Crossroads of Asia:
Travel Narratives to Siam from European,
Persian and Chinese Sources
Wednesday 27 April 2016
12.30-6pm, Ramphal Building R0.14
PROGRAMME
12.30-1.15
Lunch
1.15-1.30
Introduction by Stefan Halikowski Smith, Swansea University, and
Giorgio Riello, University of Warwick
1.30-2.20
Mathieu Torck, Ghent University, Ayutthaya in Chinese sources from
Ming and Qing dynasties
2.20-3.10
Alexandra Green, The British Museum, Historical Continuity and
Material Engagement: Collecting Thai Objects at the British Museum in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries
3.10-3.40
Coffee Break
3.40-4.30
Alan Strathern, University of Oxford, Why was Narai not another
Constantine? Religion and Political authority in Siam
4.30-5.20
Stefan Halikowski Smith, Swansea University, Between Illusions and
Reality: Two late Seventeenth-Century Unpublished Missionary Accounts from
Southeast Asia
5.20-5.30
Conclusion
ABSTRACTS
Mathieu Torck, Ghent University, Ayutthaya in Chinese sources from Ming and Qing
dynasties
Sino-Siamese relations have been the subject of a number of studies which particularly
make use of official governmental records, such as the Ming shilu 明實錄 (Veritable
Records of the Ming Dynasty), relating to diplomatic exchanges between imperial
China and Ayutthaya (Wade, 1991). Although this approach generally yields valuable
insights into the history of Ayutthaya’s international connections, other relevant
sources belonging rather to the broad category of maritime literature have so far
received little attention for his purpose. In the present paper I introduce a selection of
those contemporary maritime sources from the periods of Ming 明and Qing 清
dynasties (resp. 1368–1644 and 1644–1911), which highlight political, commercial and
ethnographic themes concerning Ayutthaya. I attempt to assess diachronically the
historical value of the relevant excerpts from works such as Xiyang fanguo zhi 西洋番
國誌 (The Annals of Foreign Nations in the Western Ocean), Haiyu 海語 (Words on the
Sea) and Shuyu zhouzi lu 殊域周咨錄 (Informative Records on Countries Far Away) in
the context of Ayutthayan history. The aim is to open up a window on Chinese views
contemporary with the heyday of the Ayutthayan kingdom by investigating data from
various texts, the interconnectedness of these texts and, furthermore, the continuities
and discontinuities that are reflected in the relevant descriptions.
Alexandra Green, The British Museum, Historical Continuity and Material
Engagement: Collecting Thai Objects at the British Museum in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
The earliest Thai objects arrived at the British Museum in the early nineteenth century.
They were primarily musical instruments, but also an anomalous bundle of deer sinew
for making soup. The collection now comprises an eclectic selection of ceramics,
shadow puppets, textiles and weaving equipment, baskets, currency, archaeological
material, musical instruments, popular posters, and religious objects gathered from
academics, adventurers, dealers, collectors, and officials. The variety of the collection
is in keeping with the British Museum’s emphasis upon its role as a museum of
civilisation rather than of art, yet it also demonstrates a continued ‘cabinet of
curiosities’ approach to collecting, particularly with regard to areas where Britain is less
geo-politically engaged. This paper explores the formation of the Thai collection at the
British Museum in comparison with Ayutthaya period encounters, focusing on the
connections between collectors, collecting time frames, and the types of objects
gathered.
Alan Strathern, University of Oxford, ‘Why was Narai not another Constantine?
Religion and Political authority in Siam’
One might consider the climax of European diplomacy with Siam to be the famous
exchange of embassies between the Louis XIV and Narai in the 1680s, which was partly
driven by an understanding on the part of the French that the Thai king could be
induced to convert to Catholicism. Scholarship has tended to look on this
understanding with all the condescension that posterity can muster – as an obviously
mistaken and even absurd proposition. But rulers elsewhere in the world had indeed
converted to Christianity – including, famously, the Emperor of the pagan empire of
Rome. Indeed, missionaries tried, in various ways, to underline the analogy with the
glorious conversion of Constantine. Yet that there were very serious obstacles to
conversion in Narai’s case is in no doubt: they are evident in the coup of 1688 that
drew strength from a Buddhist reaction to foreign and Christian meddling. So what
exactly underlies the ‘impossibility’ of ruler conversion in Siam? More generally, travel
narratives and other reports from Siam tend, with striking consistency, to comment on
how tolerant and open the inhabitants are, and yet, almost as consistently, to note
how badly Christianity has failed to take advantage of this openness to win any actual
converts. Yet how do we account for this paradox? Towards the end, I shall also raise
some questions about the relationship between the appeal of material culture and
religious conversion.
Stefan Halikowski Smith, Swansea University, Between Illusions and Reality: Two late
Seventeenth-Century Unpublished Missionary Accounts from Southeast Asia
Missionary accounts of the East Indies come thick and fast over the course of the
seventeenth century, an era in which the successes of exploration and the opening of
new trade routes gave way to the 'harvesting of souls' for the Catholic church. Many
were published at the time, while others took the form of lengthy handwritten letters
to various European potentates, diaries, 'histories', or state memoranda, which remain
to this day in a variety of seminaries, state libraries and archives. Sent out from the
sheltered religious environments in which they had trained for ordination for many
years across Europe, many of these men now lost themselves in the immense
geographic spaces and in the often hazy opportunities they saw for furthering the
cause of their Church, and became restless trotamundos, globe-trotters, roving
perpetually unfulfilled until the end of their days. The presentation and elucidation of
the two unpublished missionary texts proposed here, the Jesuit Guy Tachard's Relation
de Voyage aux Indes, 1690-99 and the Augustinian Nicolà Cima's Relatione Distinta
delli Regni di Siam, China, Tunchino e Cocincina (c. 1707) brings together two different
dreams of reviving European contact with Southeast Asia, and specifically Ayutthaya,
which is singled out for special treatment. Neither of these two texts is greatly
concerned with strategies for conversion but rather seem to suggest that this will
follow naturally from successful colonial trade. While Tachard's is a relation, or account
of two journeys and adventures in the East Indies over a nine-year period, with the
underlying message that the French Crown should establish its base for the Compagnie
Royale des Indes at Mergui rather than Pondicherry, Cima's is a harangue to the
Venetian authorities to enter into a trading alliance with the Danish East Indies
Company as a first step to launching its own new trading company. One hesitates
between use of the word 'accounts' and 'tales' in describing these texts, because they
are both coloured by self-delusional aspects of missionary writing, by which I mean
they are either nostalgic, as in the case of Guy Tachard, hankering after a state initiative
that was shown to be before its time by the circumstances of the Siamese National
Revolution of 1688, or simply beyond the political and economic constraints of the day.
Thus, for example, while Cima may have been responding to a three-month state visit
made by the Danish king Frederik IV to Venice in the winter of 1708-9 to envisage this
trading partnership, Venice in the eighteenth century was a city of fasti, or lavish
partying and self-indulgence, whilst her sea empire was being whittled away: she was
no longer able to keep order in the Adriatic and the sea corsairs at bay,
her terraferma was being devastated, and none of the urgent public works projects,
like the better fortification of the Isthmus of Corinth and the renovation of the Castello
di Morea, bore fruit. In this context, to regularize an eight-month sea journey to the
ends of the earth, with forced stops and frequent invernadas, or winterings in
protected harbours en route, can only appear absurd. But regardless of their utopian
delusions, these are interesting, substantial texts that tell us a lot both about the
Europeans who were writing them, and about Southeast Asia in a period when
information was in much shorter supply than prior to 1688, and when kingdoms across
Southeast Asia tended to retract from outward engagement and to become what
historians have christened 'hermit kingdoms'.