rise and fall of the bangkok mandala

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EDWARD VAN ROY (Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok)

RISE AND FALL OF THE BANGKOK MANDALA

The mandala (��, pronounced “monthon” in Thai) is a rigorously symmetrical geometric diagram representing the Brahman-Buddhist cosmos. In centuries past it served as a mystic metaphor for the unique structure of Southeast Asia’s kingdoms and capitals.1

The […] premodern Theravada kingdoms, including those in Thailand, were quite self-consciously constituted as microcosms in which the main lineaments of the cos-mography and the hierarchical, merit-determined order of the cosmos were replicated at the level of human social organizations.2

That vision is described in graphic detail in the Traiphumikatha �� , or Discourse on the Three Worlds, a classic Thai metaphysical exposition said to date from mid-fourteenth century Sukhothai.3

* The author thanks his colleagues in the Department of History and Institute of

Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, as well as Chatri Prakitnonthakarn, Carl Trocki, Kritika Ratanaphruks, and Ralph Van Roy for comments on ear-lier drafts of this paper. He also thanks Craig Johnson for assistance in applying MapInfo Professional software to historical reconstructive mapping, and to Sutee Boonmee for preparing the sketch maps appearing in this paper. The six maps appearing in this paper are black-and-white sketches abstracted from the author’s color-coded, annotated computer maps of Thonburi’s and Bangkok’s physical history, 1767–1910, which were compiled from a wide variety of primary-source data on the urban area’s morphological evolution.

1 Among the many studies that deal with the political applications of the man-dala metaphor in the premodern Southeast Asian context are: Tambiah (1977); Sunait (1990); Eck (1987); Wolters (1999). Surprisingly, however, none of those many studies considers the application of the mandala motif to nineteenth century Bangkok, the subject of this paper.

2 Frank E. and Mani B. Reynolds, “Translators’ Introduction,” in Reynolds and Reynolds (1982), p. 23.

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In conformity with its use as an instrument for meditation, spiritual in-sight, and ritual demarcating the consecrated space within which suppli-cants could enter into harmony with the gods, the mandala provided an architectonic blueprint whereby the moral precepts of the cosmos could be replicated in the mundane world of the political capital. The capital’s groundplan thus relied heavily on the mandala’s aesthetic principles – centricity, boundedness, radiation, axiality, dualism, replication, orienta-tion, and hierarchy. Rigorous application of those elements of symmetry identified the city’s ceremonial center, the axis mundi, by the positioning of its guardian spirit shrine, sheltering the sacred omphalos. The city bounds, dividing inner order from outer chaos, were delineated by an encircling wall, bastions, gates, and moat. Sanctity, sumptuousness, and status radiated in diminishing gradations from the city center to the pe-riphery and beyond. The city’s palaces, temples, and lesser monuments were aligned along the directional axes and were ordinarily oriented to the east, the most auspicious direction. Its principal precincts were sys-tematically bifurcated between inner and outer, superior and inferior, north and south, east and west. Replication was evident in the structural equivalence of the city’s major elements and the nesting of congruent sites of progressively lesser scale and increasing sanctity. Lastly, the mandala’s emphasis on hierarchy was exemplified in the soaring roof lines and tapering towers punctuating the city skyline as allusions to the cosmic mountain itself.3

This paper proposes that one of the mandala’s last appearances in Southeast Asian political history was the essential topographic template or “blueprint” for the planning and construction of Bangkok in the late eighteenth century.4 It further examines the process whereby, over the course of the subsequent century, the evolving Bangkok cityscape di-verged progressively from its original conception, obscuring its symbolic design and culminating around the turn of the twentieth century in the

3 The standard Thai edition of Traiphumikatha is Thammapricha (1977–78). Two

systematized English translations are available: Reynolds and Reynolds (1982) and Lithai (1985).

4 Bangkok was, in fact, Southeast Asia’s penultimate mandala city, the last being the eponymous city of Mandalay, founded in 1857 and lasting as Burma’s capital for only 26 years until the end of the Kanbaung dynasty and the absorption of Upper Burma into the British empire.

RISE AND FALL OF THE BANGKOK MANDALA 3

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dismantling of its mandala-based infrastructure in favor of a new urban morphology patterned after Western prototypes. That physical transfor-mation of Bangkok’s symbolic cityscape formed an integral element of Thailand’s transition to a modern socio-political order, a process that remains incomplete to the present day.

Structural anthropology would propose that […] the study of such specific “spatial phenomena” as the distribution of particular

camps, the layout of towns, the network of roads, “permits us to grasp the natives'” own conception of their social structure; and, through our examination of the gaps and contra-dictions, the real structure, which is often very different from the natives’ conception, becomes accessible.5

In the case of Bangkok, we can go one step further by placing the bi-polarities of that essentially synchronic view in diachronic perspective, examining the nexus between the city’s evolving physical morphology and social organization from its eighteenth century inception to the early twentieth century. In examining that urban history with direct reference to the sacred symbolism of the mandala, several questions arise: What role did the mandala motif play in Bangkok’s planning and construction? How did the mandala’s aesthetic principles express themselves in Bang-kok’s physical design? Why did the mandala wane as Bangkok’s archi-tectonic template over the course of the city’s two-centuries-long history? In what ways did that physical transformation interact with the city’s evolving social organization? Such questions contest and lead far beyond the blunt assertion that

[…] the layout of [old Bangkok] showed an obvious lack of concern for the correct arrangement of the Indic ritual space [viz., the mandala] in which to carry into effect the performative form of government that Clifford Geertz has famously termed (with refer-ence to Bali) the “theater state”.6

5 Kuper (2003), p. 249, citing Lévy-Strauss (1967), p. 328. 6 Peleggi (2002), p. 78. Similarly, it contests the view that “After Angkor, it is hard

to identify a Southeast Asian city in which the mandala is a strong influence.” Baker (2002), p. 172.

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Origin of the Bangkok Mandala

Map 1: The Thonburi mandala, pre-1782

The ancient guardpost and customs station at Thonburi, some 60 kilome-ters downriver from the former capital at Ayutthaya, was occupied by King Taksin in late 1767 as a fortified position from which to conduct a series of military campaigns aimed at restoring the Thai kingdom that had recently been destroyed by the Burmese. It thus became the revived kingdom’s capi-tal by default over the course of Taksin’s 15-year reign (1767–1782), though it appears never formally to have been consecrated as such, as is suggested by the lack of any documentary or physical evidence of the city’s founding ceremonies and installation of a city pillar as its axis mundi. Thonburi’s defi-ciencies as the kingdom’s new seat of government, particularly its con-stricted confines, eroding riverbank, inadequate grand palace, and vulner-ability to attack from the west, were apparent from the start but were not definitively remedied until some 15 years later.7 Among the piecemeal steps taken early on to strengthen the capital‘s defenses was the excavation of a moat along its rear flank, flowing from the centuries-old canal (Khlong Bangkok Noi) marking the city’s northern limit to the equally ancient canal (Khlong Bangkok Yai) at the southern end to create a narrow, elongated (350 7 Thipakorawong (1988), p. 1.


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meters wide, two kilometers long) riverside stronghold. The moat was backed by a wall which was eventually extended to encircle the entire cita-del. Still concerned about the fortified position’s vulnerability to the west, the king had an outer defensive barrier erected, a second moat – little more than a ditch given the manpower shortage – backed by an earthen parapet planted with dense bamboo thickets and gun emplacements. That outer boundary lay about 400 meters west of the Thonburi city moat, doubling the capital’s ef-fective width. Those western defenses were abandoned as impractical, how-ever, as the threat of Burmese attack receded after 1776 and as the Thonburi cityscape expanded eastward, cross-river.8

It was only then that concerted action was taken to transform Thonburi into a capital worthy of the name. Though no reference to those actions ap-pears in the Thonburi royal chronicle,9 several independent strands of evi-dence support a plausible scenario. First, a sudden heightened interest in the aforementioned Traiphumikatha coincided with the upgrading of the Thon-buri cityscape along the lines of the mandala model. With only a few manu-script fragments of that metaphysical treatise having survived the sack of Ayutthaya (1767), it was certainly more than fortuitous that in a flurry of activity two new recensions were prepared by royal order in 1776 and 1778.10 One motivation behind the new recensions may have arisen with the arrival at Thonburi in 1770 of some of the Brahman court officials – the

8 A section of that abandoned Thonburi moat was deepened and widened in the

1860s for the Nantha Uthayan Palace, a sprawling royal retreat developed for Rama IV. Remnants of other segments of the old moat were still observable as late as the close of the nineteenth century, as indicated in an 1897 survey map of greater Bangkok, but all those lingering traces were subsequently obliterated to cut the right-of-way for one of Thonburi’s major thoroughfares, Isaraphap Road. See Royal Thai Survey Department (1984).

9 That royal chronicle (Phrarachaphongsawadan krung thonburi) was originally prepared by order of King Taksin around 1779. A revised manuscript, the version referred to here, was prepared in 1795 by Phan Chantanumat (Choem), a royal scribe serving King Rama I. Along with other manuscript accounts of the Thon-buri period available only as edited versions dating from the early Bangkok era, that recension “involved everything from correcting the style and spelling, to ex-tending the coverage, inserting new material, and altering old material [with the primary objective of placing the Chakri dynasty in a favourable light],” according to Nidhi (2005), pp. 290 and 316–317.

10 See Ivarsson (1995), p. 58, and C. Reynolds (2006), p. 169.

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ultimate champions, exponents, and arbiters of the Three Worlds cosmology and its application to royal ritual – who had fled the destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767 for the southern haven of Nakhon Si Thammarat. Another may well have been related to Taksin’s turn to advanced religious studies and deep meditation at around the same time. Whatever the precipitating circum-stances, the revived emphasis on the Three Worlds cosmology appears to have inspired the officials responsible for the capital’s physical expansion to proceed in conformity with the mandala model.

A second indicator of Thonburi’s development in keeping with the man-dala motif is provided by an exceptional contemporary map of the city and its environs long buried in the Burmese national archives.11 Its depiction of the city dates it to approximately 1780, and its artistic style and calligraphy, not to mention its provenance, suggest that its cartographer was a Burmese spy. Its wealth of information presents an ornately stylized image of Thon-buri’s essential lineaments, including its defensive walls, waterways, main royal and noble compounds, temples and shrines, boat landings, military cantonments, gun batteries, rice stores, and surrounding ethnic settlements. Of particular interest is its portrayal of the walled city’s extension to the east bank, though that precinct, among other cartographic anomalies, is depicted as being considerably smaller than actual (as can be judged from the surviv-ing physical evidence) and lacking the moat that is known to have bounded the city’s eastern precinct. Equally interesting, the city on both sides of the river is shown fully walled, in striking contrast to the conventional view that the Thonburi walls lined both the east- and west-bank moats but not the riverbanks.12

Several additional bits of physical and documentary evidence provide a third indicator of Thonburi’s formal cross-river development. As noted above, the city boasted east-bank fortifications equivalent to those on the west bank. An archaeological excavation undertaken by the Fine Arts De-partment in the early 1990s along the old waterway today known as the Former City Moat (Khlong Khu Moeang Doem) uncovered the brick foun-

11 “Map of Thonburi,” estimated c. 1780, unpublished. Original in the Burmese

National Archives, Yangon; scanned copy in author’s possession, courtesy of Professor Sunait Chutintaranond.

12 The conventional view is exemplified by Naengnoi (1991), p. 17, and Amphan (1994), p. 56.


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dation of the old wall,13 confirming the information conveyed by the Bur-mese map.14 Furthermore, among the documents carried by a tribute mis-sion sent by Taksin to China in 1781 was a royal letter proposing the dis-patch of nine junks to Canton with rice in return for cargos of bricks, paving stones, and tiles.15 While locally established Chinese merchants had been equipping at least 40 ships a year over the course of the Thonburi period to bring back such construction supplies as clay, cement, and quicklime,16 that special royal request for high-quality building materials supports the conten-tion that Taksin was intending to build an east-bank grand palace as his reign was nearing its end.

In sum, by the close of the Thonburi period an enlarged capital of sym-metrical proportions, straddling the river with parallel west- and east-bank precincts, had begun to take shape. To complement the original moated west-bank citadel an equivalent moat had been dug around the eastern precinct, its northern and southern mouths emptying into the river directly across from the canals defining the northern and southern limits of the Thonburi citadel. Further replicating the west-bank city, the moated east-bank precinct had been fortified with a gated wall. The expanded city’s vertical axis was represented by the river itself. Its horizontal axis skirted the riverside Wat Bang Wa-yai (later renamed Wat Rakhang Khosit-aram), monastery of the supreme patriarch of the Thonburi kingdom’s Buddhist monkhood. In the absence of a city pillar that temple marked the center of the urban mandala. Continuing across the city’s east-bank pre-cinct, the horizontal axis passed between the palace of Taksin’s eldest son, the prospective viceroy and heir presumptive (uparat ��), and Taksin’s planned new grand palace, occupying the approximate site of the grand palace later built by Rama I. With those developments Thonburi had at-tained the basic structural lineaments of a mandala city.

13 Amphan (1994), pp. 44–62. 14 The old Thonburi city walls surrounding both the west- and east-bank precincts

were dismantled in 1783/84, following the decision to move the capital to the east bank and their brickwork was used to build the Bangkok city wall, but ap-parently their brick foundations were left undisturbed.

15 Taksin (1781), cited in Cushman (1981), p. 51. 16 Sarasin (1977), p. 171.

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Map 2: The initial Bangkok mandala, 1782–1785

The opening passage of the royal chronicles of the Bangkok era contains the chronicles’ sole reference to the new capital’s founding in 1782.17 That brief mention declares that in the two weeks immediately following the start of the Chakri dynasty’s First Reign (1782–1809), in the midst of a political crisis and myriad reign-change issues requiring the undivided attention of the newly enthroned king (Rama I), the momentous decision was taken to recenter the capital from the west bank of the river to the east bank. The stated reasons were the persistent erosion of the west bank and the constricted confines of the Thonburi grand palace. An additional, im-plicit reason appears to have been the traditional relocation of Thai and other Southeast Asian capitals, or at least their grand palaces, upon dynas-tic turnover, to mark the political rebirth and ensure the new regime’s spiritual purity. The most plausible explanation for Thonburi’s swift re-creation as Bangkok after the reign change, however, is its fulfillment of an urban development plan that had been conceived under the previous regime and was ripe for immediate implementation.18

17 Thipakorawong (1988), p. 1. 18 Intimations of such a possibility are offered in Wenk (1968), p. 18. Equally plau-

sible is the contention that Phraya Thammathikon and Phraya Wichitnawi, the


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Earlier preparations to recenter the capital on the east bank would help explain why and how, within only two weeks after the reign change, a cadastral survey had been completed to stake out the expanded city’s basic parameters; a sizable Chinese community had been evicted from the planned city site; and the new capital’s cosmic pivot, the city pillar, had been ritually implanted.19 Those actions in turn triggered further prepara-tory tasks for the new capital’s construction, including the mobilization of manpower and acquisition of construction materials; the draining, clearing, leveling, and raising of the new city center’s swampy terrain; and the readying of residential precincts for the relocation of the capital’s political elite. Lacking any indication to the contrary, the First Reign chronicle im-plies, not without a trace of disingenuousness, that all this was done sud-denly, spontaneously, even impulsively by order of the newly invested king, a ruler otherwise renowned for his cautious, sagacious tempera-ment.20 In fact, as has been noted above, circumstantial evidence points to an earlier start to the planning of the new capital and its grounding on the mandala template dating some years back into the Thonburi period.

In contrast with the necessarily speculative interpretation of Thonburi’s mandala associations, Bangkok was undoubtedly planned from the outset as a replica of Indra’s celestial city. That is firmly attested in its official proclamation as City of Deities, Great City, Excellent Jewel of Indra

two senior officials mentioned in the First Reign chronicle (Thipakorawong, 1988, p. 1) as responsible for surveying and laying out the new city site, had al-ready initiated that work in the preceding reign.

19 The city pillar served not only as the pivot of the two-dimensional urban place but also formed the vertical axis of the city’s three-dimensional cosmic space. Metaphysically, its depths reached to the nether world of ghosts and demons (represented by the ancient practice sacrificing a pregnant woman beneath the implanted pillar); its visible element passed through the realm of human habita-tion; and its upper reaches ascended via the incense clouds of its devotees to the world of the gods. Through the ancient Southeast Asian fertility rites associated with its phallic imagery it contested the Buddhist ethos propagated by the Chakri kings, and so in the Bangkok period it soon fell from royal favor.

20 The deliberative governance style of Rama I is stressed by Dhani (1955), and Wyatt (1994). Dhani (1955), p. 36, for instance, emphasizes that Rama I “was in the habit of taking steps to study and enquire before embarking upon any impor-tant move” and provides several examples in evidence.

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(Krungthep maha nakhon bowon ratanakosin ��).21 It was evidently for that reason that in 1783, shortly after the start of his reign, Rama I ordered a new recension of the Traiphumikatha.

The king would not have been collecting museum pieces while he was still appointing his ministers [and taking other steps to validate the new regime]. The status of the monks assigned to the compilation [of the Traiphumikatha] also indicates that the text had prac-tical value. No less a figure than the supreme patriarch [of the Thai Therawada Buddhist monastic order] advised the work; since high-ranking monks were responsible for its contents the cosmography must have formed an essential part of what every properly educated [member of the Thai elite] should know.22

As illustrated in map 2, considerable evidence points to the close con-formity of Bangkok’s initial design with the mandala motif as derived from the Traiphumikatha. The cityscape’s deviations from that cosmic template were attributable not to willful distortion but rather to the need to accom-modate the practical realities of the local terrain.23 21 That was the capital’s abbreviated name (with “bowon” �� later revised to

“amon” �� to distance the name from association with the viceroy’s formal title, which included the term “bowon”). The full official title containing that opening phrase appears in Thipakorawong (1988), p. 31. In popular usage the summary term, “Krung Ratanakosin” ��, came to serve as the name of the nine-teenth-century walled city of Bangkok. Over the course of the early twentieth century, however, “Ratanakosin” �� was gradually discarded as anti-quated in common use and replaced by “Phra Nakhon” �� (technically the city’s innermost administrative district), “Krungthep” ��, and in English us-age, Bangkok.

22 C. Reynolds (2006), p. 170. The all-embracing influence of the Three Worlds cosmology on the Thai intellectual and moral fabric during the early decades of the Bangkok era is explored in Saichon (2003).

23 It has been widely accepted among Thai historians that the original Bangkok city-scape was designed primarily for defensive purposes in keeping with the instruc-tions on the appropriate disposition of military forces contained in the ancient Manual on Victorious Warfare (Department of Fine Arts, 2009), which survives in several manuscript versions stored in the National Archives, Bangkok. By late eighteenth-century Southeast Asian standards of military technology, however, Bangkok’s defenses were not impressive. Charney (2004), p. 257, for instance, notes that the introduction of Western firepower had left Bangkok’s wall and bas-tions largely redundant for military purposes by that time. Nevertheless, as stated by C. Reynolds (2006), p. 151, they continued to serve the imperative ritual function of protecting the citizenry “just as a Buddhist amulet protects its possessor.” Bang-


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Table 1. Bangkok palaces: Locations over the course of the first five Chakri reigns, 1782–1910a

Reign Citadel City (outside the citadel)

Outside (outside the walled city)

Total

First Reign (1782–1809) 1782–1785 King’s entourage 2 4b – 6 Viceroy’s entourage 1 4b – 5 1785–1809 King’s entourage 10 – – 10 Viceroy’s entourage 4 – – 4 Second Reign (1809–1824)

King’s entourage 10 4 – 14 Viceroy’s entourage – 1 1 2 Third Reign (1824–1851) King’s entourage 9 9 – 18 Viceroy’s entourage 4 7 3 14 Fourth Reign (1851–1868) King’s entourage 1 – 5 6 Viceroy’s entourage 2 4 – 6 Fifth Reign (1868–1910) 1868–1885 King’s entourage 2 14 3 19 Viceroy’s entourage – 1 – 1885–1910 King’s entourage 1 2 19 22 Viceroy’s entouragec – 2 5 7 Total 46 52 36 134d

Notes: a Derived from Damrong (1964), supplemented by a number of other primary sources containing

princes’ biographies. Where not cited in the sources, dates of palace establishment are based on the dates of princes’ coming of age.

b Including palaces located on the Thonburi side, included in the original Bangkok mandala.

c Because of the early deaths of the successive viceroys of the Chakri dynasty, a number of viceroys’ sons’ palaces were established for them by the respective kings. Thus, seven viceroys’ sons’ palaces are listed as having been established after 1885, following abolition of the post of viceroy.

d Not all these palaces survived to 1910.

kok’s defenses, in that light, combined empirical and cosmological considerations, which should thus not be considered mutually exclusive.

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The basic elements of the resituated city, centering on the newly-im-planted city pillar (see map 2, item A), were installed over the years 1782/83–1784/85; the completion of construction, accompanying a second, triumphal coronation of Rama I, was celebrated in 1785 with lavish festivi-ties culminating in the designation of the city’s formal name. The First Reign chronicle devotes special attention to the major projects that highlighted the city’s construction over that three-year period and to the climactic celebra-tions.24 Of particular interest is the excavation of the new Bangkok City Moat (Khu Rop Krung, today commonly referred to as Khlong Banglamphu - Khlong Ong Ang) and the erection of the Bangkok city wall and bastions. Those extended bounds more than doubled the dimensions of the former east-bank precinct. They created a new eastern district within the expanded urban mandala, separated from the old east-bank settlement by the Former City Moat. It was assigned to house the bulk of the capital’s minor nobility, or civil service. A Brahman temple (thewa sathan bot phram �� ) and giant ritual swing (sao chingcha ��"�) (see map 2, item B) were erected along the city’s latitudinal axis in 1784, marking the center of that district, and a major Buddhist temple (Wat Suthat) was later built di-rectly alongside as the lynchpin of the noble quarter. Similarly, the city’s longitudinal axis extended southward from the city pillar shrine through a cluster of spirit shrines (see map 2, item C) located near the rear of the Grand Palace.25

That the initial Bangkok mandala incorporated the former Thonburi cita-del is vividly demonstrated by several essential architectonic features. First, the city pillar was installed centrally about 1.2 kilometers equidistant be-tween the expanded city’s west- and east-bank moats. Second, the capital’s initial 11 palaces, occupied by the leading members of the Chakri royal fam-ily’s founding generation, were distributed evenly along both sides of the river (see table 1).26 The Grand Palace (Wang Luang, the king’s residence)

24 Thipakorawong (1988), 22–26, 28–31. 25 Those shrines were closely associated with the various military and police con-

tingents charged with the city’s day-to-day safety and security. They were dis-mantled in the Fifth Reign, and their five deity images were transferred to the city pillar shrine, where they continue to reside today in a separate small sanctuary fronting the city pillar.

26 “Palaces” (wang ��) are here defined in terms of their occupants rather than their architectural splendour; in fact, many Bangkok palaces were virtually indistin-


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and Front Palace (Wang Na, the viceroy’s residence) dominated the east bank while the Rear Palace (Wang Lang, residence of the deputy viceroy) and Former Grand Palace (Wang Doem, briefly occupied by Rama I, then by a royal family elder, and later by the king’s senior son) dominated the west. Of the remaining seven palaces, three lined the west bank and four lined the east bank. Furthermore, the city’s leading west-bank temples, Wat Rakhang and Wat Arun, were paired with Wat Mahathat and Wat Phra Chetuphon, the city’s principal east-bank temples.27

Not only did the city’s initial palaces and temples form a symmetrical cross-river arrangement, they also straddled the city’s latitudinal axis, re-flecting the north-south division of the city into separate zones of occupa-tion and control by the king and viceroy, the latter often referred to in Eng-lish translation as the “second king” or “second sovereign.” Five palaces occupied the southern (Grand Palace) zone, while six were located in the northern (Front Palace) zone. The positioning of the residential compounds of senior members of the nobility serving the king and the viceroy, respec-tively, also fit that zonal division. Just as the Grand Palace and Former Grand Palace served as the chief redoubts of the king and his entourage, so the Front Palace and Rear Palace stood in command over the viceroy’s retinue. That dualistic, north-south division of the city became increasingly apparent in the later years of the First Reign and subsequent reigns as the numbers of palaces and mansions multiplied with the intergenerational proliferation of the kingdom’s aristocracy and nobility.

guishable in their physical features from noblemen’s mansions. “Palaces” were the residences of kings and their sons – the sons of queens (princes of chao fa �#"�$" � rank) or concubines (princes of phra ong chao �� #"� rank). The kings’ grandsons (princes of mom chao ��%��#"� rank) technically did not occupy “pal-aces,” though their residences had in many cases formerly served as their fathers’ palaces and thus often continued to be popularly referred to as such out of respect for their patrimony.

27 The prohibition against cremations within the mandala city, other than for senior royals in their metaphorical guise as celestial divinities, extended to the west-bank precincts of the original Bangkok cityscape. For example, the perma-nent funerary facilities associated with Thonburi’s Wat Arun were purposely situated well outside the Thonburi city bounds, beyond the west-bank moat, to insure against any transgression of the mandala city’s sanctity. See Wat Arun Rachaworaram, map insert.

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Map 3: The revised Bangkok mandala, 1809

Whereas the original conception of the Bangkok mandala was com-memorated with formal founding festivities in 1785, its subsequent evolu-tion proceeded as a gradual, largely unnoticed process. The first intimation of deviation from the city’s original mandala form had, in fact, already occurred in 1784/85 with the much-celebrated completion of the Grand Palace’s chapel royal (Wat Phra Si Ratana Sasadaram, popularly known as Wat Phra Kaew) upon the installation of the Emerald Buddha (Phra Kaew Morakot) image as the kingdom’s new palladium (see map 2, item D).28 Located some 200 meters from the city pillar shrine, the Emerald Buddha image usurped the role of the city pillar as the embodiment of the king-dom’s tutelary spirit.29 That shift in spiritual allegiance accorded with what may for simplicity’s sake be termed the Buddhist fundamentalism of

28 See Thipakorawong (1988), p. 24, and F. Reynolds (1978). 29 “Through the proper veneration of the Jewel [i.e., the Emerald Buddha image]

the king gained the support of sovereign power in its most potent and beneficent form. And, on a deeper level the king’s meditation on the Jewel imbued him with that power and thereby enabled him to exercise authority, to establish order, and to guarantee the protection and prosperity of the kingdom” (F. Reynolds, 1978, p. 183).


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Rama I (and his successors), part of a broad-based, continuing strategy to validate and sustain the Chakri dynasty.

In some ways [the intellectual orientation of the First Reign] amounted to the begin-ning of a sort of Buddhist ‘Reformation,’ to the extent that it involved a return to first principles and the clearing away of the accretion of centuries of custom and long-standing habit.30

That revisionist theme was apparent in the king’s purge of dissident elements from the Buddhist monkhood, his convening of a full-blown monastic council (the ninth, by Thai reckoning, in the history of Bud-dhism), his command to reorient all the capital’s temples eastward in keeping with Buddhist tradition, his order that the Traiphumikatha be re-vised anew to incorporate the wisdom contained in the Buddhist canon, and his proscription against the veneration of linga (phallic images, in-cluding, by implication, the city pillar) as antithetical to Buddhist tenets. The installation of the Emerald Buddha image in the chapel royal thus constituted a subtle shift of the city center, not far distant in space from the city pillar but far removed from it in symbolic significance.

With the city pillar shrine marginalized in the shadow of the resplendent chapel royal, the city’s longitudinal axis slipped westward in the later years of the First Reign as the Emerald Buddha was joined by two other spiritual lynchpins: the Phra Sihing Buddha image (see map 3, item F), installed in the Phuthai Sawan Throne Hall of the Front Palace in 1794/95, and the Royal Cremation Ground (Thung Phra Men) (see map 3, item E) laid out in front of Wat Mahathat, between the Grand Palace and Front Palace, in 1796/97.31 Aligned with the Royal Cremation Ground, the spiritually

30 Wyatt (1994), p. 172. 31 The Chakri dynasty progenitor, father of King Rama I and his younger brother,

the First Reign viceroy, had died at the provincial capital of Phisanulok in the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Ayutthaya (1767). Some three decades later, in 1797, Bangkok’s Royal Cremation Ground was inaugurated with elaborate fu-neral rites for his remains. His crematory relics were subsequently divided for in-terment, respectively, at Wat Phra Si Ratana Sasadaram, the king’s chapel royal, and Wat Mahathat, the viceroy’s landmark temple, referred to in Wat Mahathat, pp. 24–35. Over the succeeding years of the First Reign the cremations of an ad-ditional six senior members of the Chakri royal family were conducted at the Royal Cremation Ground, the capital’s new cosmic axis, reinventing an ancient Thai royal tradition that continues to the present day.

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powerful Emerald and Sinhalese Buddha images installed in the Grand Palace and Front Palace, respectively, formed a new longitudinal axis bi-secting the Bangkok citadel about 200 meters west of the city’s original axis.32 Similarly, in the closing years of the First Reign the city’s latitu-dinal axis slipped northward about 100 meters to accommodate the en-croachment of nine new palaces built by Rama I for his sons along the southern fringe of the Royal Cremation Ground. The resulting convergence of the two axes at the Royal Cremation Ground, a no-man’s land between the king’s and viceroy’s zones of occupation and control, established a distinct new mandala configuration for the Bangkok citadel, now con-firmed as the capital’s royal precinct, bounded by the river and the Former City Moat.

Contributing further to the fading away of the original Bangkok man-dala was the distortion of its architectonic symmetry with the abandonment of the Thonburi citadel as a formal component of the new city. The original intention – if such an intent had ever existed – to build a new Thonburi city wall to replace the collapsed and dismantled old wall never materialized. Nearly imperceptibly, the political significance of Thonburi as the new city’s west-bank precinct slipped into obscurity.33 After the construction of the Rear Palace in 1785, no further palace was built on the west bank over the remaining two-and-a-half decades of the First Reign. In the closing years of the First Reign the deaths of several senior royal family members residing along the Thonburi riverbank opened opportunities for the down-grading of their palaces. Particularly important was the dissolution of the Rear Palace in 1806 upon the death of the deputy viceroy, with the prop- 32 The new city’s perimeter, too, took on enhanced mandala attributes during the

First Reign with the installation of the ritually appropriate number of 16 spired gates and 16 bastions along the city wall. (The conventional view that only 14 bastions punctuated the city wall – for instance, Naengnoi (1991), pp. 24–25 – overlooks the two corner bastions along the Grand Palace’s original riverside wall, paralleling those of the Front Palace which are included among the other 14.) The resulting total of 32 alternating gates and bastions corresponds un-equivocally with the 32 lesser deities surrounding Indra’s palace atop Mount Meru.

33 The military weakness of the bisected riparian city of Phisanulok, the kingdom’s key northern guardpost, in the face of repeated Burmese attack during the 1760s and 1770s has been cited in Wenk, op. cit., p. 17, in justification of the First Reign decision to abandon Bangkok’s west bank precinct.


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erty being divided among his principal heirs. That abandonment of the west bank as a royal redoubt truncated the original Bangkok mandala, leaving it unaesthetically asymmetrical.34 That may have contributed to the axial shifts and revised centricity that ignored the city in favor of the citadel as the essential Bangkok mandala.

The citadel’s north-south dualism centering on the Royal Cremation Ground became increasingly apparent over the course of the First Reign as the sons of Rama I and his viceroy came of age and required their own palaces. Fourteen palaces were built between 1785 and the close of the First Reign, all within the citadel (see table 1). Of the ten built for the king’s sons and one grandson (a son of King Taksin by a daughter of Rama I), all were situated within the Grand Palace zone. The rest were built within the Front Palace zone for the viceroy’s four senior sons.

Contributing further to the crystallization of the citadel’s north-south di-vide was the pairing of Wat Phra Chetuphon and Wat Mahathat, the former standing alongside the Grand Palace as the king’s signature monastery and the latter adjoining the Front Palace under the viceroy’s patronage. The parallel association of those two temples with the Grand Palace and Front Palace, respectively, is confirmed not only by their positioning but also by their many elements of internal symbolism. Wat Phra Chetuphon served as the royal repository for hundreds of Buddha images brought to Bangkok by Rama I from outlying provinces and vassal states as testimony to their subjugation to the Thai Kingdom; also included was a great reliquary monument (chedi �#&'(�) containing the remains of the Si Sanphet Buddha image that had formerly graced the chapel royal at Ayutthaya.35 The close affiliation between Wat Mahathat and the Front Palace was confirmed by a splendid ritual chamber (mondop ��)�) erected by the First Reign viceroy

34 The truncated Bangkok mandala displayed a number of similarities to Ayutthaya,

the former Thai capital that had nestled comfortably within the great bend of the Chaophraya-Lopburi River confluence. It is thus frequently presumed that the Bangkok cityscape was consciously designed as a methodical re-creation of Ayutthaya. However, the many obvious physical similarities linking the two capitals also characterized such other ancient cities as Sukhothai, Chiangmai, and Nakhon Si Thammarat. Given that generic pattern, the two capitals’ morpho-logical similarities can plausibly be ascribed to their mutual reliance on the man-dala motif.

35 Thipakorawong (1988), pp. 81–84.

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to house a golden reliquary containing a portion of the crematory remains of the Chakri dynasty progenitor,36 and by its uniquely stylized boundary markers (bai sema *��), closely associated with the First Reign viceroy and also installed by him in Wat Chana Songkhram, the other royal temple built by him in the city’s northern precinct.

Decline of the Bangkok Mandala

Map 4: Disintegration: The king’s and viceroy’s zones, 1782–1885

Subsequent reigns witnessed the progressive decay of the Bangkok man-dala in the presence of accelerating demographic, social, and technological change. Increasingly, the push of residential overcrowding at the center complemented by the pull of rising economic prosperity along the periphery combined to override concerns for cosmic conformity and aesthetic principle in the shaping of the Bangkok cityscape. Within the walled city the cumula-tive spread of palaces beyond the confines of the citadel corroded the original conception of a capital stratified spatially between royal and noble zones of occupation. Under the practice of unfettered royal polygyny the households of the successive Chakri kings and viceroys grew quickly, and as each of the successive rulers’ adult sons formed his own household a total of 40 palaces came to crowd the citadel by the close of the Third Reign (table 1). Given

36 Wat Mahathat, pp. 23–35.


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those circumstances, growing pressure on the available terrain encouraged the construction of new palaces outside the citadel bounds, resulting in the establishment of 24 palaces within the walled city’s noble precinct by the end of the Third Reign.37 Even outside the citadel, however, those palaces con-tinued to be sited, with rare exceptions, in conformity with the north-south dualism of the king’s and viceroy’s respective zones of occupation and con-trol. Despite a lack of comparable demographic and residential data on the lower echelons of the elite, it can be inferred that an equivalent tendency to crowding arose in the precincts populated by the city’s similarly polygynous nobility.38

Adding to the walled city’s increased crowding and clutter over the successive reigns was the emergence of a number of commoners’ settle-ments in the interstices between the various princely and noble residential tracts.39 Select coteries of slaves and freemen had from the start formed a substratum of servants and staff within the city’s sprawling elite residential compounds. Gradually, however, commoners’ independent access to the walled city eased with the relaxation of curfew, residency, and landholding regulations, construction of metalled roads and sturdy bridges, drainage of marshlands, and introduction of rental shophouses and tenements. Increas-ingly, growing prosperity and the accompanying demand for luxury goods and specialized services induced an influx of marketplaces, artisans’ workshops, retail outlets, and transport agents at the city’s major cross-roads and along its principal waterways and roadways. With them ap-peared a number of new commercial neighborhoods within the noble pre-

37 Contributing to the spread of palaces beyond the citadel bounds was the fact that

most princes’ mothers were concubines (chaochom manda �#"�#��&�), the daughters of high-ranking nobles. When those noblemen died, their residential compounds within the noble precinct were in many cases awarded to their princely grandsons.

38 A leading example is the Bunnag lineage, the kingdom’s leading noble family, which over the course of some five generations covering the first five Chakri reigns sired at least 120 senior officials in the state bureaucracy – three ministers of princely stature (somdet chaophraya ��&+#�#"�� (�), ten ministers (chaophraya �#"�� (�), 74 directors general (phraya �� (�), and 33 directors (phra �� ) – whose estates came to dominate the Khlong San district, directly downriver from Thonburi. See Banchop (1999).

39 A number of examples are examined in Van Roy (2009) and (2010).

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cinct as well as several along the citadel riverside.40 In the minds of the Bangkok elite the city wall and moat were gradually reduced to little more than a vaguely emblematic social boundary; to many commoners they came to be seen as a threshold into a world of profit and preferment. Under those evolving circumstances the aristocratic mystique of Krung Ratana-kosin wore increasingly thin, and the memory of the walled city’s sacral configuration as a replica of Indra’s heaven began to fade away.

Over the course of the Second, Third, and Fourth Reigns (collectively covering 1809–1868), commercial and political influence spread inexora-bly beyond the city wall to the downriver riparian districts of Sampheng, Khlong San, and Bang Rak.41 The increasing urban convergence between the walled city and its immediate surrounds led King Mongkut (Rama IV) and his principal councilors early in the Fourth Reign to decide on the practical advisability of the city’s formal expansion. So in 1852 Bangkok was more than doubled in size with the addition of a 5.6 kilometers-long outer moat known as Khlong Phadung Krung Kasem (see map 6), includ-ing within the extended city bounds the Chinese community of Sampheng downriver, the Lao community of Bang Khun Phrom upriver, and several other ethnic minority settlements in between. A plan to erect an outer city wall alongside the new moat was left unimplemented due to the heavy cost, and instead a string of six token forts was installed along the moat’s length at approximately one-kilometer intervals in a halfhearted attempt to retain a semblance of the city’s mandala motif.42 Though failing in its symbolic role, the new moat did perform an important economic function in providing a convenient transport route bypassing the city’s eastern out-skirts, contributing greatly to that outlying area’s development.

The pragmatism behind the decline of the Bangkok mandala was com-plemented by a sense of rising dissatisfaction with the spiritual potency and metaphorical applicability of the Three Worlds cosmography as the kingdom’s elite sought to accommodate the intellectual challenge of West-ern scientific rationalism.

40 See Tomosugi (1993), pp. 13–15; and Prani (2002). 41 See, for example, Van Roy (2008), and Banchop (1999), “Locations of the

Homes of the Bunnag Lineage”. 42 That project is referred to in Thipakorawong (2005), pp. 67–68, without any

mention of its mandala overtones or the reverses encountered in its implementa-tion.


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The unquestioned use of the [Three Worlds cosmography] to express Buddhist princi-ples and to explain natural phenomena [ended] as the Siamese state entered a new era in which the [Three Worlds cosmology] had to compete with other systems of thought. […]. By mid-century [it] could no longer stand as an unchallenged interpretation of the Sia-mese Buddhist world.43

Spearheaded by the efforts of King Mongkut and his minions to liberate Buddhism from its Three Worlds mythology, the metaphysical meaning of the Bangkok mandala was systematically deconstructed.44 That may well explain why Chaophraya Thipakorawong, one of the king’s closest confi-dants in that revisionist enterprise, omitted all mention of Bangkok’s man-dala template from his compilation of the dynastic chronicles of the Bang-kok era.

By the second decade of the Fifth Reign, the growth of Bangkok’s elite population and its residential dispersion beyond the confines of the walled city, countervailed by the penetration of the lower classes into emerging commercial neighborhoods within the city wall, had proceeded to the point where the conceptual integrity of the mandala city had come under serious threat. Bangkok’s first postal directory, issued in 1883, illustrates the issue well.45 The four-volume directory was organized to accommodate the spa-

43 C. Reynolds (2006), pp. 171 and 178. 44 In the process, and in line with the Chakri dynasty’s consistent Buddhist funda-

mentalism, the role of the Brahman adepts at the Thai court was gradually mar-ginalized while the place of Buddhist ritual in royal ceremony was brought to the fore. See Tambiah (1976), pp. 227–228.

45 That unique directory of postal addresses (Post and Telegraph Department, 1883) was issued in support of Siam’s application for membership in the Universal Postal Union. Its four volumes are titled Sarabanchi suan thi 1 khoe tamnaeng rachakan cho. so. 1245 lem thi 1 ��,�' �%��'- . �/��0�1��%�� #.2. .345 ��%��'- . [Directory, Part 1: Those Holding Government Appointments, 1883, Vol. 1]; Sarabanchi suan thi 2 khoe rasadon nai changwat thanon lae trok so. 1245 lem thi 2 ��,�' �%��'- 3 �/��67�*� #��& �� 1� �� .345 ��%��'- 3 [Directory, Part 2: Population in the Changwat: Streets and Lanes, 1883, Vol. 2]; Sarabanchi suan thi 3 khoe rasadon nai changwat ban mu lae lamnam so. 1245 lem thi 3 ��,�' �%��'- 8 �/��67�*�#��& ��%1� �0��09� .345 ��%��'- 8 [Directory, Part 3: Population in the Changwat: Villages and Waterways, 1883, Vol. 3]; and Sarabanchi suan thi 4 khoe rasadon nai changwat khu lae khlong lampathong so. 1245 lem thi 4 ��,�' �%��'- 4 �/��67�*�#��&�1� �� 0�� .345 ��%��'- 4 [Directory, Part 4: Population in the Changwat: Ditches and Irrigation Canals, 1883, Vol. 4].

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tial distribution of Bangkok’s social classes. The first volume listed the ad-dresses of Bangkok’s royalty and senior nobility (in the implicit expectation of thereby covering the walled city), while the other three volumes list the addresses of the commons in successive degrees of distance from the center (from the inner built-up districts featuring streets and lanes) to the outer sub-urbs (with localities being successively identified in terms of villages and waterways, and ditches and irrigation canals). But the realities refused to comport with the presumption, as a substantial number of officials were located outside the walled city, and many commoners’ residences were listed within. The spatial intermingling of residence among the major social classes had thus by the early 1880s proceeded to a point preventing any definitive linking of the mandala city with the elite.

Map 5: Dismantling: The post-mandala city, 1910

Political relations between the successive Chakri kings and viceroys, and thus between the city’s southern and northern zones, had chronically been tense. Early in the Fifth Reign, in 1874/75, they reached the breaking


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point with an armed confrontation that proved disastrous for the viceroy.46 His defeat resulted in his relegation to political obscurity and set King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) on the path to monarchist absolutism. An impor-tant step along that path was the death in 1885 of the discredited Fifth Reign viceroy, which provided the king with a unique opportunity to abol-ish the ancient viceregal office and dissolve the power base it repre-sented.47 In demonstration of the king’s consolidation of power the Front Palace was abandoned as a royal residence, except for a residual contin-gent of former viceregal consorts and their female attendants. Furthermore, the Front Palace was reduced by about one-fifth of its former area with the demolition of its front wall and forecourt. That was the first of two abate-ments in the Front Palace grounds. The second came in 1898 to make way for the creation of the Great Esplanade (Sanam Luang), resulting in a re-duction of the Front Palace grounds by a third of their former area (see map 5). At around the same time, both of the signature temples of the Front Palace zone were also truncated – Wat Mahathat being hidden from public view behind a massive red edifice (today repainted a dull yellow) fronting Sanam Luang, and the forecourt of Wat Chana Songkhram giving way to the passage of Chakraphong Road, the major land route to the northern suburbs.48 Similarly, the princely palaces situated within the Front Palace zone, left vulnerable following the loss of their chief source of support and security, quickly declined in number over the ensuing years with the death or eviction of their occupants (see maps 4 and 5). The Front Palace nobility and lesser staff were concurrently reassigned to subsidiary postings within the reorganised state bureaucracy. With that restructuring the division of

46 Succinct reviews of the “Front Palace crisis” and its aftermath are provided in

Kullada (2004), pp. 60–64, and Stengs (2009), pp. 9–11. 47 Two years later King Chulalongkorn awarded the newly minted title of crown

prince (siam makut rachakuman) to his eldest son, and he ordered the construc-tion of a new palace for the crown prince in the Pathumwan district, well without the walled city. See Chulalongkorn, “Preparations and Arrangments for a New Palace to Receive Western Royalty”.

48 Yet another humiliation visited upon the viceregal heritage was the decommis-sioning of Wat Bowon Sathan Suthawat, popularly known as Wat Phra Kaew Wang Na, a royal chapel that had been built within the Front Palace grounds along the citadel’s longitudinal axis during the Third and Fourth Reigns. See Sunisa (2000), pp. 114–116.

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the citadel between the king’s and viceroy’s zones of occupation and con-trol faded away.49

Just as the north-south divide between the king’s and viceroy’s zones was eliminated, so the east-west demarcation between the city’s royal and noble precincts was progressively obscured. Only one of the 29 palaces built between 1885 and 1910 was situated within the citadel, and only another four were sited elsewhere within the walled city (table 1). Of the total of 134 palaces built during the first five Chakri reigns, only 50 were still serving in that capacity as of 1910, and only half of those were located within the walled city (see map 5). That dispersal of royal residences was accompanied by the scattering of seats of ministerial power. The Western tradition of separation of place of work from place of residence in gov-ernment service was introduced to Bangkok in the early 1880s with the construction of a military staff headquarter, soon upgraded to the War Of-fice, precursor of the Ministry of War, on the site of a cluster of former princes’ palaces alongside the city pillar shrine. A few years later a parallel Foreign Office, precursor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was estab-lished in the neighboring, vacant Saranrom Palace, which had been built as a prospective retirement residence for Rama IV shortly before his unan-ticipated death. The procedure of converting old palaces to ministry head-quarters and affiliated offices proved both a convenient and cost-effective means of housing the modern bureaucracy. By 1910 four of Siam’s ten ministries as well as many subsidiary departments and other government facilities were quartered in former palaces and noblemen’s mansions out-side the citadel (see map 5). That progressive diffusion of the administra-tive apparatus quickened in subsequent years, first beyond the citadel and then beyond the walled city.

Over the course of his 42–year reign King Chulalongkorn became increas-ingly engaged in his kingdom’s modernization, or “civilizing process” (ka-buan kansiwilai :��(), through the adoption and adaptation of selective

49 The thoroughness with which nearly all vestiges of the former Front Palace zone

was obliterated, along with the mysterious disappearance of the Front Palace ar-chives, provides strong circumstantial evidence of an intentional campaign to ex-tirpate the viceregal memory. The emergence in later years of the “King Chu-lalongkorn cult,” which as an essential element of the Thai state ideology “dic-tates absolute respect for the monarchy [and] precludes even the mildest criti-cism” (Stengs, 2009, p. 15), has long left that issue unexplored.


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attributes of Western culture. In his effort to cope with the menace of Western imperialism he came to envision the kingdom’s political salvation in nine-teenth-century European terms, within the context of royal authoritarian rule. A major step in his campaign towards royal absolutism was a comprehensive bureaucratic reform, culminating in 1892 in the concentration of administra-tive control in his hands.50 In the aftermath, his 1897 grand tour of 14 Euro-pean capitals provided him with long-anticipated personal exposure to the elaborate protocol and opulent lifestyle of the European aristocracy, including its architecture of luxurious garden palaces featuring monumental edifices, majestic promenades and plazas, heroic statuary, and sublime imperial vistas that glorified the mystique of monarchal absolutism. Immediately upon his return he set in motion a comprehensive program to replicate that Western style of stately grandeur in Bangkok.51

Initial steps towards the capital’s modernization had been taken in the early 1890s by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Ministry of Public Works with the upgrading of the transport and communications infrastruc-ture of Sampheng and Bang Rak, Bangkok’s chief commercial districts. That mobilization of bureaucratic resources in the cause of planned urban devel-opment marked a significant departure from the preceding several decades of benign neglect following the brief spate of urban canal-digging and road-building projects during the Fourth Reign. A supporting factor in the municipal road-building programme, dating back to the Fourth Reign, was the decision by the Privy Purse to exploit the investment opportunities pre-sented by the expropriation of road right-of-way for the construction and rental of shophouse and tenement lines, both within the walled city and in the built-up outer districts.52 The new commercial relationship between the aristocracy and the commons pioneered by that Privy Purse innovation sys-tematically ignored the former distinction between the mandala city and the outer districts in favour of indiscriminate property rental both within and without the walled city bounds.

After King Chulalongkorn’s European sojourn of 1897, however, that work was relegated to lesser priority with the reassignment of the bulk of the two ministries’ capital budgets and engineering personnel to the redesign of

50 See Kullada (2004), pp. 94–104. 51 Peleggi (2002), p. 84–90. 52 See Sayamphon (1983), pp. 141–160, and the many references to national ar-

chives documents listed therein.

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the capital’s royal precinct. That project got underway in 1898 with the lay-ing out of Sanam Luang (the Great Esplanade, incorporating the Royal Cre-mation Ground), followed in 1899–1904 by the construction of Rachadam-noen Avenue (King’s Way).53 The completed boulevard stretched some 3.2 kilometers in three segments from the Grand Palace and Sanam Luang at one end to the Dusit Palace and its imposing royal plaza at the other (see map 6, items (a), (b), and (c)).54 The capstone of that project was the design and construction of the magnificent Dusit Palace, a new grand palace more than three times the size of the old, sited one-and-a-half kilometers northeast of the walled city (see map 6, item D).55 The Dusit Palace was set in the midst of the Suan Dusit (Dusit Garden) district, a new royal precinct embel-lished with a number of sumptuous European-style royal villas in a park-like setting, plus a new royal temple (Wat Benchama Bophit) and another exist-ing royal temple completely rebuilt (Wat Rachathiwat) to rival in magnifi-cence the century-old signature temples of the citadel.

The Dusit district construction project, particularly the Dusit Palace itself, featured the import of untold shiploads of European construction materials, furnishings, and statuary, including mountains of marble flooring and facing, plus the hiring of dozens of Italian architects, civil engineers, artists, and artisans.56 The overall cost of the Dusit district construction project was never documented, partly due to the chronic intermingling of state and Privy Purse expenditures despite their formal separation by royal fiat in 1890.57 Regardless of the 1890 decision to limit the annual Privy Purse allocation to 15 per cent of total government revenue and the 1900 decision to hold it at six million baht (about 20 per cent of total revenue at the time), it had risen

53 Chulalongkorn (1900), pp. 387–392. 54 The structural features and right-of-way of Rachadamnoen Avenue after its initial

construction are detailed in Royal Thai Survey Department (1907). 55 Naengnoi and Freeman (1996), pp. 194–233; S. Phlainoi (2005), pp. 8–46. 56 Lazara and Piazzardi (1996) present detailed information. 57 The royal household’s excessive expenditure and its impact on the general

budget, closely associated with the abandonment of the citadel in favor of the Dusit district, was mooted by C. Rivett-Carnac, Financial Advisor to the Gov-ernment of Siam, in an 1899 memorandum to King Chulalongkorn, nine years after the establishment of the Privy Purse Department. See Chulalongkorn, [Na-tional Archives, Bangkok, r. 5 kh 5.2/14].


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to 22 per cent of total expenditure by 1908, partly due to recurrent cost overruns on the Dusit district development project.58

Of the 19 palaces that King Chulalongkorn built outside the walled city for himself and his sons (table 1), 11 of his sons’ palaces were by 1910 located in the immediate vicinity of the Dusit Palace (see map 6). He him-self finally abandoned the crowded, antiquated Grand Palace in favor of the modern, spacious Dusit Palace as his primary residence in 1907. With the majestic prospect of Rachadamoen Avenue serving as the umbilicus between the old citadel and the new royal quarter, Bangkok – at least from the royalist perspective – was transformed at the turn of the century into a metropolis unbound, “a city of magnificent distances.”59

Just as the Dusit district and Rachadamnoen Avenue projects put the final obliterating touch on the former conceptual integrity of the Bangkok citadel as the capital’s political and social core, so the piecemeal dismantling of the city wall and its gates and bastions as well as the bridging of its moats effec-tively erased the physical bounds of the mandala city (see map 6).60 In a telling metaphor of Ratanakosin’s transformation from bounded redoubt to open precinct within the greater Bangkok metropolis, the brick rubble from the city’s demolished defenses was carted off to surface the newly installed arterial thoroughfares. The principal land routes radiating from the walled city to the greater Bangkok metropolis – Chakraphong/Samsen Road to the north, Rachadamnoen Avenue to the Dusit district, Bamrung Moeang / Sa Pathum Road to the east, Charoen Krung Road to the southeast, and Yaowarat Road through Chinatown (see map 6) – were greatly improved over time with macadam, culverts, curbs, and lighting to accommodate mo-torized traffic.61 Less interest was shown in the concentric perimeter roads circumscribing the old city center.

58 Brown (1992), pp. 57 and 117. 59 Sternstein (1982). 60 Considerable ambiguity remains as to the precise sections of the city wall that

had been dismantled by the close of the Fifth Reign. But there is uniformity of opinion as to the gathering pace of demolition over the course of the first two decades of the twentieth century to facilitate the city’s opening up to vehicular traffic and commercial property development. By the Seventh Reign (1925–1935) most sections of the wall and its gates and bastions had been removed.

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61 Map 6: Metropolitan Bangkok, 1910

The original practical function of the Bangkok City Moat as a defensive barrier had been dramatically confirmed by the First Reign decision – im-portant enough to warrant special mention in the royal chronicles – not to span the City Moat with a substantial bridge along the course of the city’s main eastward land corridor.62 The few essential bridges at other crossings were restricted to flimsy wooden structures limited to single- or double-file 61 In addition, the major land routes came to be served by a number of tramlines

radiating from the central tram terminus (located directly alongside the dilapi-dated and largely ignored city pillar shrine) towards the metropolitan area’s rap-idly expanding outer commercial and residential districts. See Wright and Breakspeare (1908), p. 242.

62 Thipakorawong (1988), p. 22.


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pedestrian use. By the close of the Fifth Reign that policy had been em-phatically reversed, with the many transport and drainage canals threading the thickly settled deltaic metropolis being spanned by handsome bridges featuring carriageways supported by steel and ferro-concrete frames, stuc-coed-brick superstructures, and wrought-iron balustrades.63 By 1910, a total of eight substantial bridges spanned the Former City Moat, seven spanned the City Moat, and another eight spanned the later-dug Khlong Phadung Krung Kasem (or Outer City Moat), virtually erasing the moats’ traditional ceremonial function of demarcating the city bounds (see map 6). The construction of a number of those bridges as well as many others was sponsored by members of the royal family and nobility vying for the king’s favor, and many of them were named in their sponsors’ honor as reward.64 It is said that as many as 2,000 bridges had been erected by the close of the Fifth Reign to accommodate the deltaic terrain of Bangkok’s rapidly spreading road network.65 Though probably an exaggeration, that estimate emphasizes the general impression among Bangkok’s expatriate commu-nity that led to the romantic fin de siècle sobriquet for the cosmopolitan Bangkok metropolis as “Venice of the East,” a reference that contrasts dramatically with the vision of the traditional, firmly bounded, isolated mandala city and its citadel.

The unrestrained expansion of the modern Bangkok metropolis thus spelled the waning of the old ceremonial capital of Krung Ratanakosin. In that enterprise the aesthetics of Indra’s celestial city were abandoned in favor of the secular architectonics of the nineteenth-century Western imperial capital. A new, more public expression of sovereign power and regal charisma had been introduced, with “monumental public spaces as suitable stage sets for the performance of [royal] spectacles,” fitting the temper of the times.66 That

63 Sirichai (1977). 64 In addition, a series of 17 bridges were built to celebrate King Chulalongkorn’s

successive birthdays, starting with the king’s forty-second birthday in 1895. Each was named a “celebration bridge” (saphan chaloem � ��;��) plus the royal birthday year. Of those commemorative bridges only three crossed canals within the walled city. The others spanned canals along the outer districts’ newly-built roads, further corroborating the Bangkok aristocracy’s intensifying emphasis on the larger metropolis. Sirichai (1977), pp. 38–69.

65 Wright and Breakspeare (1908), p. 241. 66 Peleggi (2002), p. 94.

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grand transformation of the capital’s royal space, along with the metropolitan area’s expansion to accommodate its flourishing emporium, effectively de-stroyed the Bangkok mandala. It represented the close of a centuries-old way of life deeply informed by the Three Worlds cosmology, “the epitome of the traditional Thai values.”67 With those developments, the Ratanakosin era – the historical period during which Bangkok’s morphology had assumed the guise of Indra’s celestial city – came effectively to an end.

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