November 23, 2023
Every visitor to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand knows the famous walls, gates, and square moat surrounding the old city, originally constructed around 1300 AD. Lost to overgrowth and civilization is the outer wall - a tall, well-engineered earthen rampart running along the stream now known as Mae Kha Canal, an expansion that was probably built after the Burmese conquest of the Lanna Kingdom (capital Chiang Mai) in mid-16thC. Part of the canal perimeter is now a walking street (first photo).
The last remaining wall segment is in the following photo, a c7-8 meter tall structure adjacent to a trench that would have been a large protective moat in the day. It looks like a hill on the left but in fact is the remains of a wall.
This wall had several bastions fortified by brick structures. The base of one can be seen in the next photo, but the last complete survivor is the Thipanet Bastion at the wall’s southwest corner, now hemmed in between neighborhoods crammed with shacks, chickens, and squatters and covered by mature trees, accessible only by a small footpath next to a modern 7-11 shop and a climb through overgrowth and crumbling bricks up the old rampart. Protruding nearly 10 meters above the canal level it would be an impressive structure if the view were cleared away. One clue on the dating of the structure are the cross-shaped gun holes around the top of the tower - guns were introduced from China into Lanna warfare by the mid-late 1400s but more widely used after the arrival of the Portuguese in the region in the early 1500s. Judging from the brick-lined paths leading away from the fort along the top of the wall structure, the brick fortifications appear to have extended 20-30 meters in either direction. There were numerous of these bastions located along the greater rampart, all the rest now lost and foundations buried under streets and modern structures.
Nearby, between the outer earthen wall and Chiang Mai’s main inner walls on a busy street is a Sukhothai style stupa, protruding upward from an untidy mass of wires and commerce. This is all that remains of Wat That Klang, the name now assigned to this former temple complex. The style of the chedi is similar to what the art historian Betty Gosling refers to as the"mature period" of Sukhothai temple architecture, or around 1400, and may have been built here in the early 15thC, pre-dating both the wars with the central plains city states (mid-1400s) and the Burmese conquest (mid-1500s). It's worth nothing that the base of this chedi is shaped more like the Sukhothai forms from the latter 1300s. All these notes combined suggest this outer area of the city was probably settled and commercially active shortly after Chiang Mai’s inner city was founded at the end of the 1200s and needed a strong defense. An information board only says to the effect “little is known of the history.” That is in part because the foundations of the wihan - the assembly hall usually set to the east of the temple chedi - are now buried under several neighboring homes, making archeological work nigh impossible.
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