27/05/2026
The Portugal in Siam
The work we present here, authored by researcher Miguel Castelo Branco and published by the National Library of Portugal, is an essential contribution to understanding Portugal’s role in relation to the former Kingdom of Siam, present-day Thailand. The privileged diplomatic and military relations maintained over the centuries made this connection an unprecedented relationship of mutual respect and consideration with a European state — one that endures to this day.
Below is an excerpt from the work — selected by the author at our request — which is directly related to the emergence of the Luso-Siamese community:
“The original nucleus of the Portuguese bandel of Ayutthaya dates back to the mid-16th century. It was founded by Portuguese settlers to whom the Siamese kings had reasons to show gratitude, expressing it through the donation of land for settlement. However, this was not yet the Portuguese bandel where Ambassador Vaz de Siqueira would stay upon arriving in the Siamese capital in 1684.
In fact, following the success of the Portuguese embassy led by Francisco de Aguiar Evangelho to King Prasat Thong in 1639, the Dominican friars Fr. António de S. Domingos and Fr. Jacinto Ximenes became the founders of the first permanent mission in Ayutthaya, promoting the relocation of the Portuguese bandel further north. Finding the original site not only “indecent” but also “highly unhealthy,” the priests succeeded, after three difficult months of negotiations with the Phra Khlang, in moving the Portuguese community to land previously occupied by people from Pegu, “situated opposite the city, on the other side of the river.” The authorization included the demolition of a Peguan temple and the construction of a church dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, which in 1640 became the first church of the bandel.
The population of the Portuguese settlement tended to grow in proportion to the military setbacks suffered throughout Insulindia. When Malacca surrendered to the Dutch in January 1641, part of the Catholic population fled to Cambodia and from there moved on to Ayutthaya. Years later, during the 1660s, Macassar was abandoned and its population sought refuge in Siam. By the late 1680s, the Portuguese numbered around four thousand, and this figure remained relatively stable until the attack and fall of the city in 1767 (LOUBÈRE 1691: 429).
More than a mere village, the bandel constituted a commune within the Siamese administrative order. Governed by a captain or Nay (Lord) appointed by the Siamese king and subordinated to the authority of the Phra Khlang, the Tambon (DAMRONG RAJANUBHAB 2001: 245) sheltered an ethnically heterogeneous population encompassing all the variations of the astonishing Afro-Indian, Indo-Malay, Luso-Japanese, Sino-Indian, and Peguan-Portuguese mixture — in addition, of course, to Thai-Portuguese — that made the Portuguese Asian world a true cultural melting pot.
The bandel differed little from any ordinary Southeast Asian village settlement. Were it not for the brick buildings with Chinese-style glazed tile roofs — the only structures built with solid and durable materials — such as the Franciscan chapel, the Dominican church of Our Lady of the Rosary, the Jesuit church of St. Paul, and the adjoining seminary residence, the ban protuket would have been indistinguishable from the other kampongs beyond the city walls.
The isolated houses were built on stilts, with an open lower level used for pottery, domestic water reserves, and cages for poultry. The walls, made of bamboo, wood, or woven wicker, allowed ventilation of the interior, while trapdoor-style windows and doors protected against rain, insects, and reptiles. These family dwellings were separated by small open spaces used for drying fish or as pig manure pits. Unlike the great city itself, the kampongs were unpaved and subject to the cycle of floods that annually overflowed the riverbanks, inundating the riverside lands and turning the ground into immense mudflats. Since the inhabitants lived largely from river-related activities, it is likely that part of the ban protuket consisted of stilt houses equipped with mooring areas and storage spaces for the boats and pirogues used to transport the men of the bandel to the customs quay of Ayutthaya on the opposite bank of the river.
As documentary testimonies concerning daily life in the settlement are scarce, we rely on Guy Tachard who, moved by the poverty endured by Father Soares, a Jesuit of St. Paul with thirty years of activity in the East, wrote that the elderly priest “lived in a small house with two poor rooms, so badly sealed that the tuké could be found everywhere, behind chests and moving freely among the furniture” (TACHARD 1686, Vol. 1: 155–156).
Objects uncovered during archaeological excavations in the early 1990s revealed traces of the material culture of the Catholic population of the kampong: rosaries, talismans, crucifixes, cups, cutlery, buckles, and small ivory figurines. With the exception of the churches, which would have possessed wooden benches for worshippers, liturgical objects, sacred images, wooden pulpits, and sacristy furniture for storing vestments, the furnishings of ordinary homes were likely limited to chests, oil lamps, and the bare essentials of daily life.”
