Baan Hollanda (Dutch VOC Settlement)

The VOC in Siam

Merchants of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) first reached Ayutthaya around 1604, and by about 1608, in the reign of King Ekathotsarot, they were permitted to open their first trading post in the capital. Siam was then among the busiest crossroads of Asian commerce, and the Dutch steadily grew into the most prominent of the Western traders on the river.

In 1634, under King Prasat Thong, the court granted the Company riverside land for a permanent factory, reportedly in recognition of Dutch naval assistance. A two-storey European brick lodge was completed around April 1636, so unlike the town's wooden houses that the Siamese named it Tuek Daeng, the "Red Building" — long remembered as one of the grandest foreign compounds in the kingdom.

The Trade

The goods that passed through Dutch hands on this bank were the wealth of the forest and the sea: deer and ray skins, sappanwood for a natural red dye, tin, ivory, aromatic eaglewood and more. Deer hides above all were shipped in great quantity toward the eager markets of Japan.

The VOC worked a triangular trade: Japanese silver bought Indian textiles, the textiles were sold in Ayutthaya for hides and sappanwood, and the Siamese goods were carried to Nagasaki for silver once more. So the Company that leaves its name on this quiet bank was one point of a network binding Amsterdam, the Coromandel Coast, Siam and Japan. With that commerce came influence, and the Dutch were a real presence in Siamese court politics — though the relationship rose and fell with the reigns.

Van Vliet, the Fall of 1767, and Baan Hollanda Today

Jeremias van Vliet, who managed the lodge from 1633 to 1642, was more than a trader. He set down the history of Siam in detail, and his chronicle of the Siamese kings is the oldest such account to survive — still consulted by historians as a primary source today.

When Ayutthaya fell to the Burmese in 1767, the Red Building was destroyed with the capital, leaving only old brick courses beneath the soil. In time the Thai and Netherlands governments together raised an information centre, Baan Hollanda, upon the excavated foundations. The graceful white building, opened in 2013, tells the four-century story of Thai–Dutch friendship on the very ground where the trade once stood.

From the River

As the boat drops south of the city island, to where the Chao Phraya swings wide, a passenger catches an elegant white, Dutch-styled building on the eastern bank, rising above a low line of old brick at the water's edge. That is Baan Hollanda — on the same bank as, and right beside, the Japanese Village.

Late-afternoon light warms the white walls against the green of the far bank and the sheen of the river, and it is easy to picture the junks and Dutch sailing ships that once lay at anchor here. From the deck alone, one feels the international crossroads that Ayutthaya once was.

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