Chiang Mai in 1816: The Puzzle of the ‘Finlayson Map’

Part of Ancient Chiang Mai

Carefully secured in the stacks of the British Library in London, catalogued as India Office Prints and Drawings WD 1750, is what may be - certainly what purports to be - the earliest known map of the old Lan Na capital of Chiang Mai. Drawn in pen-and-ink and watercolour, on paper 48cm by 37cm (19in by 15in), it is listed simply as ‘Plan of temple at Chiengmai (Siam), c.1816’. Little more is known of the map, the provenance of which remains obscure. It is filed away with the Finlayson Collection, but almost as though tacked on as an afterthought, the last of 127 prints and drawings in the group, the only map, and the only item relating to the Kingdom of Lan Na - or, indeed, any part of Siam much north of the general vicinity of Bangkok. The catalogue information remarks briefly: ‘Inscribed on front in ink: “Cheung Mai”; note 1814 water-mark’, and concludes: ‘There is nothing to show how or when this drawing reached the Library. It may possibly have been acquired by Finlayson or Crawfurd during the expedition to Siam, as earlier contacts with Siam were rare’.

An Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China

Dr George Finlayson (1790-1823), a native of Thurso in Scotland, served under Dr John Crawfurd (1783-1868), a fellow Scot from the Island of Islay and leader of the British East India Company Mission to Siam and Vietnam of 1821-2, which Finlayson represented as surgeon and naturalist. The mission remained at Bangkok between March 22 and July 18, 1822, before departing to visit the Vietnamese Court at Hue. During his time in Siam, Finlayson produced a remarkable collection of prints and drawings, chiefly of local flora and fauna, but also of everyday scenes in and around Bangkok and the Gulf of Siam.

Unfortunately Finlayson was already seriously ill by this time, having contracted an illness - perhaps malaria - on the Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, of which Crawfurd writes: ‘My poor friend, Mr. Finlayson, caught, from severe exertions he made today [March 16, 1822] under a burning sun, the malady which afterwards proved fatal to him; and which, during the remainder of the voyage, unfortunately deprived me of the active exercise of his valuable talents’. In his own account, Finlayson attributes his illness to sunstroke, noting: ‘We had been much exposed to a powerful sun during this day, the bad effect of which I soon after was destined to experience, having been laid up for some days with fever, which rendered me totally incapable to attending to any thing’.

Although weakened, Finlayson went on to visit Hue between September 28 and October 17 1822, recording his impressions of the Court of the Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mang (1820-41). The mission returned safely to Calcutta on December 29, 1822, but the unfortunate Finlayson died soon after of the disease he had contracted on Phu Quoc. He was only 33 years old.

Finlayson’s account of The Mission to Siam and Hué was published posthumously in 1826, accompanied by a long and complimentary forward by Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826), the founder of Singapore. A more detailed account of the mission was subsequently published by John Crawfurd in 1828 under the title Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China. Neither book makes any substantive reference to Chiang Mai, which the mission did not visit, though Crawfurd makes some brief mention to ‘The country of the Lao’, amongst which he includes ‘Changmai’, noting that it is ‘under the dominion of Siam’.

Finlayson’s Map of Chiang Mai

The various papers, drawings and paintings collected by George Finlayson eventually made their way safely back to the United Kingdom, where they were lodged at the India Office Library. We have no way of knowing, but it seems probable that the map of Chiang Mai was acquired by Finlayson during his short visit to Bangkok, and was included with the collection of his papers posthumously before being sent to London. The presence of a map of Chiang Mai in a collection of papers relating otherwise exclusively to central and southern Siam is clearly something of an anomaly, but seems easy enough to account for.

This is certainly more than can be said of the map itself. We have no information regarding its provenance (other than the fact that it was almost certainly collected by Finlayson during the Crawfurd Mission). It is clearly marked in the upper margin, in English, using a bold pen: ‘Cheung Mai before the Inner Wall was removed’. Beneath is a highly stylised representation of an approximately square city showing an Inner and Outer Canal, as well as a series of three concentric walls. The outer wall is pierced by eight gates and defended by eight bastions. The second wall is pierced by a further eight gates and defended by eight bastions. The inner wall has just one entrance, in style similar to a temple, and indeed the wall itself is surmounted by sema stones, suggesting a temple precinct. The residence of the ruler is shown at the centre of this innermost walled city.

All well and good - but is it really a map of Chiang Mai? We know that, according to the Chiang Mai Chronicle and other sources, King Mangrai laid out the initial fortifications of Chiang Mai in 1296 in an area that was almost square, measuring approximately 1.5 km on each of its four sides. We further know that through most of its history this single wall was defended by a single moat, a bastion at each corner, and a single gate on each of its sides, the exception being the southern wall, where there were two gates, as indeed there are today.

Chiang Mai was occupied by the Burmese between 1558 and 1776, when it was captured by a joint force owing allegiance to Chao Kawila, Lord of Lampang, and Siamese armies loyal to King Taksin. The city was then abandoned until 1781, during the 6th year of the reign of King Rama I, when Kawila was ordered to resettle and re-establish the city. This Kawila did, taking care to repair the fortifications both of the Old City and nearby Kamphaeng Din, the earthen ramparts guarding the southern and eastern commercial quarters of the city. By the beginning of the 19th century Kawila had achieved this task, and the current fortifications - notably the four main Old City bastions - date, in their present form, from this time.

Some three decades later Chiang Mai was visited by Captain William Couperus McLeod, as part of his expedition to Lan Na and the Burmese Shan States in 1837, on behalf of the British authorities in India. McLeod left a description of the city fortifications - which he looked down on from Doi Suthep - which more or less matches the layout of the Old City as we know it today. In other words, at the time of Kavila’s restoration (c.1800) and also at the time of Mcleod’s visit (1837), the Old City was protected by a single fortified wall and a single canal, as it apparently was at the time of Mangrai’s foundation in 1296, and as it remains today.

And yet the ‘Finlayson Map’, which can be dated by its watermark and the time of the Crawfurd Mission to between 1814 and 1822, purports to show a heavily defended Chiang Mai with two moats and three walls, while noting curiously that this is a map of the city ‘before the Inner Wall was removed’.

How can this be? At present we can only speculate. It might, perhaps, be that the map was originally drawn to enhance the appearance of the city’s defences, perhaps to dismay potential Siamese attack. But by 1814 - the earliest date at which the map can have been drawn, given the paper’s watermark - Chiang Mai, while still ruled by the Lan Na chao, was already a loyal tributary of the Chakri Dynasty in Bangkok, so any such deception would have been pointless. It is also significant that all notes on the map (with the exception of the margin note in English) are very clearly written using the Central Thai alphabet and terminology, while Northern Thai remained very much the lingua franca and language of court usage at Chiang Mai for at least another half century. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that the map was prepared by a Central Thai, and not a Lan Na native.

A more detailed examination of the original map in its repository at the British Library in London may throw further light on its provenance, but for the present the ‘Finlayson Map’ remains - to borrow from Churchill: ‘A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ - rather like the triple-walled fortifications it so colourfully represents.

Text by Andrew Forbes, images by David Henley. © CPA Media, 2007