by Jim Goodman
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| the Wang River running through Lampang |
When the British annexed Lower
Burma in the early 19th century they began organizing the teakwood
business. An excellent, durable
hardwood, with natural oils that make it impervious to water and termites, teak
was an ideal building material.
Vast forests dominated by teak trees existed in both Burma and northern
Thailand. As the British took over
the rest of the country they further developed the trade and extended business
operations into northern Thailand.
British companies leased
forests from local autonomous rulers in the north and set up bases mainly in
Chiang Mai and Lampang, 100 km south.
Lying along the Wang River in a broad plain, Lampang is surrounded by
mountains, then full of forests that were a prime source of teak. But while local authorities were quite
willing to grant foreigners forest concessions, local people did not want to
work in them. So the British
brought in workers from Burma, especially Shan, which not only affected the makeup
of the population, but also introduced new cultural influences. The city today features several
Burmese-style temples, around half of those in northern Thailand.
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| the walled compound of Wat Lampang Luang |
Lampang is actually the second
oldest city, after Lamphun, in northern Thailand. The younger son of Queen Chamadevi of the recently
established Mon state of Haripunchai, as Lamphun was then called, founded the
city in the 9th century.
Because of the intervening Khuntan Mountains between the two cities.
Lampang enjoyed a great measure of autonomy and indeed, there is scarce mention
of the city in Haripunchai chronicles.
To protect itself from
invasions, Lampang established bastions on all the routes leading into it. When Mengrai of the Kingdom of Lanna
conquered Haripunchai, including distant Lampang, these bastions were
abandoned. But one of them, about
18 km northeast, became the site of Wat Lampang Luang, one of the most
venerated temples in northern Thailand.
Sitting on an artificial mound and surrounded by walls, it looks like a
fortified temple compound.
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| 18th century mural, Viharn Luang |
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| 19th century mural, Viharn Luang |
The Buddha himself is said to
have visited the site and left a hair as remembrance, which was then housed in
a shrine that eventually became a chedi,
twice enlarged in the 15th century, that now stands 45 meters
tall. The Viharn Luang in front of
it has a classic Lanna triple roof and an ornate, gilded housing for the main
Buddha image.
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| 19th century scene, Lampang Luang mural |
The wooden interior walls
feature painted frescoes of the Jataka
Tales, a collection of stories of previous incarnations of the Buddha. Some
of them date from the 18th century, the oldest in northern
Thailand. These are rather crude
portraits, with fewer details and colors than the larger array of early 19th
century murals. Besides veneration
of the Buddha, scenes depict kings at their courts, soldiers assembling for
war, royalty at leisure and rivers full of fish and mythical creatures.
The original mid-15th
century viharn (main prayer hall) has
been replaced since then, though probably in the original style, as have most
of the buildings. But one of them,
Viharn Nam Tam, built in the beginning of the 16th century,
open-sided with a triple roof, has never been rebuilt and is the oldest extant
original temple in the north.
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| Viharn Nam Tam |
Within Lampang city itself,
the most important temple in the Kingdom of Lanna times was Wat Phra Kaew Don
Tao. Built over a previous Mon
temple in the 14th-15th centuries, it was the original
home of the Emerald Buddha, considered Thailand’s most powerful guardian image.
In 1434 lightning struck a chedi in
Chiang Rai province and revealed a damaged Buddha image. The abbot found that underneath the
exterior stucco was an image of green jade. The King of Lanna wanted it moved to Chiang Mai, but the
elephant carrying it three times detoured to Lampang. So it stayed in Wat Phra Kaew Don Tao until 1468, when King
Tilokaraj removed it to Chiang Mai.
A century later it was taken to Laos and eventually Siamese troops
captured it in Vientiane and took it to Bangkok, where it remains.
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| Po Thip Chang at Wat Phra Kaew Don Tao |
As the southernmost part of
Lanna, Lampang occasionally suffered when wars between Ayutthaya and Lanna took
place mainly in Lampang province.
Lanna itself began disintegrating in the mid-16th century and
Burmese armies captured Chiang Mai in 1558 with scarcely any resistance. Lampang fell under Burmese rule, too,
but as in the days when it was part of Lanna, Lampang’s administration still
enjoyed a fair measure of autonomy.
There were occasional revolts against bad Burmese governors, but these
didn’t last long. The various
principalities in the north never coordinated their actions.
In the 18th
century, Burmese control began to weaken, even as it revved up for a showdown
with Ayutthaya. In 1732 a Lampang
hunter named Po Thip Chang led an attack on the garrison that had been set up
at Wat Lampang Luang and killed the commander. Such was the politics of the day, though, instead of
organizing a reprisal, the Burmese king confirmed Po Thip Chang as autonomous
ruler of Lampang. In return, until
his death in 1757, the Lampang ruler could be relied upon to aid the Burmese
forces suppressing revolts in other places.
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| Baan Sao Nak teak house |
Burma conquered and destroyed
Ayutthaya in 1767. But in the
north, sporadic revolts had already been intensifying and now they picked up,
with a little more coordination than previously. The nominal King of Chiang Mai and King Kawila of Lampang, the
second successor to Po Thip Chang, faced with a Lanna devastated by revolts and
reprisals, sandwiched between two more powerful states, decided the best way to
get rid of the Burmese was to agree to ally with and be vassals of Siam.
In 1774 a combined
Siamese-Lanna force expelled the Burmese from Chiang Mai. But after barely surviving a
Burmese counter-attack the following year, Kawila abandoned the city and
removed what remained of the population to Lampang. When Rama I, who had commanded the Siamese troops in the
taking of Chiang Mai, ascended to Siam’s throne in 1782, he appointed Kawila as
King of a restored Lanna.
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| Baan Sao Nak interior |
But
Chiang Mai was still deserted and the Burmese still in the north. Kawila spent the next couple decades on
expeditions to capture people from northeast Burma to resettle them in
Lanna. He officially
re-established Chiang Mai as Lanna’s capital in 1796 and finally expelled the
last Burmese from Chiang Saen in 1802.
Kawila was one of Lampang’s
‘Seven Brothers,’ or Chao Chet Ton, the dynasty that ruled Lanna until its
final absorption into Thailand.
Another of the original Seven Brothers became prince of Lampang. As it was still several days’ journey
from Chiang Mai to Lampang, he also was a practically autonomous ruler.
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| the viharn at War Pong Sanuk |
Lampang was the second most
important city in revived Lanna.
Chiang Mai’s population only began exceeding Lampang’s in the mid-19th
century. By then the teak business
had made it one of the two northern cities with a significant foreign
population. The smaller portion of
this was Western, primarily British, some of whom ran the city offices and some
of whom spent many days in the forests supervising the logging. Every December the British community
celebrated Christmas together, alternating between Chiang Mai one year and Lampang
the next. (This became easier
after 1919, when the railway line, which only reached Lampang three years
earlier, was extended to Chiang Mai.)
The other foreign communities
were those who came in with the teak trade—Burmese, Shans and even
Indians. They worked both in the
cities and the forests and some Burmese entrepreneurs became quite wealthy from
the business. One of Lampang’s
most popular attractions today is Baan Sao Nak, the House of Many Pillars,
built in 1895 by a Burmese Mon trader.
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| Wat Sei Long Muang |
Altogether 116 pillars support
the house’s four connected, Lanna-style buildings, with a Burmese-style
verandah in front. All the
original furniture remains on display—beds, tables, chairs, cabinets full of
lacquer ware, brass and silver bowls, utensils and porcelain, partition
screens, a steam presser for creasing pants and a couple of early 20th
century gramophones.
Other Burmese merchants around
this time sponsored construction of temples for their community. The Burmese have been Theravada
Buddhist at least as long as the Thai, but these temples introduced new
architectural elements distinct from existing Lanna-style structures. The most obvious is the tall, thin,
multi-tiered, ornate tower over the entrances or on the roofs. The shape of the viharn—assembly hall—could also vary, making a tour of Lampang’s
temples interesting for the diversity of shapes and styles.
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| Wat Chedi Sao |
Built in 1886, Wat Pong Sanuk
rests, like Wat Lampang Luang, on a manmade mound rising above the immediate
neighborhood. Besides a gilded chedi, the compound features a
three-story viharn in an unusual
cruciform shape. The viharn at War Sri Long Muang, completed
in 1912, lies on a horizontal axis, with a very wide roof over a triple
entrance and three-tiered towers on either side of the central one. The building is unlike any other temple
in northern Thailand. And the
central Buddha image, of course, is very much in the Burmese style.
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| old house on Kad Kokng Ta |
A third Burmese temple from
this period is Wat Sri Chum, in the southern part of the city. U Myaung Gyi, also known as Big Boss,
of mixed Burmese and Shan descent, sponsored its construction and helped pay to
bring in skilled carpenters and craftsmen from Mandalay to build it, which was
completed in 1901. Both the viharn and the smaller ordination hall
feature typical Burmese/Shan roofs, different from the angled, layered roofs of
Thai temples, plus ornamented towers of receding tiers. The viharn
has two side entrances, with elaborately carved filigreed screens just above
the entry staircases.
In 1992 fire consumed the viharn. Basing their work on photographs of the original, Burmese
and Thai artisans tried to build an exact replacement. They got close, but the tower over the
rear entrance is somewhat higher than the original and the exterior walls that
were once an attractive pale yellow are now bright white. A large donation box, a postal
receptacle and a few other small structures now stand between the entry
staircases. And the filigreed
screens above them have been gilded.
Nevertheless, it’s still the finest Burmese temple in Lampang.
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| horse-carts station in Lampang |
Burmese architectural elements
also crept into the original Lanna-style temples in Lampang. An example is Wat Phra Kaew Don Tao,
where a Burmese tiered tower stands at the entrance, just in front of the old
Mon-style chedi. After this temple, the best known is
Wat Chedi Sao, on the north side of the Wang River. Sao in northern
Thai dialect means ‘twenty’ and that many white chedis with gilded tops stand in the courtyard. It also has, unusually for a Theravada
temple, a statue of a multi-armed Guan Yin, the Mahayana Buddhist Goddess of
Compassion. Wat Koh, on the south
bank of the Wang River, contains buildings in the northern Thai style, but also
a very Burmese-style small shrine in the rear of the compound, full of interior
wall murals.
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| Kad Kong Ta Street |
The other influence on Lampang
that came out of colonial Burma was that of the British teak wallahs themselves. Lampang’s central clock tower went up
at this time, replicating a feature the British introduced into cities in
Burma. The teak wallahs spent a lot of time in the
forests supervising the work.
Their crews first girdled the trees so that they would die slowly while
still standing and cut them down one to two years later. Trained elephants hauled the logs out
of the forest and shaped them into rafts on the riversides. The logs floated downriver to Bangkok,
staying in the water up to three months.
Coming home out of that
environment, they wanted homes that were spacious and comfortable. Kad Kong Ta, in the northern part of
old Lampang, was a favorite neighborhood and today the old teak wallah homes, largely converted to other
uses like restaurants and lodges, are another of the city’s highlight
attractions. They are a mix of northern Thai and European styles, but in
general so evocative of the teak trade’s heyday that the city chose the
neighborhood as its ‘Walking Street’ on Saturday nights, wherein the street
fills with stalls selling handicrafts and other merchandise, northern foods are
on offer and musicians play Lanna tunes.
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| horse-cart in the streets of Lampang |
The other enduring legacy of
the British presence is the horse-cart, also previously introduced in Burma and
still in use in Maymyo, or Pwin U Lwin, a hill station near Mandalay. Lampang is the only city in Thailand
one can still take a horse-cart to get around. They ‘re actually cheaper than taxis and a much more interesting
ride.
It’s amazing that they have
survived this long, for the teak wallahs
left a few generations ago and tourism didn’t take off until recent
decades. But now that Lampang is
drawing more attention as an excursion for travelers in northern Thailand, the
future of the horse-cart looks rosy.
They are a throwback to an archaic age, the city’s halcyon days of yore. They are an appropriate vehicle for a
relaxed exploration and enjoyment of the Mon, Lanna, Burmese and British
legacies of Lampang’s fascinating heritage.
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| the original Wat Sri Chum, 1989 |
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