PORTUGAL NA TAILÂNDIA

What Siam had to offer

Manote Tripathi
The Nation February 6, 2012 1:00 am

 

The Portuguese got the spices they wanted elsewhere in Asia.

Ayutthaya supplied a different cargo

Thailand is the only country in Asia that's commemorating centuries-old relations with Portugal. The reason why was among the issues raised at a recent conference - "500th Anniversary of Siam-Thailand Relations with Portugal and the West: 1511-2011".

 

The Toyota Foundation, Toyota Motors Thailand and the Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project put together the two-day conference at Ratchabhat Ayutthaya University.

 

Dozens of Thai historians and scholars and hundreds of history buffs gathered to discuss the traditional Thai historiography of the relationship, which relies heavily on Portuguese sources.

 

There were no significant new results but, in a whirl of impressive hypotheses, the conference produced fresh perspectives on the way the history was assembled and how it's studied.

 

It was agreed that Thais have always generally viewed the Portuguese who lived and worked in the old capital from the 16th to the late 19th century favourably. It was the warmest relationship the Siamese had with any Western nationality in that era.

 

But it was a different story in neighbouring countries where the Portuguese gained entry. India and Malaysia aren't in a mood to celebrate that chapter of the past.

 

"The Portuguese attacked Goa and Malacca because they wanted to control the sources of spices and the spice trade routes," one scholar noted. "Why would they want to celebrate Portuguese colonial power?

"Siam was briefly colonised by the Burmese, but it has never been colonised by any Western power."

Fortunately Ayutthaya, the capital, was far from the coast, so the Portuguese had to spend days negotiating the Chao Phraya River from Samut Prakhan to conduct business.

 

And there was little here in the way of spices that interested them. They found their pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg and camphor elsewhere.

 

So why did they bother with Siam at all? Historian Krairoek Nana explained that Siam instead had sappanwood, eaglewood (agar), sandalwood, ivory, sealing wax, rhinoceros horn, dammar gum and the yellow pigment called gamboge, all of value in Europe.

 

One treaty with the Portuguese also listed stingray tails, turtle shells and dried fish, and they would have been keen for our iron, silver, aluminium, tin, saltpetre and sulphur as well. They built a warehouse in Pattani in 1517 to facilitate trade in the Chinese tea, silk and porcelain sold there.

 

Historian Charnvit Kasetsiri believes Portugal saw Ayutthaya merely as a node in its spice network spanning the region. "It wanted to set up shop here rather than a colony," he said.

 

"It wasn't worth taking over Siam because it didn't have the goods they wanted. And Ayutthaya was deep in the hinterlands, which made it difficult to access, unlike the port cities in other countries."

 

Siam, it was also noted, in fact benefited from the Portuguese presence. They supplied innovative firearms and ammunition that could be used in the wars with Burma, and in many cases even fought alongside Siamese troops.

 

Scholar Pitaya Sriwattanasarn reckons life must have been relatively luxurious for the Portuguese in Ayutthaya, who had royal consent to build warehouses, shops, homes and churches. To this day archaeologists are turning up artefacts at the site of their settlement - including many broken bottles that once held wine.

 

"Director after director of the trade station in Ayutthaya married local Mon ladies," Pitaya reported. "You can imagine Ayutthaya having many half-Thai, half-Portuguese offspring roaming the city. There would have been a lot of good-looking mixed-blood ladies there."

 

Commodities obtained in Ayutthaya travelled far, said Erbprem Vatcharangkul, director of the Underwater Archaeology Division of the government's Fine Arts Department. He's traced them to European cities, particularly Lisbon, and found records of them in the wrecks of ships off Sri Lanka, Kenya, the Seychelles and the St Helena Islands.

 

Among Siamese goods found in the ships' holds was pottery from the famous Noi River kilns in Singburi, near Ayutthaya, which had been used to transport spices and other items.

 

"This pottery found in the wrecks has been mostly described by the Portuguese as 'Martaban pottery' - they called any pots from east of India 'Martaban'. Judging from the style, it dates to the Ayutthaya Period."

Erbprem said there are Siamese ceramics on display in the National Maritime Museum in Lisbon, "which is quite amazing!"

 

Various items from Ayutthaya lie on the seabed in the Gulf of Thailand. Erbprem has seen them off Koh Kram and Koh Sichang in Chonburi, off Koh Tao and Sattahip, in Chumphon, Surat Thani, Nakhon Si Thammarat and Songkhla.

 

Erbprem will next month attempt to salvage tonnes of ivory caked with calcium that he found in a wreck near Koh Kram in 1974. "It's a mass of ivory sitting 40 metres down, and we've got to bring them up one way or another.

 

"We've uncovered containers of pepper there too. Believe it or not, the pepper seeds are in good condition. When you bring it to the surface, the pepper still has its pungent smell, even after five centuries of being covered in sand in the sea floor."

 

The high value of such spices in the West is well documented, Erbprem observed.

 

"They were fashionable commodities in the colonial era. The spices would have made the Europeans seem more sophisticated in their neighbours' eyes. And Ayutthaya pottery figured prominently in the story of the Asian spice trade."

Dig deeper

Next week, Erbprem Vatcharangkul reveals more about his discoveries beneath the sea in an interview with The Nation.