The Burmese–Siamese Wars were a long series of conflicts between the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya and successive Burmese dynasties — the Toungoo, then the Konbaung — fought across the 16th to 18th centuries. They culminated in the Burmese capture and destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767, ending a kingdom more than four centuries old, and were followed by a Siamese recovery that founded Bangkok and the Chakri dynasty that still reigns in Thailand.
The Burmese won the war and lost the peace. In 1767 their armies sacked Ayutthaya so thoroughly that much of the court archive was destroyed or scattered, and the Siamese kingdom's own chronicles later had to be recompiled from surviving written and oral sources. Yet within fifteen years the Siamese had not merely recovered but built a stronger, more centralized state at Bangkok, ruled by a new dynasty that still holds the throne. One of the defining catastrophes in Thai historical memory became the hinge on which modern Thailand turns.