The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXIV, Part 1-2, 1976 - Khamkoo

REVIEW ARTICLES
Jeremias van Vliet, The Short History of the Kings of Siam, translated by
Leonard Andaya from a transcription by Miriam J. Verkuijl-van den
Berg, edited by David K. Wyatt. Bangkok, The Siam Society, 1975 iv,
97 pp.
For a number of years historians concerned with early Ayuttbay·a
have been aware that a chronicle version older than anything else extant
had been compiled in Dutch by the early 17th-century V.O.C. representative
in Ayutthaya, Jeremias van Vliet, and its publication has been
eagerly awaited for light it might shed on points which remain obscure
in other texts.
Now The Siam Society has provided in very attractive format a
transcription of van Vliet's original text with an English translation and
a certain number of notes on the historiographic problems of the text
and its relationship to other sources. I
Van Vliet's chronicle begins with a very interesting version of the
history of the peninsula and lower Menam basin before the founding of
Ayutthaya. Here van Vliet relates several stories which were current
concerning the first king of Siam in ancient times-that be was a son of
a Chinese emperor and had come to the peninsula a bout 2000 years
before, that be was a brahman named Pbrommatbep, and that Siam was
founded by the Buddha himself. A long time later, about 300 years
before van Vliet's day, another son of a Chinese ruler, Chao Ui, arrived
on the peninsula and became the Thai.> U Thong who founded Ayutthaya.
His acts in accomplishing this are described in some detail. No absolute
1) In what follows I shall use "van Vliet" for the author and vV for the text.
Proper names and royal titles will follow Wyatt's system of transcription
except where etymology is to be emphasized, and there, as in quotations from
Thai texts, the graphic system of transliteration will be used.