
two recent volumes that deal with the history of art in Thailand prior to the rise of
Sukhothai, see Betty Gosling, Origins of Thai Art (Bangkok: River Books, 2004); and
Hiram W. Woodward, The Art and Architecture of Thailand: From Prehistoric Times Through
the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Ban Chiang was inscribed on the UNESCO
World Heritage List in 1996.
1548 MAURIZIO PELEGGI

Sukhothai and the dynasty of which Ramkhamhaeng was a member,

we encounter a society within which any modern Thai would have felt
at ease’.95 Not everywhere is the past a foreign country.

95
Higham and Rachanie, Prehistoric Thailand, p. 215. The claim advanced in
the late 1980s by authors such as Michael Vickery and Piriya Krairikish that the
Ramkhamhaeng stele was a later fake caused considerable consternation. See James
Chamberlain (ed.), The Ramkhamhaeng Controversy: Collected Papers (Bangkok: The Siam
Society, 1991). Instead, the recent re-dating of the Wat Bang Sanuk inscription to
1219—some 70 years earlier than the Ramkhamhaeng inscription—aroused little
interest. On the historical hypotheses raised by the re-dating, see David K. Wyatt,
‘Relics, Oaths and Politics in Thirteenth-Century Siam’, Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 32:1 (2001): 3–66.
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