personNai Khanom Tom
นายขนมต้ม · nai khanom tom
The Burmese chronicles record the festival in detail and do not mention the fight.
Judge761 · CC BY-SA 4.0What it is
A rope-handed boxer of Ayutthaya, taken prisoner when the city fell, who is said to have beaten nine or ten Burmese and Mon fighters in front of the King of Ava. Every account of the sport in English starts with him.
The long version
Here is the whole documentary situation, because it is more interesting than the legend.
The Thai side. The story appears in the Royal Chronicle, the Somdet Phra Phonnarat manuscript held at Wat Phra Chetuphon. The King of Ava is at Yangon, the crowning umbrella of the Shwedagon has just been raised, and there is a festival. A Burmese official says Thai boxers are very good. Nai Khanom Tom is produced, and beats a Burmese man before the round is out. They send in another. He beats nine or ten in a row. The king strikes his own chest and says the line that every Thai schoolchild gets: the Thai have poison in every part of them; with his bare hands and no weapon at all, one man beats nine or ten. It was bad lords that lost them their country.
The Burmese side. The Hmannan Yazawin, the Glass Palace Chronicle, records the same event with more precision than the Thai one: the restoration and gilding of the Shwedagon, gold to the weight of the king's own body, a seven-tiered umbrella set with 15,038 gems, raised by the king himself on the full moon of Tabaung, CS 1136 — 17 March 1774. It does not mention any boxing match. Neither do the Mon-Burmese chronicles, and neither does the Testimony of the People of Ava.
Inference — that is not a contradiction and it is not proof of invention. It is one chronicle carrying something the others do not, which is the ordinary condition of a chronicle. What can be said is that the date everybody celebrates is the date of the umbrella, taken from the Burmese record, and the fight is dated by hanging it on that.
17 March is Muay Thai Day. His statue stands at the provincial stadium in Ayutthaya. Somrak Khamsing played him on television in 1996.
Connected to
- 17 March, and where the date comes from The date, and where it comes from.
- The rope What he fought with.
- How old is any of this The wider argument this sits inside.
- Somrak Khamsing Who played him.
Named here by
- Somrak Khamsing Whom he played.
- The Tiger King The other founder.
- 17 March, and where the date comes from Whose day.
- How old is any of this The founder.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | นายขนมต้ม — Wikipedia (th) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there