WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

The Sino-Burmese War and the rise of Thonburi dynasty in Siam have long been examined in isolation, even though both followed the Burmese sack of Ayutthaya and the dispersal of its royal house in 1767. In Mandala polities, this was a transfer of merit rather than territory, making both Burmese ascendancy and a new Siamese order episodically expected within the karmic logic of kingship. However, Qing observers read the turmoil after Ayutthaya’s collapse as a single southern moral crisis, since the military and dynastic destruction of a tributary polity violated the relational and ritual order of the Tianxia ideal (the Confucian moral world-order). This interpretation drove Qing military intervention and created opportunities for overseas Chinese to position themselves as guardians of legitimate order. This paper approaches this dynamic through Hà Tiên, a Chinese-founded polity on the Mekong Delta whose Confucian elite likewise operated within Tianxia moral grammar while navigated overlapping Mandala hierarchies. Drawing on correspondence preserved in the Veritable Records of Qing, the paper reconstructs how Hà Tiên positioned itself as the protector of the Ayutthaya royal house and sought Qing recognition as the proper agent of regional order. The Emperor Qianlong’s acknowledgement integrated Hà Tiên into the Qing diplomatic response to the crisis, momentarily enhancing its authority. Yet when the war ended in 1769, Qing withdrew from Southeast Asian affairs, abandoning its ethical claim to the region. Deprived of imperial recognition, Hà Tiên soon fell to Thonburi forces in 1771. Hà Tiên’s brief rise and collapse illuminates not merely the fate of a small polity but an epistemological collision between Confucian and Theravada world orders that contracted the Tianxia ideal in a reconfigured mainland Southeast Asia, demonstrating the need to understand premodern Asian diplomacy through plural, overlapping world orders than a single framework.