Lop Buri: A Rare Fusion of Three Cultures

By Robert Wilson
This is part of our Window on Southeast Asia series.

In the days before mass communication and transportation, cultural exchanges between countries that were separated by a long distance or natural barriers were far less common than today. When such exchanges did occur, they often resulted in a cultural fusion, a whole new culture, or a brief encounter leaving only a glimpse of what might have been. The latter was true of the period of contact between Safavid-era Iran and Ayutthaya-era Thailand, then known as “Siam,” two great ancient civilizations in their prime.

Lop Buri was once an important city to the Angkor (Cambodian) empire. It became a part of the kingdom Sukhotai, ancient Thailand in the 1200s. In the mid 1300s its royal family moved to Ayutthaya and established a new vassal kingdom to Sukhotai. It would go on to overthrow Sukhotai and rule all of Thailand, presiding over what is now known as the “Ayutthaya period,” from the mid-1300s until 1767. One of Thailand’s great kings, King Narai, briefly restored Lop Buri to its former greatness as a satellite capitol to Ayutthaya in the 1660s. It was then that an interesting but brief cultural fusion would take place.

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