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Siam - Historiography

It is probable that the earliest distinct reference to the country now called Siam in any known record is to be found in Ptolemy's Geography of Eastern Asia, dated in the second century AD, in which the very ancient kingdom of Sri Wichaiya is referred to under the name Samarade.

But it is to the Chronicles of the Siu Dynasty of China, put together about the year 650 AD, that the student must turn for the first connected accounts of the country. Here, and again in the History of the Tang Dynasty of China, compiled about 1060 AD, there are set forth elaborate and detailed reports of the manners, customs and history of certain kingdoms with the monarchs of which the emperors of those dynasties were in friendly relations. Some of these kingdoms have been revealed by the compilations of Ma Tuan Lin to be memoirs of the group of States out of which Siam ultimately grew. Such Chronicles contain much general information which is found in some measure to corroborate, confirm and explain the main points of the vernacular histories of these very early times.

It is impossible to over-rate the importance to Siam of these Chinese records, the elucidation of which has to a great extent dispelled the mists surrounding a period of which it was thought until recently that no reliable record existed.

Of European books in the languages of Europe, mainly concerning Siam, there are none earlier than the seventeenth century A.d. The medieval travellers who found their way to the Far East and, on returning, gave to the world more or less succinct accounts of their wanderings in the form of dictated narrative or laboriously recorded journal, have little to say of the Peninsula of Further India and still less of Siam, and certainly have loft nothing recorded of the latter which is of reliability or value.

The Portuguese conquests in India and the Far East during the sixteenth century A.d. had no lack of historians, who, since the scene of operations so often lay in Further India, had naturally a good deal to say of that region. They are however, chiefly concerned with the coast districts of the Malay Peninsula, and though references to Siam proper are frequent, they are brief and not very informing. By the seventeenth century Ad, when several European nations were beginning to take an interest in the trade of the East and Far East, a demand for information concc-ning oriental countries sprang up, and to meet it the merchants and their fellow travellers the missionaries set themselves to compile accounts of the lands which they had visited. Siam had her share of these attentions.