At the Wellspring of Visual Storytelling: The Art of Sukhothai and Its Legacy

The history of Thai art tends to begin at Sukhothai, in the 13th century, in what UNESCO presents as the first kingdom of Siam. Here we find brick monasteries clad in stucco, a Buddha caught in mid-stride and stone slabs engraved with the Buddha's previous lives. Yet this starting point is also a construction. Kings in Bangkok carried off statues and inscriptions, Thai historians turned it into a golden age, and the international community enshrined it in 1991. A look back at an art that tells stories, and at the way its story has been told.

Why the story begins at Sukhothai

Every history of art needs a beginning. Thailand's almost always places its own at Sukhothai, on the plain of the north-central region. The choice is far from arbitrary, but it remains a convention. It does not mean that nothing existed before. It means that Sukhothai is designated as the first truly Siamese kingdom. UNESCO describes the site as preserving the 'remains of the first Kingdom of Siam', in the 13th and 14th centuries.

The dates themselves call for caution. UNESCO keeps to a broad range, the 13th and 14th centuries. Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum gives 1200–1350. Conventional historiography places the end of the kingdom, absorbed by Ayutthaya, at some point in the 15th century, but the exact date varies from author to author. These discrepancies are not mere chronological squabbles. They remind us that we are speaking of a kingdom reconstructed from ruins, inscriptions and chronicles, not of an entity with clear-cut boundaries in time.

The title of this article plays on a double meaning. The art of Sukhothai tells stories: it puts into images the life of the Buddha, his virtues and his previous existences. But this art has also had its story told. Rulers moved it, scholars classified it, museums displayed it. Understanding what one is looking at in Sukhothai means holding these two threads together.

An architecture of brick and stucco in the service of the Buddha

Three cities, one ensemble

The property inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1991 brings together three neighbouring ancient cities: Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai and Kamphaeng Phet. The ensemble covers 11,852 hectares. Sukhothai accounts for 7,000 of them, Si Satchanalai for 4,514 and Kamphaeng Phet for 338. This serial configuration already tells us something. The art of Sukhothai is not that of a single, isolated capital, but that of a network of urban centres sharing a common vocabulary.

UNESCO justifies the inscription on two criteria, (i) and (iii). The first recognises in these three cities masterpieces of the 'first distinctive Siamese architectural style'. The phrase is not limited to temples. It encompasses town planning, civil and religious buildings, and a hydraulic system judged to be sophisticated. The managed landscape, with its water-control works, is therefore as much a part of the achievement as the sanctuaries.

What we see: brick and stucco

Today's visitor discovers brick structures, often stripped bare, which once bore a thick coating of sculpted stucco. According to UNESCO, Buddhism flourished at the time under royal patronage, and many monasteries were built on this principle: a brick core, a modelled skin. Stucco made it possible to sculpt directly on the building, and it carried the bulk of the figurative programme.

This programme had a precise function. Again according to UNESCO, the stucco decoration illustrates the idealised beauty of the Buddha and his superhuman characteristics, the mahapurisalakkhana (Pali for the 'marks of the great man'). In the Buddhist tradition, these physical signs distinguish the Awakened One from ordinary mortals. The image is therefore not a portrait. It is a visual demonstration of an extraordinary nature, expressed through conventions that the faithful knew how to read.

A point of method is called for. UNESCO stresses that the achievements of Sukhothai are known today chiefly through its religious monuments. What has survived, brick, stone and bronze, inevitably shapes our view. The image of a civilisation wholly turned towards the sacred stems in part from this filter of preservation.

The Walking Buddha: a story condensed into a gesture

Describe before interpreting

If a single image had to stand for Sukhothai, it would be the Walking Buddha. The Asian Civilisations Museum, which holds a bronze example, presents it as the emblematic image of this art. The Buddha is caught in mid-step, right foot forward. His right hand is raised in the abhaya mudra, the gesture signifying the absence of fear and, by extension, the protection granted to the faithful. The posture bears a Pali name, cankrama, which the museum translates as 'walking back and forth'.

Most Buddhist images fix the Buddha seated in meditation or standing motionless. This one introduces movement. The body is caught between two points of support, at the instant when the weight shifts from one leg to the other. It does not narrate an episode through a scene peopled with figures, as a narrative painting would. It condenses a story into a single figure: that of an Awakened One who walks on and comes towards those he reassures.

An image that outlived its kingdom

The Singapore bronze is dated to the 15th–16th centuries. If one accepts the museum's chronology, which has the kingdom ending around 1350, this work was produced well after Sukhothai's political zenith. The style thus continued to live, to be cast and venerated, while the centre of power had moved elsewhere. This is an important clue: an artistic form can break free of the dynasty that gave birth to it and become a reference for other generations of craftsmen and patrons.

The same museum adds a broader comment. Sukhothai, it writes, is today idealised in the Thai imagination as a golden age of Buddhism and benevolent kingship. The Walking Buddha, with its grace and poise, has become one of the favoured vehicles of this idealisation. We shall return to this.

Wat Si Chum: previous lives engraved in stone

A massive sanctuary and a hidden passage

It is at Wat Si Chum, to the north-west of the old city of Sukhothai, that the expression 'storytelling in images' takes on its most literal meaning. The monastery is organised around a mondop (from the Sanskrit mandapa, a square-plan structure) with very thick walls, which houses a large seated Buddha.

In his standard work Art in Thailand: A Brief History, the art historian M.C. Subhadradis Diskul, of the Faculty of Archaeology at Silpakorn University, first points out a gap: few mural paintings from the Sukhothai period have come down to us. He immediately notes a remarkable exception. Stone slabs engraved with various jataka, the tales of the Buddha's previous lives, line the ceiling of the passage built into the thickness of the mondop's walls.

What the specialists say

For Diskul, these slabs bear witness to the great skill of Thai artists in stone engraving. He adds that they were 'probably' influenced by the religious art of Sri Lanka. The word matters: the author is putting forward a hypothesis, not a certainty. It is all the more worth stressing because one encounters elsewhere a more categorical claim that the Sukhothai style was born simply of throwing off Khmer tutelage. This reading is not established by the primary sources consulted here.

The catalogue of the exhibition The Arts of Thailand, shown in the United States in 1960–1962, describes incised jataka slabs found reused as ceiling slabs over a narrow staircase built into the thickness of the walls. They are said to have been placed there 'for safekeeping'. The extract consulted does not name the monastery. The match with Diskul's description makes the identification with Wat Si Chum highly probable, though it has not been explicitly verified. If one follows this catalogue, one must also consider that the slabs' present location may not be the one for which they were designed. They would first have been works intended to be seen, before becoming a protected deposit, half hidden in the masonry.

The question of the patron remains open. A hypothesis advanced by historians links the founding of the sanctuary, or at least its programme, to the monk Si Sattha. It still needs to be confirmed in its authors' publications. The site has also yielded a long inscription on schist, known as 'Inscription No. 2' or the Wat Si Chum inscription. It is generally dated to the mid-14th century and is said to have been discovered in the late 19th century. These details, widely repeated, have yet to be cross-checked against an institutional source.

The Buddha who 'spoke'

A tradition attached to Wat Si Chum holds that the great seated Buddha could speak. Diskul does not dismiss it out of hand: he offers a material explanation. A person concealed behind the statue could easily make the image 'speak'. The effect must have been all the more striking since the mondop still had its roof at the time, probably of wood and terracotta tiles, which created a half-light and an enclosed acoustic. The interpretation remains that of one historian. It has the merit of reminding us that a sanctuary was not a museum. It was a space of experience, where architecture, light and voice all played a part in staging the sacred.

Moving, removing, restoring: the making of a golden age

When Bangkok drew on Sukhothai

The art history of Sukhothai does not stop with the kingdom's decline. It continues in the uses that later powers made of its works. According to UNESCO, Rama I, founder of the Chakri dynasty, who reigned from 1782 to 1809, had 2,128 Buddha statues removed from Sukhothai. UNESCO's entry, incidentally, contains a typographical error, attributing the dates 1782–1890 to this reign. The figure, for its part, gives the measure of the operation. The images were transferred to the new capital and its monasteries. They were invested anew with a religious function and, no doubt, with a symbolic significance too: linking the young kingdom of Bangkok to the prestige of the first Siamese kingdom.

Half a century later, King Mongkut (Rama IV, 1851–1868) found at Sukhothai, again according to UNESCO, an inscription and a stone throne, which he had taken away. The entry does not specify which objects these were. The identifications found elsewhere, and the debates surrounding certain Sukhothai inscriptions, lie beyond the scope of the sources gathered here. The act alone is enough to show one thing: in the 19th century, Sukhothai had become a source of legitimacy and knowledge, a past to be collected.

Restoring, and sometimes damaging

The 20th century ushered in the age of conservation, with its successes and its mistakes. Diskul notes that a heavy finial added to one of the monuments in 1940 hastened its deterioration through its sheer weight. The case illustrates a dilemma familiar to every restorer: completing a building to make it legible can endanger its structure. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Thai government subsequently restored the site with the assistance of UNESCO, leading up to the 1991 inscription.

An ascribed golden age

It is in this context that the notion of a golden age should be read. It does not come from the ruins themselves. It is the result of centuries of reinterpretation. The Asian Civilisations Museum says so plainly when it speaks of an idealisation of Sukhothai in the Thai imagination. Acknowledging this construction takes nothing away from the quality of the works. It simply makes it possible to distinguish two things: the artistic value attested by the stucco, the bronzes and the engraved slabs, and the symbolic value that later eras conferred upon them.

Writing the history of Thai art, from Sukhothai to Bangkok

The twentieth-century intermediaries

If Sukhothai holds first place in the narratives today, it is also thanks to those who wrote the history of Thai art. Subhadradis Diskul's book, a translation of his Sinlapa nai Prathet Thai, was published by the Faculty of Archaeology at Silpakorn. Its second edition appeared in 1970, and it was reissued, notably, in 1981 and 1991. For a long time it served as a textbook, in Thailand and abroad, and its chronological structure, in which the great styles follow one after another, shaped the way generations of readers learned to look.

Earlier still, the exhibition The Arts of Thailand, shown in the United States in 1960–1962, had offered the American public an overview of the country's architecture, sculpture and painting. Its catalogue, conceived as a genuine textbook, helped to establish internationally a reading of Thai art organised by periods. These publications are not mere neutral witnesses. They themselves belong to the history of the narrative they relate.

A thread that runs all the way to Bangkok

Storytelling in images does not stop with Sukhothai. It carries on through the styles of Ayutthaya and other regional centres, and then in Bangkok. Diskul offers an example of these continuities. At the beginning of the Rattanakosin period, that of Bangkok, the ubosot (ordination halls) and wihan (assembly halls) continue the style of late Ayutthaya. The ubosot of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha takes up the curved base, in the form of a concave curve, characteristic of the Ayutthaya formula. This line subsequently disappeared from Thai architecture. In the same period, religious libraries continued to be built in the middle of a pond, in keeping with tradition.

These details say what matters most. Thai art does not proceed by clean breaks but by revivals, adaptations and gradual abandonments. A form is born, spreads, outlives its kingdom of origin, then fades away in favour of another. The Walking Buddha cast two centuries after Sukhothai's zenith and the curved base handed down from Ayutthaya to Bangkok follow one and the same logic of transmission.

This is perhaps the most enduring lesson of Sukhothai. Here we see slabs in which the Buddha's previous lives are incised in stone, stucco that gives form to the marks of the Awakened One, and a walking gesture suspended in bronze. We also glimpse, between the lines, statues moved, inscriptions carried off, restorations debated and books that put the past in order. To look at Thai art from the 13th century onwards is to read, at one and the same time, the images and the history of how they have been read.

Sources and further reading

1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Historic Town of Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns (fiche n° 574, Outstanding Universal Value), UNESCO, 1991 (inscription) ;.
2. M.C. Subhadradis Diskul, Art in Thailand: A Brief History (trad. de Sinlapa nai Prathet Thai), Silpakorn University, Faculty of Archaeology (Krung Siam Press pour la 2e éd.), 1970 (2e éd.) ; éd. .
3. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Art in Thailand: a brief history – notice catalographique, Smithsonian Institution, 1981 (édition décrit.
4. Theodore Bowie (dir.) [attribution à confirmer], The Arts of Thailand: A Handbook of the Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting of Thailand (Siam), and a Catalogue of the Exhibition in the United States in 1960-61-62, Indiana University / Project MUSE (édition en accès ouvert), 1960.
5. Asian Civilisations Museum / National Heritage Board (Singapour), Sculpture of Walking Buddha, Sukhothai, north-central Thailand, bronze 15th–16th centuries, Roots.gov.sg, n.d..
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sukhothai, Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d..
7. Contributeurs Wikipedia, Wat Si Chum Inscription ; Sukhothai Historical Park (articles relayant Baker & Pasuk), Wikipedia, n.d..