No-one can whistle a Symphony

"No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it." – H.E. Luccock

In the ancient Kingdom of Siam, a powerful and cosmopolitan city full of spectacular temples graced the meeting points of three rivers (the Pa Sak, the Lop Buri and the Chao Phraya). It was also the site of a historical tidal bore; a phenomenon in which the incoming tide forms a wave (or waves) of water that travels up a river or narrow bay, reversing the direction of the river or bay's current.?The presence of a tidal bore made it seemingly impenetrable by the sea-going warships of other nations and thus the city grew complacent in the knowledge that it would never be attacked. Known as the city of Ayutthaya, it was the world’s largest and most cosmopolitan urban areas and a centre of global diplomacy and commerce from the 14th?to the 18th?centuries. For over four hundred years, the city thrived under successive rulers. One of the most influential rulers of Ayutthaya, King Narai the Great, established diplomatic activities with foreign nations from the Middle East to Europe and created deep links with the court of Louis XIV in France. It is believed this cross-cultural understanding and friendship enabled the city (and eventually all of Thailand) to avoid the European intervention and colonisation that happened to neighbouring nations. Over the course of the French-Siamese friendship established by King Narai, many gifts were exchanged including a pair of intricately etched silver cannons that Narai gifted to the French court. Assumed to be purely decorative items, they were stored in the Royal Furniture Depository. When the Parisians rioted against the royalty in 1789, they failed to find usable weapons in the Royal Arsenal but managed to salvage the decorative (but fully functional) cannons from the Furniture Depository. Thus, during the storming of the Bastille it was a pair of Siamese Cannons crafted in Ayutthaya that did much of the damage. As such, the success of the French Revolution and the subsequent democratic system of government that followed, has a direct link to the collegiality and collaboration between two very different and distant cultures.?

Ayutthaya ended its reign as the world’s largest and most cosmopolitan city in April 1767, after a 14-month siege by the Burmese. The Burmese army destroyed the city and desecrated its temples; cutting the heads off the thousands of stone statues of the Buddha which populated the vast temple complexes throughout the city. Currently a UNESCO Heritage site, the ruins of Ayutthaya are a reminder of the fragility of our systems and certainties. It is also, as in the example of the cannons above, a reminder that good things can come from the creativity and collegiality formed prior and during periods of destruction and its aftermath. Collaboration has been identified as one of the core values of our faculty. As a faculty full of many seemingly disparate pieces, brought together under the rapid change and chaos of a global pandemic, it is the primary role of the Faculty Executive to foster an environment in which collegiality and collaboration are the natural state of being. Our ability as a faculty to be collaborate and collegial is evidenced in the lead up to a semester and with our systems down at the beginning of the year coupled with the roll out of a new LMS, our teams have had an exceptionally challenging time this year in performing the necessary tasks for a smooth semester prep. Thank you to everyone in CIESJ for working together for the collective advancement of the faculty and for your brilliant, collaborative spirit. According to Darwin: "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) that those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."?

References: UNESCO Historic City of Ayutthaya?https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/576/