Page:Story of records of Siamese hist - Damrong - 1915.pdf/3

 rangsi, between the years B.E. 2000 and 2070. It relates the history of this statue which was originally constructed in Ceylon. Then King Phra Ruang sent the Prince of Nakhon Sri Dhammaraj to beg permission to bring it to Sukhothai. The book, which has been translated into Siamese several times, further relates the wanderings of the image to different cities.

6.The History of Jinnkalamalini. This manuscript was the work of a priest named Ratana Paññāñāṇa. It was composed in Pali, at Chieng Mai, in the year B.E. 2059, and gives the history of the spread of Buddhism in Siam. A translation into Siamese was made in the reign of King Phra Buddha Yotfa Chulalok.

7.The Chinese history known as Kimtia Soktongchi. This work the Chinese Emperor Kian Long of the Ching dynasty ordered his officials to publish in the year B.E. 2310. It deals with the treaty relations between Chinn and Siam, and was translated into Siamese by Khun Chen Chin Aksorn (Sutchai).

8.The Northern Annals, as appearing in the manuscript kept in the Vajirañānaṇa [sic] National Library. King Phra Buddha Yotfa Chulalok directed his younger brother Prince Surasinghanada to collect all the documents. That was in B.E. 2350, and the Prince in turn ordered Phra Vichien Pricha, the chief of the royal pandits of the right side, to collate them. It appears that the method adopted by Phra Vichien Pricha was to collect all the old manuscripts he could find which he believed to relate events that happened before the building of Ayuddhya. And sometimes he simply noted down what he heard from old people in the North who remembered the old traditions. All this material he arranged in order just as he thought it would fit in, his purpose being to make it a consecutive whole like the history of Ayuddhya. The result is that in the Northern Annals we have a combination of many narrations, and sometimes one story is repeated twice, The chronology is thus entirely unreliable, and breaks down if any attempt is made to compare one date with another. None the less there is a solid substratum of fact to be obtained in the incidents narrated in this history; only one must not put credence in their sequence as set down by Phra Vichien Pricha.

9.The History of Yonaka. This is a history of the various principalities now included in Bayap Circle, and was written by Phya