The island capital of Siam for over four centuries, set where three rivers meet in central Thailand. A cosmopolitan trading port that European visitors ranked among the greatest cities of the world, ringed by canals and crowded with gilded temples and corn-cob towers, it was captured and burned by a Burmese army in 1767. The kingdom regrouped downriver at what became Bangkok, and Ayutthaya was never rebuilt as Siam's capital; its brick ruins and root-wrapped Buddha head are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Thai memory of lost grandeur.
In 1767, after a long siege, a Burmese army broke into a city that European traders had ranked among the greatest on earth and left its palaces and temples in ashes. Ayutthaya had ruled the kingdom of Siam for over four hundred years. It was an island ringed by rivers and canals where Chinese, Persian, Japanese, and European merchants lived in their own quarters beneath hundreds of gilded temples. The invaders looted the palaces, melted the gold from the Buddhas, and carried off the people, and the Siamese court never restored it as the capital. They built a new capital downstream, at the village that grew into Bangkok. What is left at Ayutthaya is brick: rows of headless Buddhas, broken towers, and a single stone Buddha head held in the roots of a fig tree, a face the forest swallowed and kept.