Phra Sumen Fort

In 1783 King Rama I (1737–1809), the first sovereign of Bangkok, had his new capital enclosed by a wall punctuated by fourteen forts. Phra Sumen Fort belonged to this system, alongside other works such as the Suea Thayan, Maha Chai, Chak Phet and Phi Suea forts. All were built of brick bonded with mortar. They mark the beginning of the Rattanakosin periodPeriod of Thai history that began with the founding of Bangkok as the capital by King Rama I at the end of the eighteenth century. It takes its name from Rattanakosin Island, the heart of the royal city., named after the royal city Rama I had just founded, and gave the nascent city a boundary that was at once military and symbolic.⁶

The fort now stands at the corner of Phra Athit Road and Phra Sumen Road, in the Chana Songkhram subdistrict of Phra Nakhon district. Phra Sumen Road owes its name to the fort: it begins at its foot, as though the modern city had preserved in its street plan the memory of the old rampart.²

Phra Sumen Fort was the northern fort of the ring. It stood where KhlongCanal or waterway, natural or man-made, which long played a major role in transport, irrigation and the organisation of settlements and territories in Thailand. Bang Lamphu – a khlong being a canal – joins the Chao Phraya River. This canal, formerly known as Khlong Rop Krung, ran alongside the city wall. The fort faces it, set on a high two-tiered base. Its position at the junction of river and canal explains its role: to hold the northern end of the capital’s defences, at the point where the waterway skirting the ramparts flowed out into the river.⁴

The importance of this post can also be read in the layout of the city. Rama I had princely palaces built near the most important forts, thereby entrusting their surroundings to members of the royal family. Near Phra Sumen Fort stood a palace occupied by a younger brother or sister of the king. The defence of the capital and the presence of the royal family thus went hand in hand.⁶

To raise his forts and city wall, Rama I had bricks dismantled at Ayutthaya, the kingdom’s former capital, then lying in ruins, and had new ones made. Two reasons are put forward for this choice. First, the new city had to be completed as quickly as possible, and bricks that had already been fired saved a considerable amount of time. It was also a matter of preventing an enemy from entrenching itself in the ruins of Ayutthaya by finding walls still standing there.⁴

This reuse lends Phra Sumen Fort a particular depth. Part of the very substance of the old capital passed into the foundations of the new one, and Bangkok’s fortifications were literally built from what remained of the previous city.

Phra Sumen Fort is a regular octagon rising over three levels. Its foundations are spread two metres below ground, and the whole formed by the fort and its wall extends forty-five metres from north to south. The first two levels are lined with parapets fitted with protection for artillery: this is where the defenders stood and where cannon could be positioned.⁴

The third level is a combat tower, known as ho ropThai term for the combat tower that crowns a fort and overlooks its defensive terraces., which dominates the whole. Published heights vary, because they are not measured from the same point: the crenellated wall reaches some ten metres at the top of its merlonsSolid section of a crenellated parapet, between two embrasures, behind which defenders take cover., the bai semaThai term for the solid merlons, often leaf-shaped, that crown the parapet of walls and forts., the solid crenellations that crown the parapet, while the tower carries the fort’s silhouette nearly twenty metres above the upper level. Seen from the park, the fort appears as a tiered white mass, its crowned tower standing out above the terraces.⁴

Originally, three staircases rose from the lower base, on the inner side of the wall. Only two remain: the third, too close to the road, was demolished, a sign of the compromises imposed by the city that grew up around the fort. Each staircase is marked at its corner by a masonry pillar topped with a bud-shaped finialCarved ornament, often shaped like a bud or flower, placed at the top of a pillar, pinnacle or roof..¹

The doors and windows are simple rectangular openings, without superfluous decoration, in keeping with the military function of the structure. The tower is covered by a dome-shaped roof, carried on a rendered timber frame. This roof is identical to that of Mahakan Fort, the other surviving fort of the city wall, a reminder that the works in Rama I’s ring followed a single model.¹

The walls of the fort were built in the same way as those of the city wall. The builders first raised two brick facings, then filled the central void with brick rubble, small in the lower part and larger towards the top. This technique, which may be described as loose rubble infill, made it possible to raise thick walls quickly using salvaged materials.¹

This method is consistent with the urgency of founding the capital and with the reuse of bricks from Ayutthaya. It shows how a building site worked in haste could produce structures robust enough to hold the approaches to a river.

After the reign of Rama I, the defensive ring gradually lost its purpose. Under King Chulalongkorn, Rama V (1853–1910), who set about modernising the kingdom, most of the forts were demolished. Their sites were put to other public uses: roads, bridges and buildings that accompanied the transformation of Bangkok.¹

Of this vast ensemble, only two forts survive, Phra Sumen and Mahakan. Their survival makes them the last visible witnesses to the fortified wall of the capital founded in 1783. Without them, the line of the ramparts could be read only in the names of streets and the course of the canals.¹

Phra Sumen Fort did not come through this period intact. One hypothesis holds that its main body collapsed between 1910 and 1928, during the reigns of Rama VI and Rama VII, and that only its base then remained. The 1999 excavations uncovered numerous cracks in the bricks of the foundations of the fort and the wall, which supports this supposition without allowing it to be dated precisely.⁴

This scenario sheds light on the subsequent history of the site. The fort that survived the demolition of the ramparts was probably, at least in part, a ruin. Its preservation owes as much to what remained buried as to what was still standing.

On 22 November 1949, Thailand’s Fine Arts Department, responsible for the national heritage, registered the fort and its ramparts as a national historic monumentLegal status granted by the State to a building recognised for its historical value, placing it under the protection of the heritage administration.. This listing officially recognised the value of the structure as a witness to the founding of Bangkok and shielded it from the demolitions that had swept away the other forts.²

Legal protection preceded the reconstruction by more than thirty years. Yet it set the framework for everything that followed: henceforth, any intervention on the fort was a matter for the State and its heritage administration.

In 1981, as the bicentenary of Rattanakosin approached, the Fine Arts Department reconstructed Phra Sumen Fort. The architects drew on photographs taken during the reign of Rama V, at a time when the fort still retained its elevation. During these works, the surroundings were laid out as a public garden.²

This choice gave the fort the appearance it presents today. The upper parts the visitor sees – terraces, tower and roof – are therefore the product of a 20th-century reconstruction, based on the photographic imageIn Thai Buddhism, a devotional representation of the Buddha, most often a statue, venerated as an object of worship. of an earlier state. In 1992 the Fine Arts Department drew up a survey and plan of the fort, recording the state of the structure after this reconstruction.¹

In 1999 the government decided to lay out the area as a park with a pavilion, in tribute to the seventy-second birthday of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (1927–2016). The project was accompanied by archaeological excavations and a new restoration programme, the plans for which were drawn up by Sawara Nonthari and Phon Sridurongkhatham. The excavations were entrusted to the firm Siwakorn Kanchang Co., under the supervision of the Office of Archaeology and National Museums of the Fine Arts Department.¹

The excavators uncovered an abundance of finds, classified by material. Wooden objects lay at shallow depth, beneath the tiled concrete slab laid during the previous restoration. Some of the finds date from the 19th and 20th centuries and bear witness to the occupation of the site after the fort was built, at a time when its surroundings were inhabited and worked.⁶

The major discovery lay at a depth of one metre. There the excavators exposed an inverted lotus baseMoulded base, called bua khwam in Thai, whose profile evokes an upturned lotus flower, used in Thai architecture., bua khwam, a moulding evoking an upturned lotus flower, covered with a smooth render. They regard it as the base of the original fort, that of Rama I. The excavations also showed that the base of the fort had been built using two techniques; one of them consisted of setting Sam Khok jars upside down in the foundation layer.⁵

These observations matter in two ways. They shed light on the skills employed for large buildings in the early Rattanakosin period, from foundations on upturned jars to the infilling of walls. They also suggest that only the foundations and the base go back to the fort of 1783, while the elevation dates from the 1981 reconstruction. Phra Sumen Fort can thus be read as a layering: an old buried footing, and a reconstituted monument above it.¹

Before 1999, the surroundings of the fort were occupied by the warehouses of the Sri Maharaja company and by dwellings that encroached on the site. The park project covers an area stretching from a head office to a former sugar refinery, taking in the Sri Maharaja company’s land and the surroundings of the fort. The scheme thus transformed an industrial, densely built-up space into a garden open to the river.⁵

At the centre of this project, the pavilion was built as a royal residence. Santichaiprakan Park, laid out for King Bhumibol’s seventy-second birthday, now combines the military work of the late 18th century with a monarchical tribute of the late 20th century.⁵

Phra Sumen Fort is today the principal monument of Santichaiprakan Park. The neighbouring pavilion is used for royal ceremonies on the water and has a landing stage for the royal barges. The site, which once guarded the northern approach to the capital by river, thus remains linked to the Chao Phraya, but for ceremonial rather than defensive purposes.³

Reading the fort on site means distinguishing its periods. The tiered white silhouette seen from the park is that of 1981, designed after photographs from the time of Rama V. Beneath it, the inverted lotus base and the foundations on upturned jars preserve the trace of the 1783 works, carried out with bricks from Ayutthaya. Between the two, the listing of 1949 and the excavations of 1999 are a reminder that the fort owes its present existence as much to the decision to protect it as to its original construction.