WIENG KUM KAM, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 1 Jun 2003 – Today (20th August 2003) I unintentionally revisited Wieng Kum Kam, specifically that part now named as Wat Phan Lao, and hypothesized as being the AD 1286 palace of King Mengrai.

What I witnessed there has left me extremely disappointed and completely disillusioned regarding current local and national plans to develop the ancient city into anything approaching Sukhothai or Ayutthaya.

My original visits to that particular archaeology, 12 months ago, resulted in comments from archaeologists which I have been loathe to commit in writing.

Suffice it to say that even then, it had been determined that a genuine search for historical truth was to be avoided at all costs.

When I presented cartographical and archival evidence to support a proposal that the site was Mengrai’s palace, the excavation was abandoned very quickly and the site left to deteriorate, which last year’s heavy rains accelerated.

At that time there was an unwelcome ferocity in the archaeologists’ determination that the site was “only a temple”.  One of them can be quoted, “The structures are brick, do you think ordinary people built in brick at that time?”  OK, so this particular ignoramus referring to King Mengrai as an ordinary person, was from Bangkok.  We all know that Bangkokians are completely unaware of anything north of Lop Buri.

Today FAD (Fine Arts Department) are restructuring the whole site – I can use no other description. Over thirty cubic metres of reproduction bricks have been dumped at the site and a team of labourers are busily “renovating” the eroded structures.  Normally I would applaud and support such activity, but in this case I cannot, due to how they are doing it.

Ignoring that excavation was never completed, and therefore the true designs and purposes of many of the structures were never fully investigated; the unsupervised labourers are adopting the current excavation and rains-distorted surface as being the original ground level and are amateurishly applying childlike brick-laying onto the original structures.  The shapes and profiles that were clearly visible last year are being distorted and stylised into text book Lan Na designs, a visualisation which does not appear in the photographs I took when they were first uncovered.  Today’s ground surface is also known to still be 1.5 to 2 metres above the original, even after the top 1 to 1.5 metres were taken off last year.

Worse still is the fact that they are “inventing” structures and walls, creating them where there was no excavated evidence of any existing. By the start of high season, this site will indeed look like a typical AD 16th century Lan Na temple ruin, yet the early deep level excavations showed a much different picture.

The site bore no similarity to any temple excavated inside Wieng Kum Kam, or to any surviving in or around Chiangmai.  That fact is being deliberately changed and the truth hidden from future scholars and researchers – WHY?

FAD may deny this is their intent, against which I have my original photographs and drawings.

Following a Prime Ministerial directive last year, it may be fashionable (faddish? – sorry, bad pun) to rewrite the Burmo-Thai history of warfare between the two kingdoms and appease current political tensions, but there is no need to involve Wieng Kum Kam.

That FAD continues to avoid recognition of scientific geological evidence concerning the flood dating for Wieng Kum Kam is another indicator of an ulterior political motive.  They insist that it was flooded, destroyed, and abandoned, on an unknown date during the Burmese occupation of Chiangmai and Lan Na from AD 1558 to 1776, yet all the evidence (archaeological, documentary, etc) points to the flood occurring in the late 1520s.

The most compelling result of this mythology-manufacturing was this year’s “Underground Empire” campaign that thoroughly spurned foreign visitation, and promoted nationalism over education with a near-complete rewrite of local history; one that ignored medieval chronicles of events, written by writers contemporary to the events described.  Again, why this need to use the Walt Disney approach?  The truth is much more fascinating and exciting than the modern fiction.

The past writings of prominent Thai archaeologists and historians support what I state above.

Rajapat Chiangmai’s Sarasawadee Ongsakul criticised FAD’s level of professionalism in her Thai-language book about Wieng Kum Kam, Silpakorn’s Dhida Saraya admitted in her thesis-like tome on Sri Davarati that “Thailand’s first scientific excavation only took place in the early 1990s”.  Even the producer of Suriyothai has been quoted as admitting he had to build his own city sets because those restored by FAD were inaccurate for the period.

Additionally, other much longer “in-country” foreign historians have seen Wat Phan Lao and conclude it is not a standard temple, that it’s arrangement supports a secular rather than religious use, and that it could originally have been defensive of the wieng’s north side.  FAD refuse to discuss this.

In conclusion, I therefore urge each of you, in editorial and journalistic ways, to please investigate this travesty that will continue to oppress local peoples understanding of their own history and heritage – I feel completely unable to pursue this matter in any way that would not reveal my disgust at this archaeological vandalism.

If FAD are capable of doing this here, then it calls into doubt the truth and integrity of what we see at Sukhothai, Sri Satchanalai, Ayutthaya, Phimai, and every other archaeological park in the kingdom.  Did FAD’s in-house Disney-esque designer also create what we see in those locations today?

Can we believe anything older than yesterday that any government department is associated with?

FOOTNOTE – The site under discussion in this article is Site 14 in the book Wieng Kum Kam – Atlantis of Lan Na

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Published in Chiangmai Mail Newspaper, Thailand – 20 September 2003

Heritage Hooliganism at Wieng Kum Kam
Political Manipulation of Medieval History?