Chronicle (Tamnan) › Secular History

What this is

This is the smallest of the three chronicle sub-genres — 159 witnesses, against 569 Buddhist Chronicle and 328 Tamnan — and it is where the catalogue put the material that reads as worldly: kings, muang, dynasties, warfare, and the memory a polity keeps of its own statecraft. Forty-nine of the 159 titles name a เมือง. Nineteen name Chiang Mai; nineteen name Chiang Saen.

It is also the shelf where the labelling most visibly strains. The parent genre is built on sacred causation, and a sacred-causation historiography does not have a secular half to be split off. What it has is a residue — and the residue is fascinating precisely because it is mixed. Read the titles honestly and this sub-genre contains: a cosmogony, a Buddhist queen's Pali vaṃsa, an epic of an invulnerable warrior-king, a city that sank into a lake, several biographies of abbots, one manual for building irrigation weirs, and — filed with all the rest — a bundle containing a yant.

The hero: Phaya Chueang

พระยาเจือง carries seven witnesses here, all from Phrae and Phayao and all copied within a century: ms 3521 at Wat Si Khom Kham, 1803; ms 3522, 1836, pairing him with the Ngoen Yang chronicle; ms 2681, a wohan nisai — a gloss-and-explanation version — at Wat Phra Bat Ming Mueang, 1845; then ms 2752 and ms 3115 at Wat Mueang Mo (1894) and ms 2825 and ms 3116 at Wat Klang (1895), four copies in two years. The EFEO batch adds three more, and those three are one work split by fascicle — phuk 1–4, 5–8 and 9–11 — which tells you the size of the thing: an eleven-fascicle epic.

Tradition holds — Chueang (Thao Hung Thao Chueang in the Lao telling) is the oldest and grandest hero of the upper Mekong, a Tai epic of some thousands of stanzas whose reach runs from Phayao through Luang Prabang into Sipsong Panna.

And the corpus can show him from the outside. The printed Supreme Maha Mantra Katha, a modern wichaa manual, opens a section on "Great and Valiant Heroes Who Excelled Supremely in Mantras and Incantations" with him (p.55): a prophecy at birth that he would be a world-conqueror, three princesses won as by-products of elephant-catching expeditions into Nan and Phrae, then a career of conquest across Lan Chang — and the sentence that explains why a katha book wants him at all, that "possessing powerful mantras and great yantras for his protection, [he] could not be touched by any weapon on his body, not even once, even in battle" (p.56). Inference — the treatise is not summarising a chronicle for interest's sake. It is entering Chueang as evidence, the way a law report cites a case: the invulnerability worked, here is the man it worked for. Whatever the cataloguer meant by secular, this is not it.

The city that ate the wrong fish

โยนกนคอรราชธานีชัยยะบูรีศรีเชียงแสน — Yonok Nakhon, the primordial capital — has five witnesses here, including ms 800 at Wat Chiang Man (1880), ms 3527 at Wat Si Khom Kham (1888), ms 3529 at Wat Pa Sao, Lamphun (1953) and ms 3531 at Wat Ban Laeo, Chiang Rai. Ms 3520, Tamnan nyonok lok, was still being copied at Wat Thao Bun Rueang in 1963.

Tradition holds — the story it tells is the north's flood myth and it is merciless. The townspeople of Yonok catch an enormous white eel in the river, haul it up, cook it, and share it out across the city — every household eating except one poor widow, who is given none. That night the ground opens and the whole capital, court and king and all, goes down under the water in a single convulsion; the widow alone wakes to find herself on an island. The eel was no eel. What the city had eaten belonged to the nāga, and the lake that stands there now is the receipt. The neighbouring สุวัณณะโคมคำ, the Golden-Vessel country (ms 5575, ms 801, and ms 3525 at Wat Pa O Don Chai), is its companion piece — another first-city with a serpent in its foundations. See Wat Chiang Saen.

Inference — note what a "secular" chronicle is doing here. It is not recording a flood. It is recording a judgement, with an identified plaintiff. That is sacred causation running the machinery, on the shelf labelled worldly.

The first aeon, filed under politics

The single clearest sign that this label is a container rather than a category: eight witnesses of ปฐมมูลมูลี and seven of ปฐมกัป sit here. The Pathamamūlamūlī is Lanna's own account of the beginning of things — the first aeon, the first beings, how the world got populated and ordered — and the Pathamakappa is the first world-age. Ms 2119, a wohan version, was copied at Wat Sung Men in 1834; ms 4702 at Wat Lai Hin Luang in 1917; ms 3371 at Wat Phaya Phu, Nan, in 1891; ms 4320 as late as 1974. A near-identical text, ms 4118, went to the literary shelf as a folk tale. Cosmogony, sorted three ways by three cataloguers.

The same is true of Camadevi: four of her nine witnesses are here, including the Pali จามเทวีวงสา itself (ms 1350, Wat Sung Men, 1833) — a vaṃsa, by name, on the non-vaṃsa shelf.

Dynasties, and one man with a gun

The genuinely political material is real and it is good.

• ราชวงส์มังราย — ms 798 at Wat Chiang Man, the Mangrai dynasty recorded at the temple Mangrai built first, in the city he founded. Ms 4168 and ms 4315 (a phawat, a life) carry him into the 1960s and 70s. Where a chronicle names a founder it is one step from the charter that legitimises him, which is why two manuscripts actually titled Tamnan Phanya Mangrai sit on the customary-law shelf beside the Mangrai code rather than here.
• ตำนานเจ้าเจ็ดตน — the Seven Lords, the Kawila house of Lampang and Chiang Mai (ms 5572 at Wat Si Khom Kham; ms 4039; ms 6599). Tradition holds — their founder was a commoner. The printed Supreme Maha Mantra Katha tells the founding at length (pp.57–60): a forest hunter, Nan Thip Chang, chosen not by birth but because a senior monk consulted the magical texts to find out who was supposed to save Lampang and the texts named him; he demanded a public pledge of the throne before he would fight; he entered Burmese-occupied Wat Phra That Lampang Luang at night through the western drainage channel disguised as a courier, shot the Burmese commander dead across a chessboard in the Wihan Luang, and left the way he came. The treatise notes twice that the physical evidence is still there — the channel, and the mark where the ball struck the iron railing round the reliquary. He was installed with lustral water in 1732.
• ราชวงศ์ปกอรณ์ พงสาวดารเมืองน่าน — ms 440, at Wat Hia in Nan, 1933: the Nan dynastic annals in the recension of Chao Suriyaphong Pharitdet, the last ruling prince of Nan. A named royal edition, on palm-leaf, in the 20th century.
• The neighbours' histories. Lanna libraries kept Ayutthaya's: ms 2415, Nangsue tamnan mueang kung (Wat Sung Men, 1834), ms 2570 and ms 2801, Puen mueang kung si nyothinya. And the Shan borderland writes in its own form — the ซะแมง chronicles on mulberry paper at Mae Hong Son (ms 189, 1954; ms 172; ms 4434 at Wat Pa Pao, Chiang Mai), plus ms 1144, ขัติยวงส์เงี้ยว, the Shan royal lineage, at Wat Sung Men. Eight of the 159 witnesses are in Shan script outright.
• ยันต์แรกก่อสร้างเวียงน่าน — and the best single object on the shelf. Ms 228, at Wat Phra That Chang Kham in Nan, is an untitled mulberry-paper bundle of 188 pages whose contents the cataloguer lists as: the Lanna chronicle; an inventory of the ruling family's effects; and the yant for the first construction of Wiang Nan. A dynastic history, a property list, and a consecration diagram for founding a walled city, sewn into one bundle. Inference — nothing about that combination is odd to the people who made it. Founding a city was a rite; the rite had a diagram; the diagram belonged with the record.

At the far end of "worldly" sit the genuinely administrative pieces, and there are few: ms 5089, ตำราส้างเหมืองฝายทุ่งฅำ, the manual for building the weirs and channels of the Thung Kham muang fai irrigation system (Wat Ban Ueam, Lampang, 1942); ms 5053 and ms 5059, the phawat of an abbot and of a teacher-monk at the same temple; ms 4934, มนุสสวิไนย, at Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, 1801.

The shape of the collection

Palm-leaf dominant (134 of 159) with 10 on mulberry paper and 15 unrecorded — a visibly higher paper share than the canonical genres, consistent with working documents rather than merit-copies. Only 75 carry a date, less than half, the lowest dated share of the three sub-genres — but those 75 span 1742 to 2024, and that 2024 witness (ms 6201, Wat Li, Phayao) is the most recent manuscript in the entire archive. Secular chronicling did not stop.

Its geography breaks the Wat Sung Men pattern cleanly, and this is the sub-genre's strongest structural claim: Phayao leads (36), ahead of Phrae (30) and Chiang Mai (19), across 52 named temples, led by Wat Si Khom Kham (26) with Wat Sung Men a distant second (11). Secular history was kept where the polity was, not gathered into one scholastic library. Inference — of the three sub-genres this is the one whose provenance counts most deserve to be read as a real regional distribution — it is the only one not dominated either by a single library or by a single digitisation project.

Notes

• Treat "Secular History" as a container, not a claim. A cosmogony, a Pali vaṃsa, a nāga judgement on a drowned city and a city-founding yant are all filed here. The useful question is not whether these texts are secular — they are not — but what the cataloguer had left over once Buddhist Chronicle and Tamnan were full. That is a finding about the taxonomy, and it belongs in any re-sort of the parent genre.
• The chronicle/law seam runs straight through here. A dynastic chronicle that records a ruling house is one step from the charter that legitimises it. Read this shelf and customary law together wherever a title names a founder or a lineage; the Mangrai material is split across both.
• Chueang is the transcription priority. Seven witnesses here, three more fascicle-records in the EFEO batch, a wohan gloss version (ms 2681) that would make the Tham Lanna easier to read, and an independent modern retelling in a printed treatise to check a transcription against. No other work in this sub-genre offers that combination.
• Historically dense, none flagged efficacious. The puen mueang and pongsawadan, muang by muang, are primary sources for northern political history, and the sub-genre's reach to 2024 makes it a living historiographical tradition rather than a frozen one. Browse it, then read it against the atlas — every muang on this shelf is a place on that map.

What the bots have noticed

Auto-derived from the catalogue and the curiosity bots — refreshed automatically, not hand-written. Each note links to its finding.

• The heavyweights: the longest manuscripts — The twelve longest texts by leaf count, led by one running to 1,046 leaves. see the finding →