On the fourth day of our visit to Thailand, we traveled up north of Bangkok to pay tribute to Thailand's ancient ruins of Ayutthaya....as usual, before revealing to you pictures of our time there...here is an excerpt from the guidebook, yet once again courtesy of Discovery Channel:
"Ayutthaya was founded in 1351 by Prince U-thong, who later become King Ramathibodi I. By the 15th century the kingdom of Sukhothai had passed under Ayutthayan rule, and the court's influence spread as far as Angkor in the east, and Pegu, in Burma (Myanmar), to the west. Regular relations with Europe began in the early 1500s with the Portuguese, and later with the Dutch, British, and especially the French. Europeans wrote awed accounts of the fabulous wealth of the courts of Ayutthaya and of the 2,000 temple spires which were clad in gold.
Ayutthaya was one of the richest cities in Asia by the 1600s and, with a population of one million, greater than that of contemporary London. Merchants came from Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia to trade in its markets. Ayutthayan kings engaged Japanese soldiers, Indian men-at-arms, and Persian ministers to serve in their retinues. As quickly as Ayutthaya rose, it collapsed. Burmese armies had been battering at its gates for centuries. In 1767, however, the Burmese triumphed and in their victory they burned and looted without restraint, destroying most of the city's monuments. Within a year, Ayutthaya had become a ghost town, its population of over one million reduced to a few thousand."
Here are pictures of the Ayutthayan ruins during my trip there:
No comments:
Post a Comment