The many mysteries of Wat Si Chum

       Wat Si Chum in Sukhothai is perhaps the most intriguing of old Siam's monuments.The peekaboo view of the image through the slit entranceway gives the building a secretive air. Louis Fournereau's photographs from 1891 bathed the ruins in an atmosphere of ancient enchantment.The massive walls hide a narrow twisting staircase roofed with beautiful engravings of Jataka tales. Curiously, there are only 100 Jatakas illustrated, rather than the 500-plus usual for such displays. The roof seems to have totally disappeared.Inscription Two, found inside the temple,is so rich and jumbled that there are at least four interpretations of what it says and means.
       This mystery has invited imagination.Most people have imagined the roof was an inverted bowl shape by analogy with similar looking buildings such as Wat Phaya Dam in Si Satchanalai. Eighty years ago, George Coedes proposed that the Jataka engravings had been moved from an original location at Sukhothai's Wat Mahathat. Griswold and Prasert endorsed this idea on grounds that Jatakas were meant for "edification of the general public". Betty Gosling ingeniously reconstructed how they might have appeared at Wat Mahathat, and suggested they had been "hidden away" in
       Wat Si Chum after a liturgical schism.
       As this beautiful and erudite book shows, all this speculation was possible because none of these scholars went to take a proper look.
       After examining the engraved slabs in situ in the concealed staircase, the architect-historian Pierre Pichard shows that they were not moved from elsewhere, but purpose-made to fit
       this location. ML Pattaratorn Chir-
       pravati adds that there was
       nothing strange about them
       being "hidden" in such an apparently obscure place. As
       with the paintings deep in the sealed crypt of Wat
       Ratburana in Ayutthaya,they were offerings, created
       as part of the sacredness of the building, and were never meant to be seen.Pichard also has a stunning idea about the roof. The giveaway is that
       the walls are unusually thick and heavily buttressed, as if designed to bear an exceptionally heavy weight. What if the surviving structure were only a fraction of the intended building? What if the original design,such as the Chedi Ku Kut in Lamphun province, was a five-stage tower?The base could stand it. The staircase continuing up another four levels could have accommodated the full 500-plus Jataka tales.Pichard has computerconstructed a possible image of what it might have looked like - a massive tower rising 60m and weighing 7,400 tonnes.
       Who had the vision and power to attempt such a project? Mr Pattaratorn argues that there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to associate the great monk Si Sattha with Wat Si Chum.Further, the clue to the building may lie in Inscription Two, which is an account of Si Sattha's forebears, life, works and travels.
       Mr Pattaratorn argues that the Mahathat mentioned in Inscription Two is not in either Sukhothai or Sri Lanka,but is clearly the Sri Dhanyakataka, a massive stupa that once stood near Amaraoti in central India.She speculates that Si Sattha travelled to this site as well as to Sri Lanka, and was inspired to build something as grand as he had seen on his travels back in his hometown of Sukhothai. She calculates that Si Sattha must have returned around 1350. By comparing some motifs in the Jataka engravings (fan, ascetics, peonies,etc.) with other, datable depictions, she estimates the engravings were made around 1370.
       Peter Skilling traces the depictions of the Jatakas from the earliest Indian reliefs in the 1st century BC, through the first appearances in Siam at Chula Pathon Chedi in the Dvaravati era, up to their modern appearance in comic books.
       Skilling also provides an exhaustive account of the modern discovery and interpretation of Wat Si Chum.
       The second part of the book contains a catalogue of the Jataka slabs compiled by Skilling, Prapod Assavavirulhakarn and Santi Pakdeekham. Each engraving is beautifully photographed, with an additional close-up of the inscription. In most cases, Fournereau's
       1891 rubbing is presented for comparison, showing how much the engravings have deteriorated in the interim. The compilers had the wonderful
       idea of showing the depictions
       of the same story at Wat Khrua Wan in Thon Buri, the Ananda Temple in Pagan, and occasionally elsewhere. They
       also transcribe and translate
       the inscription,and provide a full English rendering of the Jataka
       tale. Where the slabs are now totally unreadable,they guess which tales
       would have been depicted at this location based on the sequence.
       Wat Si Chum has not lost its intrigue. This team has cleared up some old mysteries, but then created a new one.Instead of a tale of engravings being chipped off the Wat
       Mahathat and furtively hidden away, we have a story about the most ambitious construction project in the Chao Phraya basin of its time, and a mystery of why it went unfinished. Probably the project faltered when Si Sattha died at an unknown date after 1376. Pichard surmises that Si Sattha had a "touch of megalomania" and would always have faced opposition to his overblown vision.Mr Pattaratorn wonders if the repeated raiding by Ayutthaya armies frightened away the craftsmen and manpower needed for such a massive project.Possibly the kings and nobles were not at all keen on a building that consumed so much local manpower, and glorified religion more than worldly matters.
       This superb study invites us to look at Wat Si Chum in a whole new light.Rather than a rather squat, blocky building, we can now imagine it as one-fifth of a fantastic tower. Rather than wondering why the Jataka slabs were "hidden away", we can view them as intrinsic to a very ambitious project of religious construction. This revised view of the building raises new questions about Sukhothai's history. What should we make of the fact that this massive project was sited outside the royal city, among the forest monasteries? Why was it never completed? was it never completed?