Ayutthaya
Ayutthaya was a Siamese kingdom known by the name of its capital city. In the 16th to early 17th centuries, Ayutthaya was one of the most powerful and prominent polities in Southeast Asia, and the most prominent Southeast Asian trading partner with Japan and the Ryûkyû Kingdom. It was also home to a short-lived but influential Nihonmachi (Japantown) which housed around 800 Japanese, from the 1590s until its destruction in 1630.[1] At its peak, the city of Ayutthaya boasted a population over 100,000.
Ayutthaya faced off against Ming Chinese armies in the 1580s-1590s,
The Nihonmachi revived following its destruction in 1630, though it would never again attain its former levels of activity. The imposition of policies of maritime restrictions by the Tokugawa shogunate in the late 1630s meant that Japanese could no longer return to Japan (and very few left Japan, either, after this time), severing the Nihonmachi from any infusion of new blood, and severely hampering its economic power. Still, figures such as Kimura Hanjemon, who became head of the community in 1642, remained prominent in local trade activities, including supplying the Dutch East India Company factory in Ayutthaya with deer skins. Another man by the same name, possibly the elder Hanjemon's son, traveled widely across Southeast Asia in the 1680s.[2]
The Dutch East India Company closed its base in Ayutthaya in 1663.
King Narai, who ruled in the latter half of the 17th century, was perhaps among the most active of Southeast Asian rulers in engaging with the West. In 1673, he received formal diplomatic communications from both Louis XIV of France, and Pope Clement IX, and reciprocated them.
A small number of Siamese ships - officially under the name of either the king or one of the royal princes - traveled to Nagasaki over the course of the 17th-18th centuries. Despite maritime restrictions against trade with most outside powers, Nagasaki accepted these Siamese ships under the category of "Dutch ships," given their Western-style construction.
Kings of Ayutthaya
- Naresuan (r. 1590-1605)
- Ekathotsarot (r. 1605-1610)
- Songtham (r. 1610-1628)
- Prasat Thong (r. 1629-)
References
- ↑ Geoffrey Gunn, History Without Borders: The Making of an Asian World Region, 1000-1800, Hong Kong University Press (2011), 222.
- ↑ Nagazumi Yoko. "Ayutthaya and Japan: Embassies and Trade in the Seventeenth Century." in Kennon Breazeale (ed.). From Japan to Arabia: Ayutthaya's Maritime Relations with Asia. Bangkok: The Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences and Humanities Textbook Project, 1999. pp100-101.
