The royal chronicles of the Ayutthaya and early Bangkok periods,
which inherited this tradition, were produced under a historiographicaltradition and ideology entirely different from modern historiography.
All the pre-nineteenth-century royal chronicles were records of the
kings as the supreme moral exemplars or righteous rulers over a
microcosmic realm that represented the higher plane of existence. A
war or individual battle between kings was the most important measure
of their contested moral power (pāramī or barami in Buddhist terms) to
claim superior righteousness. The more august the contesters and their
battles, the higher the claim was for the supremacy of the Universal
Monarch (cakravartin). Those kings were not national leaders; they
represented the higher moral beings regardless of nations. Their battles
and results were not about mundane politics among nations; they were
battles for supreme righteousness. They were not about colonisation or
independence. With this kind of ideology, the royal chronicles were a
literary genre that observed certain conventions and followed traditions
of a religious historiography that historians need to understand better.
They were primarily not empirical records or matter-of-fact narratives
of actual historical events, and were not supposed to be read as such.
I have shown elsewhere, for example, how the fall of Ayutthaya in
1569 was composed, and supposed to be read, as a story about moral
supremacy between the contesting moral power of greatest monarchs
of the time, regardless of their ethnicity or nationalities, instead of a
conflict between two archrival nations. The results of those different
readings can even contrast in important respects such as who were the
heroes and the villains (Thongchai 1990).