The City of Memory

The two brothers named Ahmad and Mohammed Sayyid travelled east from their home in Persia and arrived in Ayutthaya around 1600. The images we are able to discern of the two brothers are filtered through the dark prism of Ayutthaya, whose fall would not be for another 150 years.

When the Burmese sacked the city in 1767, its inhabitants were dispersed or marched away in captivity, and most of the city’s records were destroyed. The lives of Ahmad, and his first descendants, are broken into fragments. Fifteen generations have passed since Ahmad and the reconstitution of these shards is both torturous and precarious – it is not certain what will come out.

The search for what has been lost or misconstrued has its culture and antecedents. Even the origins of glassy Bangkok can be found in games of memory.

After the fall of Ayutthaya, it took almost a decade for peace to come. War tore through the country, first against the invaders, and later against rival claimants, pretenders, and unruly allies and vassals. With peace, the survivors would set down their memories of Ayutthaya. Their reminiscences came to be known as The Testimony,1 and out of these works another city was born, which foreigners called Bangkok.

The Testimony was used to plan and build the new city, with copied canals, temples and palaces – often built from materials salvaged from the former capital. Ayutthaya, an iteration of a mythical Hindu city, was reincarnated as Bangkok.

The new capital was rendered directly out of the minds of survivors, who attempted to recall every detail of the old city. They gave back life indiscriminately: the districts for buying nails and types of fabric, where to buy pleasure, the height of bridges, and the size of boats that could pass beneath them. They inserted sentimental elements, such as the names of the shop owners and guardians of the gates. In the looping present tense of the Testimony, old Ayutthaya lives on.2 by Greenwich Meantime in Thailand, profligates and misers, the spleen and choler of privilege. Everything was faded and ragged, especially the generational cohesion and the sense of unity. And much of the shared recollection was recent. It rose gradually out of the 1920s and fizzled out in the 1960s. It was a short memory bump.

Bangkok was an exercise in historical consciousness, claiming seamless continuity from the old capital, reinvigorating its traditions, and cleansing its political weaknesses. Bangkok’s grand families were the blood continuum of this ancestor capital.

In the mid 19th century, an eighth generation descendant wrote a chronicle of Ahmad’s family in Thailand. He was a nobleman who had run the Ministry of Trade for a time, helped negotiate a treaty with the British, and, before going blind, had written the first histories of the Bangkok Era, as well as a curious tome called A Book on Various Things. His name was Kham Bunnag, but he is generally referred to as Chaophraya Thiphakorawong.

Kham’s stated objective was to set down the history of this family for the benefit of future generations. He consulted with relatives, who had kept partial records of the Persian ancestors. The scant details that are handed down about the lives of Ahmad and Mohammed, and their offspring, come largely from this legacy. These histories are based on lineage records, memory and oral transmission.

Ahmad and his brother left Astarabad at some point towards the end of the 16th century travelling to India. They would have journeyed south from Astarabad to join the Great Khorasan Road, connecting to Mashad, and then to Herat, Farah, Kandahar, crossing the mountains through the Bolan Pass, to Sukkur, and finally Hyderabad.3 It is thought that they lived in Hyderabad for some years, working as traders. The city was in the Persianate state of Golkonda, which had attracted many people from Persia’s Caspian area.

There had been contact between Persia and Ayutthaya for hundreds of years. Ayutthaya was a trading state controlling the Chaophraya river basin from its eponymous capital, a large fortified river island. The Persians referred to it as Shahr-I Naw, New City, and although it was a predominantly Buddhist state, Ayutthaya was known as a place of Shia practice even before Ahmad’s arrival. The Malay mystic Hamzah Fansuri, who was active in the mid 16th century, some time before Ahmad’s birth, is said to have undergone a conversion or awakening of sorts in Ayutthaya.