Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom

History

Before the Sukhothai period

Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit report that around ninety sites with Brahmanical material, including elaborate hilltop temple complexes, have been found on the east coast around Nakhon Si Thammarat, dating from the 5th century CE onwards. From the 12th century the city stood on a religious network as well. The unification of the monkhood under the Mahavihara at Anuradhapura linked Sri Lanka over the 12th and 13th centuries to Buddhist communities at Arakan, Thaton, Pagan, Martaban, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Sukhothai, Chiang Mai and Ayutthaya. David K. Wyatt describes the direction of that traffic as changing over the same centuries. In the 11th century men from Martaban and Nakhon Si Thammarat went to Sri Lanka to live there; by the 12th and 13th they went for what they could carry home, and what they brought back was a more exacting Theravada that required monks to read the canon in Pali. From the 1290s the sources connect the Buddhism of the north with Nakhon Si Thammarat and Sri Lanka, on a route running from Sukhothai through Suphanburi to Phetchaburi and Nakhon Si Thammarat, then overland to Trang and by sea to Sri Lanka.

Chinese works of the 12th and 13th centuries describe a polity in this region under the name Deng liu mei (登流眉). The Lingwai Daida of 1178 singles out its aromatics as the finest of any land overseas and states that the agarwood for which Zhenla was known came from there, while the Zhu Fan Zhi of 1225 places it west of Zhenla and counts it among Zhenla's dependent states (屬國). The latter also describes its court: the ruler wore his hair in a topknot dressed with flowers and a red shoulder cloth marked with white, gave audience in the open with no hall of audience, and ate with the hand from vessels of palm leaf; local products were cardamom, agarwood, beeswax and thong kwao. The Song Huiyao gives the same name, as T'eng-liu-mei, for the polity lying to the south-west of Chen Li Fu on the upper gulf, and O. W. Wolters identified it with Tambralinga.

The Nakhon Si Thammarat Chronicle gives an account of the city's refounding after it had been emptied by an epidemic after the reign of Chandrabhanu, the population having fled to the forests and hills. Phra Phanom Wang and Nang Sadiang Thong are said to have been sent by the ruler of Phetchaburi to rebuild it as Mueang Nakhon Don Phra, their son Sri Racha assisting them. On Phra Phanom Wang's death Sri Racha carried the records of Nakhon Si Thammarat and its dependencies to the Phetchaburi court, and was sent back to govern with the style Phaya Sri Dharmasokaraja Surindraraja Suravongsathibodi Sri Suriyathian Aphaiphiriyaprakrommaphahu, his wife being raised as Nang Chandradevi Sri Rattanachaya. The same royal style is attested in 1167 in the inscription of Dong Mae Nang Mueang, in what is now Nakhon Sawan, where the bearer is invoked as Kamrateng Jagat Sri Dharmasokaraja.

Both the date of that inscription and the identity of its donor are disputed, and neither dispute places him at Nakhon Si Thammarat. The stone gives 1089 śaka; Coedès read this as 5 February 1167 by treating the year as elapsed rather than current, which Wyatt rejects on J. C. Eade's calendrical tables in favour of 4 February 1168, while granting that his own date falls on the tenth day of the waning moon where the stone specifies the full moon of Māgha. On the donor, Wyatt reports that no Angkorian king took the name Dharmāśoka in any form. Coedès first argued for a king of Hariphunchai, either Ādityarāja or Dhammikarāja, then withdrew that in a footnote added while his article was in press, after evidence emerged that Lopburi had sent its own mission to China in 1155 separately from Angkor's; in 1968 he stated a preference for Lopburi, and Wyatt follows him, chiefly on the inscription's use of Khmer. Reviewing the sixteen dated inscriptions of 1168 to 1219, Wyatt found no indication of Angkorian political or administrative power in those from Grahi (in modern Surat Thani province) or from Lopburi, while Pracinburi and the Khorat Plateau remained within the Angkorian sphere; he added that the absence of such references is not conclusive. Walailak Songsiri offers a third reading of the name itself. On her account the inscription cites a prestigious royal style borrowed from the peninsula rather than naming the donor's own king, and she sets it beside the use of Sri Maharaja, a Srivijayan royal style, as the place-name Phraek Si Racha; on the same argument the Khmer kamrateng before it is a court usage taken up for formal address rather than a mark of subordination.

Sukhothai period

Most historians identify the Tambralinga kingdom (existing c. 10th to 13th century) as a precursor of Nakhon Si Thammarat. During the late 1st and early 2nd millennium CE, Tai peoples expanded in mainland Southeast Asia. By the 13th century, they made Nakhon Si Thammarat one of their mueang (city-states). The exact circumstances of the Tai taking over the earlier Buddhist and Indianised kingdom at this location remain unclear, but it must have taken place before the mid-13th century.

The Ramkhamhaeng stele of 1283 (or 1292) lists Nakhon Si Thammarat as the southernmost tributary kingdom of Sukhothai, probably ruled by Sri Thammasokaraj, a relative of King Ram Khamhaeng. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit read that passage as a later addition to the stele, and the corresponding clause of the Ayutthaya Palace Law with it, so that neither text can be used to date the city's subordination. Nakhon Si Thammarat's Buddhist Theravada tradition was a model for the whole Sukhothai kingdom. Exemplary for the Southeast Asian Mandala model, the dependency towards Sukhothai was only personal, not institutional. Therefore, after Ram Khaemhaeng's death, Nakhon Si Thammarat regained its independence and became the dominant Thai mueang on the Malay Peninsula.

Ayutthaya period

In the Old Javanese Desawarnana document of 1365, the Majapahit kingdom recognised Nakhon Si Thammarat as belonging to Siam. The Palatine law of King Trailok dated 1468, listed Nakhon Si Thammarat as one of eight "great cities" (phraya maha nakhon) belonging to the Ayutthaya kingdom. On Baker and Pasuk's reading that clause is itself a later insertion, and the contemporary record is silent: Ligor does not appear in the Malay, Arabic or Chinese accounts of Ayutthaya's expeditions down the peninsula between the 1290s and the 1490s, nor in the Thai royal chronicles until the late sixteenth century, nor in the chronicles of Nakhon Si Thammarat itself. Tomé Pires and Pinto list it as a tributary of Ayutthaya early in the sixteenth century, but no source records when the relationship was formed. Nevertheless, it maintained its own dynasty and had vassal states of its own, which it mediated to Ayutthaya (again a typical feature of the Mandala model with its tiered levels of power). Under king Naresuan (r. 1590–1605) it became instead a "first class province" (mueang ek). However, the post of provincial governor was still quasi-hereditary and usually handed down from father to son within the old Nakhon Si Thammarat dynasty. It was the most important among Ayutthaya's southern provinces and enjoyed a primacy vis-à-vis the other provinces on the Malay Peninsula. Its role in overseas trade (involving Dutch and Portuguese merchants) resulted in the province's substantial wealth and contributed to a high level of confidence and claim of autonomy.

During the Ayutthayan succession conflict of 1629, Nakhon Si Thammarat rebelled against the new king Prasat Thong. The usurper sent the influential Japanese adventurer Yamada Nagamasa with his mercenary force to quell the rebellion and made him governor and lord of Nakhon Si Thammarat for a short time. Another insurrection of Nakhon Si Thammarat against the capital took place after the Siamese revolution of 1688 when the local ruler refused to accept the accession of usurper king Phetracha.

Thonburi period

After the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767, Nakhon Si Thammarat again enjoyed a short period of independence, including its subordinate provinces on the Malay Peninsula, but was subdued by Taksin in 1769 on his mission to reunite Siam.

Rattanakosin period

Under Rama I, the rank of the Lord of Nakhon Si Thammarat was demoted from a vassal ruler to a mere governor of a first-class province and his control over the northern Malay sultanates (including Patani) was taken away, instead awarding them to the governor of Songkhla. Nakhon Si Thammarat was supervised by the Kalahom (Minister of the Southern provinces). In 1821 and 1831 however, kings Rama II and Rama III again tasked the governor of Nakhon Si Thammarat to quell rebellions in the Malay sultanate of Kedah. The tiered relationships between Bangkok, Nakhon Si Thammarat and the Malay sultanates of Kedah and Perak posed a conundrum for the British East India Company in Malaya, which incorrectly assumed the European model of exclusive sovereignty (or suzerainty) over territories.

Integration into the Siamese central state

With the Thesaphiban reform of Prince Damrong Rajanubhab at the end of the 19th century the kingdom was finally fully absorbed into Siam. A new administrative entity named monthon (circle) was created, each supervising several provinces. Monthon Nakhon Si Thammarat, established in 1896, covered those areas on the east coast of the peninsula, i.e. the provinces Songkhla, Nakhon Si Thammarat and Phatthalung.