Sacredness Is in the Thai of the Beholder: The Different Meanings of the Ayutthaya World Heritage Site

Archaeological temple ruins are by default sacred landscapes, but what happens when these temples are also mass tourism sites as in the case of Southeast Asia? Here we unpack the different tensions of Ayutthaya in Thailand as an ancient Siamese capital, a sacred and political landscape organised along the lines of Buddhist mandala, and contrast it with its modern status as a UNESCO World Heritage site. We show how Ayutthaya functions as a cultural tourist attraction to international visitors, but to Thai people also acts as a place of pilgrimage alongside a destination for domestic tourism, differentiated by the different sites that each group visits as well as the activities undertaken at each site. These differences play out similarly in other parts of the region, where archaeological ruins are considered as places of reverence and products of the tourist gaze simultaneously.