Eine Siedlung nur für Portugiesen in der Hauptstadt Ayutthaya des Königreichs Siam anno 1511

Zu erkennen am Hut auf den Köpfen
Portugiesen bei einer Prozession
in Thailand

Siam Society Lecture

Einkopiert:

Portuguese began to arrive and settle in Asia five centuries ago.

From India to Japan, the type of interests that moved them and the political dimensions they found dictated a considerable variety of types of human establishment and political forms of relationship with local independent rulers.

The peculiar position of Siam on the routes of Southeast Asia– a strategic plaque tournante useful for a wide range of commercial, military and missionary goals – attracted very early the settlement of a Portuguese community under the model of a

campo or a bandel.

The bandel of Ayutthaya was possibly the largest, the oldest and the most important in the constellation of Portuguese “informal establishments” extant in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries in places like Bengal, Macassar, Sulawesi, Arrakan, Siriang in lower Burma and a few places in South China.

Quite different from subjects in “crown possessions”, the bandel inhabitants kept their national or religious links with regional centers of the Portuguese Empire like Goa, Malacca and Macau, but one major characteristic was the elaborate but clear system of integration into pre-existent social and political structures of the places they were accepted to settle on.

Until the fall of Ayutthaya, the Portuguese bandel was the oldest European presence in Siam. Its history can be examined from different perspectives, eventually all of them relevant to understand the rich culture of 17th, 18th and 19th Siam.

It is, for example, the direct ancestor of the contemporary Santa Cruz community and the cradle of Christianity in Thailand.

It was also the origin of many civil and military officials that served the Siamese monarchs.

It contributed to the cosmopolitan ambience of Ayutthaya in 17th century and it is hard to find any relevant political event in that century to which the Portuguese bandel and its people are not associated.

On the eve of the opening of the official commemorations that until 2011 will mark the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese to Siam, this conference aims to contribute to celebrate one of the most rich periods of the long Siamese-Portuguese relations. .

Vortrag von
António Vasconcelos de Saldanha
Nationalbibliothek Portugal

via:
Visto de Bangkok
Obrigado, Nuno Caldeira da Silva, Khob Khun Krap


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