Princess Bualai’s Embroidered Kammavācā Manuscripts from Thailand

There are two embroidered kammavācā manuscripts produced by Princess Bualai Thepphawong (1847–1932) from Phrae in Northern Thailand. One, in the Lan Na Dhamma script, a traditional script of Northern Thailand, was donated to Wat Phra Bat Ming Mueang monastery (Phrae) in 1873. The other, in the Khom script, the religious script of Central Thailand, was sent as a royal gift to King Chu lalongkorn (1853–1910; r. 1868–1910) of Bangkok around the turn of the twentieth century. Instead of being incised on a leaf by a stylus or being written on paper with ink as widely practised in the manuscript cultures of Buddhist mainland Southeast Asia, the writing in both manuscripts is embroidered with silk on a long piece of cloth. The two embroidered manuscripts of Princess Bualai can be considered decorative manuscripts, due to their artistic features and values. The National Library of Thailand also registers the ‘Khom embroidered manuscript’ into the Subsection of Illustrated Manuscripts of its Manuscript Collection, along with other illuminated and decorative manuscripts. However, it is noteworthy that these two embroidered manuscripts are different from other illuminated and illustrated manuscripts from Thailand in some regards. Firstly, both manuscripts combine the artistic forms of writing and embroidery. Secondly, the decoration in the manuscripts includes the entirety of the text itself, not the spaces around the text as in the regular illuminated and illustrated manuscripts. Thirdly, and most importantly, these manuscripts were created with an aesthetic focus, making them art objects, not conventionally written texts like traditional manuscripts. One was donated as a monastic gift; the other as a royal gift. A creative context of this nature seems to be otherwise scarcely found in the Buddhist manuscript culture of Thailand. For these reasons, Princess Bualai’s manuscripts should not only be considered to be illuminated manuscripts from Thai-Tai manuscript cultures but also a very unique artwork of manuscript embroidery created with the purpose of being an art object for a religious donation and for presentation to the King within the context of administrational centralization in the late nineteenth century. This function indicates a shift from the manuscript as a carrier of linguistic and textual information as found in traditional manuscripts, to an object of art representing the creator’s faith in Buddhism, in the case of the ‘Dhamma embroidered manuscript’, and representing the loyalty its creator paid to the receiver for the ‘Khom embroidered manuscript’.