Ambiguous heritage and the place of tourism: Bangkok’s Rattanakosin

Abstract

Bangkok’s ancient city, Rattanakosin, is a major tourism focus displaying palaces, temples, exotic street life and frenetic waterfront. However, this ‘first-level’ heritage landscape makes little sense dissociated from that of an underlying ‘second level,’ comprising surviving remnants and lost memories of a vast array of other palaces whose occupants sustained the ancient Siamese state and accounted for a present culture of royal-elite-military hegemony. The first five Chakri kings had an immense multiplicity of sons who could serve as defenders of both realm and dynasty, later as royal ministers and administrators and as commercial collaborators. Multiple daughters were useful in buying loyalty of an often restive nobility. Royal fecundity, however, posed a real-estate challenge as sons had to be housed appropriately, calling for an extraordinary profusion of both large and small palaces. While most have now been swept away for other development, the remnants constitute a suppressed and uninterpreted cultural landscape that also intersects with multiple sites of both dark and hedonistic tourism. These intersections of first and second levels of heritage, then with both dark and hedonistic levels of heritage-identity, yield ambiguity, demanding interpretation.

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