Who ruled Ayutthaya?

Ayutthaya, formally Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, stands on an island where the Chao Phraya, Pa Sak and Lopburi rivers meet, about 65 kilometres north of Bangkok. For four centuries it was the capital of the Siamese kingdom that bears its name, a river port that traded with China, Japan, Persia and Europe and grew into one of the largest cities in the world. Its destruction by a Burmese army in 1767 left the ruins that are now a World Heritage Site.

The conventional founding date is 1351, when a ruler remembered as Uthong, later titled Ramathibodi I, proclaimed the city the capital of his realm; one tradition says he moved there to escape an epidemic in Lopburi. The site was not empty. Temples such as Wat Phanan Choeng predate 1351, and a settlement called Ayodhya, after the city of Rama in the Ramayana, may have existed there since the Khmer period. Who Uthong was remains uncertain: the chronicles blend several figures of that name, and historians record competing traditions about his origin. Rival princely lines from Lopburi and Suphanburi disputed the throne for decades before the Suphanburi line prevailed in 1408.

The city's island position, protected by rivers and a dug moat and laced with canals, made it both defensible and a natural port. Ayutthaya, counted as the second Siamese capital after Sukhothai, expanded aggressively in the fifteenth century, attacking the Khmer capital at Angkor in the 1430s and fighting for the ports of the Tenasserim coast.

From the mid-sixteenth century the Taungoo kings of Burma attacked repeatedly. A siege in 1548–1549 failed, but Bayinnaung forced the city's surrender in 1564 and captured it in 1569 after a third siege, installing a vassal king; the city was not sacked, though valuable objects were carried off. In 1584 Naresuan, the vassal king's son, declared independence, and Siam held off further invasions. The tradition that he killed the Burmese crown prince in an elephant duel in 1593 is celebrated in Thailand, although some scholars have doubted it took place.

The seventeenth century brought peace and wealth. Ayutthaya acted as a middleman between the great Asian empires and the European trading companies, and foreign communities, among them Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese, lived in their own quarters. King Narai, who reigned from 1656, favoured France, welcomed Jesuits and sent embassies to France, and visitors such as the Dutch agent Joost Schouten and the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer wrote admiringly of its gilded temples. Estimates suggest a population of about 300,000 by 1600 and perhaps as many as a million around 1700.

The new Konbaung dynasty of Burma revived the old wars. An invasion under Alaungpaya reached the city in 1760 but withdrew when the king fell ill or was wounded. His son Hsinbyushin sent two armies that converged on Ayutthaya in January 1766 in the Burmese–Siamese War. After a siege of about fourteen months the attackers undermined part of the wall, and the city fell on 7 April 1767. Palaces and temples were burned, the great gilded Buddha of Wat Phra Si Sanphet was melted for its gold, and tens of thousands of captives were deported to Burma. The last king, Ekkathat, died during or soon after the fall.

Within months the general Taksin expelled the Burmese garrison, but he founded his new capital downstream at Thonburi, and the Rattanakosin kings who followed built Bangkok, partly with bricks taken from Ayutthaya's ruins, as its successor. A Danish visitor in 1779 found the old city overgrown and roamed by elephants and tigers. It was gradually resettled, and a new town grew to the east of the island.

The Fine Arts Department of Thailand began restoring the ruins in 1969, the site became a historical park in 1976, and UNESCO inscribed the Historic City of Ayutthaya on the World Heritage List in 1991. Today Ayutthaya is a provincial capital and a centre of heritage tourism within the industrial belt north of Bangkok.