Nicolas Revire – Charting Dvāravatī: The Making of an Early Buddhist Polity in Central Thailand

This lecture explores the intellectual foundations of Dvāravatī studies and the making of an early Buddhist polity in central Thailand during the mid-to-late first millennium CE. It highlights the pivotal roles of Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (1862–1943) and Professor George Cœdès (1886–1969), whose historical and epigraphic work shaped modern understandings of Dvāravatī as a Theravāda Buddhist culture with Old Mon, Sanskrit, and Pali influences. Beginning with the 19th-century rediscovery of sites like Nakhon Pathom, the talk traces how their scholarship framed Dvāravatī in both historical, and cultural terms. It also considers the legacy of their work in the writings of later scholars and Orientalists such as Horace Geoffrey Quaritch Wales (1900–1981), Pierre Dupont (1908–1955), Jean Boisselier (1912–1996), or Piriya Krairiksh (b. 1942), whose contributions continue to shape debates on early Southeast Asian religion, language, and state formation.

Born in France, Nicolas Revire holds a doctoral degree from Paris, specializing in Hindu-Buddhist art of early Southeast Asia, particularly pre-modern Thailand. As a senior research fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, he brings expertise from two decades of teaching and research in Bangkok. The speaker has published extensively on the subject and is currently the managing editor of the Journal of the Siam Society.