ABSTRACT
The period of King Bodawpaya’s reign has been described as a watershed ‘separating Burma’s eighteenth century traditionalism from its unavoidable orientation towards the outside world in the nineteenth’. Bodawpaya was the fourth and in many respects the ablest son of Alaungpaya. The beginning of Bodawpaya’s reign in 1782 coincided with the establishing of a new dynasty of Thai kings in a newly selected capital, a village now to become a city known generally as Bangkok. One of the commonest results of Christian missionary enterprise in Asia was something the missionaries did not intend or expect: a ‘reform’ in the religion they were challenging. The fortunes of the Buddhist state in Burma and in Thailand respectively began to diverge very sharply in the period the people are now to consider, namely the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade or so of the twentieth.
