Rama I of Siam

The image known as the Emerald Buddha is carved from a single block of green jadeite, sits about sixty-six centimetres high, and has travelled further than most relics. Chiang Rai, Lampang, Chiang Mai, Luang Prabang and Vientiane all held it in turn, each acquisition read at the time as a transfer of fortune along with the object. In 1779 the general who would become Rama I took it from Vientiane and brought it to Thonburi. Three years later he crossed the river, laid out a new capital on the eastern bank, and built a chapel for the image inside the palace walls rather than in a monastery outside them.

The placement is the argument. Wat Phra Kaew has no resident community of monks; it is a royal chapel, and the image within it is dressed three times a year by the king himself in seasonal costumes of gold. Putting the palladium of the kingdom inside the palace, and making its care a personal duty of the sovereign, states the relationship between crown and religion in architecture before any decree has to say it.

The building programme extended well beyond the chapel. Monasteries were founded and restored across the new city, murals were commissioned, and the Ramakien, the Siamese telling of the Rama story, was set down in a version the king himself worked on and painted along the cloister walls. Much of this was salvage. The destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767 had taken the artistic and textual inheritance of four centuries, and a great deal of what survives of classical Siamese culture survives because it was reconstructed from memory and fragments in the first decades of Bangkok.

Twenty years of war had left the Siamese monastic order in a condition its own authorities described as disordered. Ordination lines were uncertain, discipline had lapsed in places, and a previous ruler had required monks to prostrate themselves before him on the claim that he had attained a stage of the path, a demand a number of senior monks had refused and been punished for. Rama I reversed that ruling, restored the monks who had refused, and then turned to the order itself.

Between 1782 and 1801 he issued a long sequence of royal decrees on monastic conduct, covering the handling of money, the keeping of the rains retreat, the examination of candidates and the reporting of offences, and he enforced them. Several hundred monks were removed from the order under these measures. The decrees are unusual in that they were issued as law by the crown rather than as rulings by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which set a Siamese precedent: the state, not the order, would regulate the order.

The textual work came alongside. In November 1788 he convened a council at Bangkok, in the model of the councils of Buddhist tradition, bringing together more than two hundred monks and a body of lay scholars to compare the surviving manuscripts of the Pali canon and produce a corrected recension. It sat for five months. The edition it produced, written on palm leaf and stored in the royal monasteries, became the standard Siamese text, and it is the direct ancestor of the printed royal edition issued a century later under Chulalongkorn.