ABSTRACT
There were numerous wats, or monasteries, many of royal foundation, magnificent today even as ruins. In Burma it was to the city and port of Pegu, on the eastern edge of the Irrawaddy delta, that the first Europeans, the Portuguese, came in the early part of the sixteenth century. If there was a discernible pattern to the aggressive warlord policy followed by the Burmese kings Bayin Naung and Nanda Bayin during the second half of the sixteenth century it was opposition to the Thais, wherever they were to be found, whether in the Shan States of Burma, in Lan Chang (Laos), or Lan-na (Chiengmai) or in Ayudhaya. The Portuguese were joined in Thailand by the Dutch and the English during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. From the early seventeenth century, English accounts of Buddhist life and practice in Thailand begin to appear.
