Event date:14:00-15:30 (GMT) Monday, 4 December, 2023
Organizer: University of Oxford
Stanley Tambiah’s idea of the Galactic Polity, alongside previous ways of defining urban centers in Southeast Asia as Mueang, Mandala, or Nagara have been very useful in trying to understand the ritual, symbolic, and political ways of defining royal centers of power in the region. However, all-encompassing definitions always exclude as much as they include. This paper explores ways of understanding the founding and growth of the last Buddho-Brahmanic royal city of Southeast Asia, Bangkok. What and who gets excluded in the galactic polity and how does the ethnic history of the city help revisit the ways in which we understand the first 250 years of one of the world’s great cities.
Lecture Report: “Mapping the City of the Gods: Bangkok, Ethnicity, and the Galactic Polity”
Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series
University of Oxford, April 12, 2023, at 14:00–15:30 pm
Lecture by Professor Justin McDaniel (University of Pennsylvania)
Response by Dr. Edoardo Siani (University of Oxford)
Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation
Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the University of Oxford as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Justin McDaniel of the University of Pennsylvania delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Mapping the City of the Gods: Bangkok, Ethnicity, and the Galactic Polity.” The respondent was Dr. Edoardo Siani of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The event was chaired and introduced by Professor Kate Crosby of the University of Oxford, who welcomed the speaker and highlighted his extensive contributions to the study of Theravada Buddhism, Thai and Lao religious traditions, and the religious geography of Southeast Asian cities
Prof. Justin McDaniel is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research spans Theravada Buddhism, manuscript cultures, Thai and Lao religion, and the religious geography of Southeast Asian cities. His books include Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, winner of the Harry Bender Prize, and The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk, which explores the rich complexity of Thai religious life through the contrasting figures of a senior monk and a celebrated female ghost. He is known for combining close ethnographic attention to local detail with broad comparative and historical perspectives.
Dr. Edoardo Siani is Lecturer in Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the intersection of Buddhism, astrology, and political thought in Southeast Asia, with particular attention to Thai court culture and the cosmological dimensions of royal power.
Prof. Kate Crosby is Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on Theravada Buddhism, particularly its meditation traditions, manuscript cultures, and the history of Buddhist practice in South and Southeast Asia. She is the author of Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, and Identity and Esoteric Theravada, which examines the pre-modern meditation tradition known as borān kammaṭṭhāna.
Rethinking the Frameworks for Southeast Asian Royal Cities
Professor McDaniel opened by situating his argument within a long-running debate in Southeast Asian studies over how to conceptualise royal cities and the nature of political and cosmological power in the region. Scholars have over the decades proposed a series of competing terms and models: Mueang, Mandala, Nagara, theatre state. Each has sought to capture the ways in which monarchs, urban planners, and ritual specialists organised space, power, and cosmological meaning in cities such as Angkor, Ayutthaya, and Kathmandu. Among these, Stanley Tambiah’s influential model of the Galactic Polity has proven the most durable and widely applied. Tambiah described such a kingdom as defined by a ritually and symbolically reinforced royal centre, from which power radiates outward like heat, growing gradually attenuated as it approaches ill-defined frontiers. The model has the virtue of elegance: it holds together the ritual, the political, and the cosmological in a single explanatory framework.
Professor McDaniel’s lecture was an extended challenge to what happens when this framework is applied to Bangkok. He did not argue that the Galactic Polity model is without value as an analytical tool; he acknowledged it as a useful concept for certain comparative purposes. What he resisted, with considerable archival and ethnographic weight behind him, was the assumption that Bangkok’s physical structure, social organisation, and founding logic could be adequately described or explained in these terms. Applied too rigidly, he argued, the model conceals more than it reveals, and what it conceals is precisely the most historically significant feature of Bangkok’s first 250 years: its profound and constitutive ethnic diversity.
The Mandala That Was Not
The first and most direct target of Professor McDaniel’s critique was Edward Van Roy’s influential study Siamese Melting Pot, which had argued that Bangkok’s original spatial organisation followed a Mandala template, with the Grand Palace complex as the sacred centre radiating outward through concentric rings of symbolic and political significance. Professor McDaniel dismantled this argument point by point.
The city wall, often cited as evidence of cosmological planning, was a practical military fortification, not a ritual statement. It was modified three separate times within the first reign of the Chakri dynasty alone, in direct response to the practical problems of waterways, swamp drainage, and the threat of attack. These are not the modifications one makes to a cosmological diagram; they are the improvisations of a dynasty trying to survive in a volatile geopolitical environment. Key monuments cited as pillars of the supposed Mandala arrangement tell a similar story. Wat Arun and Phuket Thong, frequently invoked as markers of the sacred city’s symbolic geography, were built in later reigns and sit well outside any coherent central axis. Most telling of all is the fate of the city pillar itself, which in a genuine Mandala city ought to stand as the unmistakable ritual centre around which the entire built environment is oriented. Bangkok’s city pillar sits in a neglected traffic circle, unremarked by most of the city’s residents, dwarfed in presence and significance by the many temples that surround it.
None of this is to say that cosmological ambition was absent from Chakri urban planning. Professor McDaniel was careful to acknowledge that the dynasty made conscious use of cosmological symbolism in particular monuments and ritual contexts. What he argued was that these gestures were selective, retrospective, and insufficient to support the claim that Bangkok was organised from its foundation according to a Mandala logic.
Ethnic Diversity as Historical Foundation
Having cleared the ground, Professor McDaniel turned to what he argued was the genuinely revelatory story about Bangkok: not the coherence of its cosmological plan, but the richness and complexity of its ethnic origins. Within the first fifty years of the city’s founding, communities of Lao, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Tamil, Persian, and Cham peoples were already well-established within and immediately around the city walls. Some had been brought to Bangkok as war captives following Chakri military campaigns in Laos, the Malay states, and elsewhere. Others were long-established residents of the lower Chao Phraya basin who predated the dynasty itself, having lived in the area before the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767.
More remarkable still was the ethnic composition of the Chakri royal family itself. Drawing on historical records that are rarely foregrounded in standard accounts of Bangkok’s founding, Professor McDaniel showed that the early Chakri kings had Hmong, Persian, and Chinese ancestry. The supposedly homogeneous ethnic centre of the Mandala, in other words, was never purely Siamese, and was never conceived as such by those who built it.
Through a series of closely observed neighbourhood case studies, Professor McDaniel traced how these diverse communities shaped Bangkok’s sacred geography in ways that the Galactic Polity model cannot accommodate. The Lao community’s connection to Wat Patum Wanaram, a forest monastery that today sits incongruously amid Bangkok’s most upmarket shopping district, was one of his most vivid examples. The Buddha images brought from Laos in the aftermath of military conquest and installed at royal temples were not simply trophies; they were symbols that bound conquered peripheral communities to the Chakri court in a relationship of cosmological indebtedness and belonging. The Cham and Malay Muslim communities concentrated around the Kutiyai Mosque, originally located directly adjacent to the Grand Palace, were not merely tolerated minorities at the margin of a Siamese city. They were present at the city’s symbolic core from the very beginning. The Tamil Chettiar community, whose financial networks were indispensable to the early Chakri economy, wove itself into the commercial and ritual fabric of the city in ways that no cosmological plan had anticipated.
In each of these cases, the argument was the same: these communities were not absorbed into a pre-existing cosmological structure but were constitutive of the city itself. Bangkok was diverse before it was royal; its diversity was not an incidental feature but a precondition of its founding.
Reinterpreting the Logic of the Galactic Centre
Having established the historical case for ethnic diversity, Professor McDaniel turned to an unexpected theoretical move. Rather than abandoning the Galactic Polity framework entirely, he proposed a reinterpretation that might actually make it more historically accurate than its standard application. In Buddhist kingship theory, and particularly in the Theravada traditions of mainland Southeast Asia, the capacity of a king to attract followers from the periphery and draw them toward the centre is itself a manifestation of his barami, his accumulated merit and virtue. A king whose court is surrounded by diverse peoples who have chosen or been compelled to orbit around him is not a king whose cosmological claims have been diluted. He is a king whose barami is visibly and impressively on display.
If this reading is correct, then Bangkok’s ethnic diversity is not a complication that the Galactic Polity model must struggle to explain away. It is, on the contrary, its most vivid expression. The diversity of Bangkok’s founding population was the Chakri dynasty’s most powerful argument for its own cosmic legitimacy. Far from contradicting the claims of the cosmological city, it confirmed them.
Discussion
Dr. Edoardo Siani offered a response that extended and refined the theoretical argument. He suggested that the galactic model might be reconceived not as a static spatial template, a diagram imposed on the city from above, but as a dynamic relational process: a centre that constitutes itself through the ongoing act of drawing the periphery toward it, incorporating, transforming, and appropriating what it receives. In this reading, the ethnic communities absorbed into Bangkok’s early royal orbit were not simply made subordinate. They were transformed into tokens of the centre’s power, and their incorporation was part of how the centre maintained its claim to be a centre at all.
Audience questions addressed a rich range of issues. Several touched on the conspicuous absence of Confucian ideas of statecraft from Bangkok’s political culture, despite the enormous economic and demographic presence of the Chinese community in the city. The question proved difficult to answer cleanly, and Professor McDaniel acknowledged it as one of the more genuinely puzzling gaps in the historical record. Other questions addressed the racial and ethnic hierarchies that persist in Bangkok today, and the reluctance of many residents to speak openly about the city’s ethnic past in an environment that officially promotes a narrative of Thai cultural homogeneity. The pre-dynastic history of the Bangkok area also came up: what was the population of the lower Chao Phraya basin before the fall of Ayutthaya, and to what extent did its already-diverse character shape the conditions in which the Chakri dynasty was founded? And there was the question of historical memory itself: how did the trauma of Ayutthaya’s sudden and violent destruction in 1767 shape the Chakri self-conception, and is Bangkok better understood as a renewal of something lost or as a genuinely fresh foundation?
Professor McDaniel concluded by returning to the methodological principle that had guided the lecture throughout. The most productive approach to Bangkok’s history, he suggested, may be the most intimate one: following the city’s stories neighbourhood by neighbourhood, interview by interview, attending to how ordinary residents understand their own local histories. Grand cosmological frameworks, applied too quickly from above, tend to find what they are looking for and miss everything else. The history of a city as complex and as alive as Bangkok deserves better.
Bibliography
McDaniel, Justin. Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words: Histories of Buddhist Monastic Education in Laos and Thailand. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.
McDaniel, Justin. The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magic Monk: Practicing Buddhism in Modern Thailand. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Tambiah, Stanley J. World Conqueror and World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Van Roy, Edward. Siamese Melting Pot: Ethnic Minorities in the Making of Bangkok. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2017.