Gold burns. Most people do not know this. Cast into fire, gold becomes liquid, and flows into whatever hollows the earth will offer. In
[1767](https://woud.io/ayutthaya/ja/ayutthaya_12), that is precisely what happened here.
Once, this city overflowed with gold. The crowns of its stupas were sheathed in gold leaf, and when sunlight broke through the clouds between monsoon rains, the entire city blazed with light. Merchants from
the Netherlands and
Persia, sailing upriver, would catch their breath at the first sight of those golden spires rising before them. They carried the story home — that at the far edge of the east, there stood a city clad in gold. At
**Wat Phra Si Sanphet**, a standing image sixteen meters tall was draped in nearly two hundred kilograms of gold. Pilgrims walked for days, and knelt before its radiance.
For more than four centuries, this city had accumulated its wealth. It sold rice and fragrant timber, sent ceramics and ivory out into the world. That wealth became the gold on temple walls, the gold in the crowns of kings. Everyone believed that prosperity meant raising gold upon stone.
And the end did not come in a single night. Fourteen months. The siege lasted fourteen months. Within the walls, the food ran out and disease spread. When the rainy season finally lifted, the fires were set.
The flames licked at the temples, scorched the gold leaf, and melted the Buddha images. The
gold that had clothed the great standing figure yielded to the heat and ran down in streams. Soldiers shattered the statues to scrape up what had melted away.
The body of the Buddha was broken apart for the sake of coin.
When the fires died, what remained were blackened brick and
headless stone Buddhas. The gold was carried away, or seeped into the earth, and never returned.
At the base of the fallen towers, reddish-brown bricks lie stacked. The light that once covered them is gone. Yet each one of those bricks still holds in silence four centuries of glory and a few brief months of ruin. The gold melted and vanished. But the bricks remain — the last witnesses of a city that was burned.
The gold melted. But the memory of the city did not.
Location:
Wat Phra Si Sanphet
Fall of the City:
1767 (by the Burmese Konbaung Dynasty)
Founded: 1350
Golden Standing Buddha:
Phra Si Sanphet Buddha (approx. 16 m tall; traditionally said to have been covered in approx. 173 kg of gold leaf)
Kingdom: Kingdom of Ayutthaya (Siam)
Site: Ayutthaya Historical Park (UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed 1991)
Official Site:
Ayutthaya Historical Park – Fine Arts Department, Thailand
Photo: MBertolotti /
Pixabay (pixabay)
