Exploring the Buddhist Landscapes of the Khorat Plateau in the 7th to 11th Centuries

Exploring the Buddhist Landscapes of the Khorat Plateau in the 7th to 11th Centuries

Stephen Murphy


The Khorat Plateau is a landscape of 155,000 square kilometres in northeast Thailand and central Laos. Despite rich evidence for the region's dynamism and development in the Metal Age, knowledge of subsequent developments on the plateau remains limited. The spread of Buddhism across the region has been overshadowed by the attention given the Dvāravatī culture of the Chao Phraya Basin to the west and the Zhenla and later Angkor civilisations to the south and southeast.

In this talk, Stephen Murphy discusses his new book, Buddhist Landscapes: Art and Archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th Centuries (NUS Press, 2024), as well as related objects in the ACM collection. The book builds on extensive fieldwork and archaeological surveys to reveal the distinctive Buddhist culture of the plateau, expressed in new forms of art and architecture, and investigates Buddhism's spread into the region along major river systems.

Stephen will illustrate how this history reads into and against the Khorat landscape, attending to the emergence of Buddha images and other forms of monumental architecture carved into the rockfaces of hills and mountainsides. This provides a new picture of the region in the first and early second millennia, adding to our understanding of the development of Buddhism in Southeast Asia.

About the speaker

Stephen A. Murphy is Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art at SOAS, University of London. Prior to this he was Senior Curator for Southeast Asia at ACM from 2013 to 2020. He specialises in the art and archaeology of Buddhism and Hinduism in first millennium CE Southeast Asia, with a focus on Thailand and Laos. His museological focus engages with issues of restitution and curation in Asian art.
Stephen is the co-editor of Before Siam: Essays in Art and Archaeology (2014) and the author of a number of ACM catalogues, including Cities and Kings: Ancient Treasures from Myanmar (2016) and The Tang Shipwreck: Art and Exchange in the 9th century (2017), with Alan Chong. He has contributed to several leading academic journals, including Antiquity, Asian Perspectives, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Siam Society.

About the respondent

Priya M. Jaradi is Senior Lecturer and Convenor for Art History, a collaboration between National University of Singapore, the National Gallery Singapore, and the Singapore Art Museum. Jaradi was Assistant Curator (South Asia) at the Asian Civilisations Museum from 2005 to 2007. She is the author of Transcultural Imaginations: Revisiting the 1959 Donation from the Government of India to Malaya (2024), Fashioning a National Art: Baroda’s Royal Collection and Institutions (1875–1924) (2016), and the volume editor of Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, Mumbai: Marg Foundation (2015).
Jaradi’s current research uncovers the contributions of collections, curricula, and pedagogies to revisionist art histories and historiographies of South and Southeast Asia, particularly India and Singapore.

About the moderator

Jackie Yoong is Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles at ACM and the Peranakan Museum. She holds an MA in Art History from SOAS University of London on the Alphawood Scholarship. She is currently serving on the International Council of Museums Costume Board. Her research interests focus on Singapore and Asia in global fashion history from the 20th century onwards.