The Portuguese Who Never Went Home: Thailand’s Five-Century Secret
Ask anyone in Bangkok where to find European history and they will point you at the Grand Palace, or maybe the old shophouses in Charoen Krung, or that French bakery in Silom that charges 400 baht for a croissant.
Almost nobody will send you west across the river to a knot of lanes in Thonburi where the descendants of Portuguese mercenaries have been quietly going to Mass for longer than the United States has existed as a country. That is the story I would tell, and it starts with a land grab in Malacca that had absolutely nothing to do with Siam until it suddenly did.
A Deal Struck Before Anyone Was Paying Attention
When Afonso de Albuquerque took Malacca in 1511, he did not just seize a port. He inherited a map of Asian trade routes that stretched from Gujarat to Guangzhou, and he needed friends at the far end of it. Siam was the obvious candidate. Portuguese envoys were at the court of King Ramathibodi II within a few years, and here the sources start bickering in the way sources do.
One scholarly retrospective dates the establishment of formal diplomatic relations to 1516, while other accounts put the first formal reception of Portuguese envoys at 1518. Either way, what happened next was unusual for the era. The Siamese court did not view these bearded strangers as a threat to be managed but as a useful asset to be employed, and that decision shaped the next five hundred years.
The Bodyguards Who Asked for Dirt
The arrangement hardened in the 1530s. King Chairacha, ruling from 1534 to 1546, was watching Burma flex its muscles and decided he wanted men who understood gunpowder. Around 120 Portuguese soldiers were taken into royal service, some accounts placing the arrangement in 1538, and they earned their keep.
After a successful campaign against Burmese forces, the king did something that would baffle a modern defence ministry. He paid his foreign troops in real estate, handing over a plot on the river just south of the capital island, in what is now the Samphao Lom area of Ayutthaya. That grant is generally dated to 1540, though you will find the occasional source confusing the 1538 hiring with the 1540 land gift, and a few cheerfully claiming Portuguese fighters were hired as early as 1511. Treat the finer points loosely and the shape of the thing stays solid.
The settlement that grew there, Campos Portugues, covered more than half a square kilometre and eventually housed around 3,000 people, with some estimates putting it at 2,000 households at its height. It sat on the west bank of the Chao Phraya opposite the Japanese trading post, hemmed in by canals on three sides, and it was probably the largest Western community in the kingdom.
Catholic missionaries followed the soldiers in the 1560s, and the village ended up with three churches. The ruins you can walk around today belong to a Dominican church, sometimes called San Petro, and its dating is genuinely unsettled. Secondary sources put the first Dominican church here around 1540, while the scholar Michel Jacq-Hergoualch dates the surviving structure to the last quarter of the 16th century.
What is not unsettled is what came out of the ground. On 2 March 1984, excavations by the Fine Arts Department turned up burials, and those bones told a story of a community that had put down roots rather than merely parked itself. Extensive burials of both Portuguese and Siamese were found in the same excavations, some believed to be Jesuits, while the Siamese were some who died of disease or in violence.
The Fire, the Flight and the Second Riverbank
Then came 1767, and the Burmese army did to Ayutthaya what armies do to cities they have decided to erase. The Portuguese community scattered, and many of them drifted south to join King Taksin, who was regrouping at Thonburi and needed every ally he could get. Portuguese mercenaries were still fighting for the Siamese cause, and as early as 1769 Taksin granted land just south of his own palace to the Portuguese and their mixed-race families.
That grant is the true origin of Kudeejeen, or Kudi Chin, the neighbourhood you can still visit today, tucked into the Wat Kanlaya subdistrict of Thonburi. The name itself is a puzzle. It translates roughly as the village of the Chinese monk’s house, and nobody agrees whether that refers to a nearby Chinese temple or to the Chinese styling of the community’s own church in the nineteenth century. Both theories are still in circulation, which is the sort of ambiguity that makes local history fun.
The church at the centre of it, Santa Cruz, has been rebuilt so many times that pinning down its biography takes patience. An original timber structure went up in the Thonburi period, and then the building was replaced again in the 1830s, with sources splitting between 1834 and 1845 for that second version.
The Renaissance Revival church you see now was built between 1913 and 1916, designed by the Italian architect Mario Tamagno, and consecrated on 17 September 1916 during the reign of King Rama VI. Stand in front of it and you are looking at a European architectural fashion that arrived in Siam about the same time as the motorcar.
Two Villages, Not One, and This Matters
Here is where a lot of well-meaning articles get sloppy. Kudeejeen and Khymer Village are neighbours, both Portuguese, both Catholic, but they are not the same community. The Khymer Village traces to 1785, when King Rama I granted land in what is now Samsen district to around 500 Vietnamese and Khymer soldiers as thanks for their help in his campaigns against Cambodia. Its landmark is the Church of the Immaculate Conception, built in 1838, with a Neo-Romanesque bell tower added in 1883 by the Austrian architect Joachim Grassi.
The congregation there has an even older pedigree, since the church’s origins trace back to 1674, when King Narai the Great allowed a church to be built on his own land in what is now the Samsen area of Dusit, making it the oldest Catholic church in Thailand. In 1785 it also became a refuge for Khymer fleeing civil war, and in 1832 for Vietnamese escaping religious persecution, which is why locals sometimes called it Bot Buan Yuan, the church of the Vietnamese. Layered on layered, and none of it in the tourist brochures.
Names That Still Give the Game Away
You can trace the community through surnames, which is a more reliable method than squinting at cheekbones. Families who kept a Portuguese echo include Na Silawan, from da Silva, Yesu, from de Jesus, and Renangkul, from de Reina. Others dropped the thread entirely and became indistinguishable from their Thai neighbours, which is what assimilation looks like when it happens gradually rather than dramatically.
Down in Pattani, the Portuguese-descended community had become identifiable by 1973 only through physical characteristics and a handful of surnames, with the language long since replaced by Thai, Pattani Malay and trade Chinese. A generation or two more and even those markers soften. Extinction rarely announces itself. It just quietly stops being noticeable.
What the Kitchens Refused to Forget
Food carried more of the load than language ever did. The Portuguese were the ones who moved American chillies into Asian kitchens, along with tomatoes, custard apples and breadfruit, and the results are so thoroughly absorbed into Thai cooking that nobody thinks to credit them. You can still find the fingerprints if you look.
Kanom farang, literally the foreigner’s cake, is a Portuguese-derived sponge. The Baan Kudichin Museum, housed in an old wooden family home, runs a cafe serving sappayak buns, a Portuguese savoury bun with a name that has been bent into Thai shape. Walk the lanes and you will smell incense, coffee and fish sauce in roughly equal measure, which is as good a summary of five centuries of fusion as you are likely to find.
Finding It Without a Tour Bus
About eighty families still live around Santa Cruz, and the neighbourhood is a genuine mix of Thai Catholics, Muslims and Buddhists rather than a heritage set piece. Weekday mornings are quiet. Come on a Sunday and you will catch the community doing what it has done since King Taksin’s land grant, which is turning up, singing, eating and carrying on.
Take the ferry across from the Bangkok side, walk past the bougainvillea, and look for the dome. Nobody will hand you a leaflet, and that is precisely the point. Some of the best stories in Thailand are the ones that never bothered to advertise.