by Tom Anderson
Prachai Tangsopon was a noble, but not from one of the important houses. There is some evidence that he was a royal bastard, a common source of generals to the Ayutthaya kingdom (and indeed elsewhere), which would have made him Maha Ekatotaphak’s half-brother and perhaps explaining their close bond. For whatever reason, Prachai was firmly wedded to the needs of Ayutthaya, the broader Thai nation, and his king, rather than being diverted by political jockeying as so many of his predecessors had been. This combined with cold competence meant that Ayutthaya rapidly developed to be more than just a Chinese puppet. She still enjoyed good relations with China and paid her tributes, but was beginning to stand on her own two feet. A new professional military, the Kongthap Bok (“Royal Army”) was created, though quietly and subtly so as to avoid antagonising the Chinese in Shanguo. Under Maha Ekatotaphak the kingdom also asserted more state control over trade, setting up a stronger relationship with its neighbours. All of this was done with ready deniability, yet in hindsight it is easy to see the ultimate goal of Ayutthaya regaining full independence.
It is extremely questionable whether all of this could really have held off a Chinese army if Ayutthaya had turned against her overlords. Prachai ultimately sought to form an alliance with Ayutthaya’s neighbours before doing so, but it is doubtful whether they, more reliant on China, would have gone along with it. In any case it is a moot point. With the withdrawal of General Sun, Ayutthaya faced a crisis: the Konbaung army was surging back into old Burma. While it was unknown whether Phaungasa Min intended to push into Ayutthai lands in this campaign, it seemed a foregone conclusion that this would follow at some point. Therefore, Prachai argued with his monarch, it was important that they take decisive – and pre-emptive – action.
The Threefold Harmonious Accord was sworn in 1812 in the fortress city of Lopburi, a former capital of Ayutthaya. To the meeting were invited representatives of all the friendly kingdoms in the region: Ava (even as its capital fell to the Konbaung army), Pegu, the Lao states of Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Tran Ninh – and Tonkin. The ‘Threefold’ in the name reflects historical hindsight; in retrospect it would be seen as a triple alliance between Ayutthaya, Pegu and Tonkin. The Lao statelets would soon be absorbed as puppets into Ayutthaya, while there was no saving Ava now. Nonetheless, Prachai’s plan worked to safeguard the allies – the Kongthap Bok was blooded in Pegu in 1813 as the Konbaung turned their attention to the south. Fighting continued along the frontier until 1815, when Phaungasa Min decided that pushing his exhausted men further risked losing his precious restored kingdom – particularly since, what with the Indian wars flaring up, support from the BEIC looked like an increasingly unlikely proposition. For that reason he retreated to Ava and spent the next few years instead contesting Shanguo with the remaining Chinese-trained Shan militiamen. For the moment Pegu, defended by Thai arms, would retain its independence.
The Threefold Accord proved itself once more from 1814 onwards, when the Nguyen Lords of Cochinchina took advantage of chaos in China to launch a renewed attack on Tonkin. Once more Ayutthai troops sallied forth to defend their allies, a policy which provoked mutterings among much of the Ayutthai nobility. Prachai explained to those critics that it was better to fight in someone else’s country than wait a couple of years and then have to fight the same people in your own. Then he had them arrested on trumped-up charges and executed. The diplomatic skill he showed in the signing of the Accord was not duplicated with internal politics. In 1817 the fighting in Dai Viet died down, and Tonkin was as inextricably bound to Ayutthaya as Pegu…
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…relations between Ayutthaya and the European powers had been fraught for the past few centuries. The year 1688 is best known for a revolution in which the people of a kingdom, incensed at their king being seen as a puppet of the French, turned against him. But do I speak of England? No, for the same thing was happening simultaneously on the other side of the world; the Ayutthais overthrew King Narai on his deathbed for the king and his designated heir being too close to French and Greek traders. Ever since, Ayutthaya had been distinctly suspicious of Europeans. This policy was gradually softened, however, in the reign of Maha Ekatotaphak. Full trade with great powers like Britain and France was still out of the question – hence why the British backed the Burmese against the Ayutthais – but the Dutch, just as in Japan, managed to sidle around all the restrictions and maintain low-key trade through the port of Mergui.[191] The Dutch certainly played a role in Thai contact with the West, but in fact the most important Europeans in Ayutthaya at this point were Ulf Mikkelsen and Martin Holtved. The two Danes were former members of the Danish Asiatic Company, which had been scaled back at the time thanks to Christian VII’s reforms and would not be revived until the end of the reign of Johannes II. Now ageing and unwilling to seek posts in rival nations’ trading companies, they instead took up residence in Mergui. Through their knowledge of backwater trade channels, they helped Prachai equip the new Kongthap Bok with some European weapons, mostly artillery. The Danes’ skill in trade manipulation is attested to the fact that some of these had in fact been BEIC weapons intended for the very Burmese that the Ayutthais were fighting.
Given BEIC distraction in India at the time of the formation of the Threefold Accord, it would not be until the 1820s that knowledge of the tough new power in Indochina would enter the European consciousness. For it was at that time that Ayutthaya, which had been gradually pushing its way down the Malay Peninsula for years, resumed its task using its new army and military skill. The conquest of Kedah and Perak (1821-24) shocked the European trade establishment, not least because the Ayutthais ejected the French East India Company from Penang in the process.[192] At the same time, the BEIC was realising that the Threefold Accord could pose a real threat to British Bengal, and even the restored Burmese kingdom might not be enough of a buffer state. The Europeans began to recognise that there was a new native power to be reckoned with, and they needed a name to describe it, always a difficult proposition in Indochina’s volatile environment for naming terminology. It is therefore highly illuminating when considering Ayutthaya’s dominant position within the Accord that the term popularised by the BEIC and brought home to Britain was “The Siamese Empire”…
Interlude #10: Yes, But Is It Art?
Testing… testing… is this thing on?
Ah yes. (Indistinct static, as of a microphone being readjusted) Er… Lombardi here, Dr Bruno Lombardi, or are we supposed to use codenames in this outfit? I confess I usually leave all that stuff to Captain Nutcase… er… where’s the rewind on this thing… (Sound of tape fast-forwarding, followed by a mumble) You will remember nothing you heard… (Loudly) Hello New Cambridge, this is Dr Bruno Lombardi reporting, or you may call me, erm, er… Zorro the Gay Blade.
Captain Nuttall has asked me to record this short segment to explain why our data transmissions have slowed of late. As you may recall from the captain’s supplementary commentary[193] our team has been somewhat disadvantaged of late thanks to, ah, an unpleasant encounter or two with the locals – but of course that is difficult to explain in context while our compilation of this world’s history remains far removed from the present. Suffice to say that we have had to move our headquarters elsewhere lest the locals remove a quarter of our heads. (Pause) Must say, it’s fine to be able to issue such wonderful humour to a tape recorder rather than that dour Scotsman and that Greek bastard… errr… (Sound of tape fast-forwarding again)
In any case, while we are halfway through moving we naturally do not have access to the same libraries or books, and until contacts are re-established the captain has asked me to compile what I can from what few books remain to us, most of which do not relate directly to the political or military history of TimeLine L. Nonetheless I suppose looking at social history may help illuminate how this world has diverged from our own, no matter what the Englishmen on the team say. Therefore I present the first edition of, let’s call it Zorro the Gay Blade’s Cultural Extravaganza. Ahem.
From: “Overview of European Human Development 1700-1900, Volume 3” by P.J. Hartley, (1940)—
The Watchful Peace is known as an era of cultural flowering in all areas of the arts, even in those countries which had descended towards authoritarian oppression of freedom of expression, such as Austria and Great Britain. This apparent paradox is resolvable if one considers the two decades of the Peace as a place in which all men would pause to catch their breath and allow their wounds to heal. Men in this case also meaning nations, notions, ideologies, and even women, as such great artistic luminaries as Madame Réjane and I. I. Ivanova demonstrate. The Peace, as Bulkeley once said, was exactly like the release valve on the steam engines which proliferated during that very time, a time when all the bottled-up tensions and passions of the Jacobin Wars, now forbidden to express themselves through base conflict, now instead bled away in the form of a cultural flowering. It was as if a kettle had boiled and instead of emitting a simple whistle it had produced a symphony to bring tears to the eyes of Druschetzky himself.
Equally, of course, great wars by their very nature move men and ideas across continents, forcing them to flee their hometowns, conscripting them into armies, exposing them to those very horrors that often inspire the most poignant and moving pieces. The Jacobin Wars are no exception; indeed the effect was even more pronounced, for the conflict had itself been ignited over a clash of ideas. The core concepts of both the Revolution and its opponents would help inform the productions of the years following the conflict they had created…
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From: “A Beginner’s Guide to European Architectural Styles from the Fall of Rome to the Present Day” by John Atkinson and Genevieve Delormé (1970)
The eighteenth century had been dominated by several schools of architecture, primarily the Versaillaise[194] which began in France in the twilight of Louis XIV’s reign. Characterised by the expression of rich decoration, gilding and the use of (then-expensive) mirrors, Versaillaise architecture was perfectly emblematic of the glories and excesses of the ancien régime. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, the whole of Europe culturally revolved around France, the legacy of the Sun King being a model of Galilean heliocentrism.
Because it was France, and more specifically Paris, that began and defined cultural trends, the Versaillaise style naturally proliferated elsewhere, particularly in the Germanies and Russia. In Naples it displaced the existing Baroque school, which nonetheless held on in the northern Italies and in Spain, whose own Baroque style can be considered almost to be a separate mode altogether due to its deep-seated Islamic influences. Only in Great Britain was Versaillaise definitively rejected thanks to the ideological conflict with France over systems of government, the style being associated with the kind of absolutism that had been anathema to the British since the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Glorious Revolution. Instead, as English Baroque faded away, Britain embraced the Classical Revival style, a transition heralded by Sir Christopher Wren’s daring design for St Paul’s Cathedral following the First Great Fire of London. Also known as Neoclassicism, this school sought to replicate the style and achievements of Greek and Roman architecture from the classical period, hence the name. While European architecture had always been somewhat informed by that of its civilisation’s cultural predecessors, the Neoclassicists emphasised those elements which stood in opposition to what they perceived as the gaudiness and excess of the Versaillaise, focusing on geometric aesthetics, plain, understated designs, and in particular the use of pillars derived from both the Greek and Roman style. As many later critics observed, in many ways Neoclassicism was the dream of a Nostalgic,[195] attempting to replicate a style which had never truly existed; the spare plainness of Neoclassical buildings was inspired by the ruins of the former civilisations, whereas in actual antiquity they would have been brightly painted.
One trend which began during this period, though not reaching its peak for many years, was the Orientalist school, which took its inspiration from the exotic architecture of India and China. Initially considered daring and vulgar, it was initially associated primarily with Portugal and the Netherlands, although as the eastern trading interests of France, Britain and eventually Denmark became more prominent it proliferated to other nations. Naming Orientalism a school is somewhat disingenuous as it was a grab-bag of influences from across a vast area of Asia, largely depending on which regions the country in question was trading with – and therefore conducting impromptu cultural exchange with. For example, Bisgana Hindu architecture was popular in France and Portugal due to their trade with the former Bisgana states.[196] In particular Bisgana temple pillars were adapted for European usage, their Hindu designs being replaced with either Christian iconography (mainly in the case of the Portuguese) or icons of great contemporary heroes (in the case of the French) but with the overall Indian sculptural style being maintained. The British on the other hand were influenced by the Islamo-Indian mode common to Haidarabad and Bengal, which itself was largely derived from Persian influence. There was cross-pollination between this and Britain’s own Neoclassical style, which reached its climax with the rebuilding of London after the Second Great Fire. Just as Wren’s version of St Paul’s Cathedral had been shocking in its day for evoking an Orthodox church, Sir Ralph Reynolds’ replacement did the same for the fact that it resembled a Mogul mosque. However, as with the Neoclassical style, what would have been brightly coloured under the Muslims was left white and understated by the British.
Chinese influence also increased during the Watchful Peace thanks to the gates being thrown open to trade by the nascent Feng Dynasty. The Feng’s seat of power in Canton meant that Cantonese style predominated, and indeed the casual European student to this day has a tendency to forget the northern architectural schools of China. While in Denmark a craze for pagodas began around the time of the death of Johannes II, in Britain it was the tuloo of the Haccahans[197] that was introduced by the East India Company. The tuloo was a circular structure with only one entrance, designed to be defensible and ultimately informed by the sensibilities of a people who had had a bloody history. In the aftermath of the French invasion and under the Marleburgensian dictatorship, that was an attitude most Britons could well sympathise with. Larger ones were sometimes compared to the Norman motte-and-bailey castles that had dotted England seven centuries before.
Naturally, the Orientalist school reached its peak during the Watchful Peace, when it was the riches brought to Europe by the eastern trading companies that paid for the repairs to the ruinous damage wrought by the Jacobin Wars. Given the number of cities to be rebuilt, it is scarcely surprising that many surviving Orientalist buildings were constructed at this time. European interest in the exotic east was piqued not only by the opening of parts of China and Japan but out of an (entirely misplaced) popular romantic belief that those lands were free of the ideological bloody warfare that had wreaked havoc with their own countries. It is commonly thought that Pablo Sanchez’s own decision to join the Portuguese East India Company as a young clerk at this time was informed by this very perception.
The Jacobin Revolution brought its own architectural styles to France. Revolutionary architects such as Bruant and his pupil Perrault (who took over after his master was phlogisticated by the Robespierre regime) pioneered the Linnaean school, later renamed the Taxonomic Mode to avoid being tainted by association. The Taxonomic style sought to design each individual building according to its purpose and needs, and further to do the same to each room within. Just as Linnaeus argued that each creature was designed to fit its role in the broader design of creation, so the habitat of a human being should be designed to fit that human’s role in service of the state and the revolution. Although emblematic of the all-controlling nature of even the early French Latin Republic, it was nonetheless somewhat informed by the existing Versaillaise and Baroque styles and therefore retained decoration, albeit of a more restrained kind. Further, such decorations and engravings were
designed to evoke a building or a room’s purpose. Some of this arguably drew upon earlier ideas – the use of designs including dolphins, fish and shells for rooms intended for ablutions went back at least a hundred years earlier.
The Taxonomic Mode was displaced by Utilitarianism when Lisieux seized power in the Double Revolution, and therefore the Taxonomic Mode escaped so many negative connotations, proving somewhat popular in post-war Iberia and Italy. In the more paranoid Austria and Russia, on the other hand, the formerly prevailing Versaillaise school was tainted by its association with the Taxonomic Mode rather than the other way around. Russia at this point adopted Neoslavicism, a movement playing to the nativist policies of Tsar Paul I due to the forces unleashed by the Russian Civil War, in which the traditional primitive architecture of pre-Christian Russia was revived and reconstructed in a modern style. Austria on the other hand clung to a mixture of Gothic Revival – a school which proved less popular in most other parts of Europe except Scandinavia[198] – and the Magyar School, which applied a similar approach as Neoslavicism to the traditional architecture of Hungary. “Emperor” Francis II is known to have vacillated over whether to condemn this, in the end deciding instead to support it as a way of spiting the northern German states which he saw as betrayers of the Holy Roman Empire. It was this type of decision which ultimately influenced the outcome of the Popular Wars in the Hapsburg lands.
