Phrip Phri

History

Early settlements

Caves and rock shelters in and around Phetchaburi have yielded evidence of settlement in the prehistoric era such as Ban Nong Fab in the west of Tha Yang district and Tham Fa Tho in Mueang district, Ratchaburi. Several settlements dating to the Metal Age in the late prehistoric period have been found on the plains and along the coast. Iron Age sites include Ban Khok Phrik, on a large hummock along the coast in Khung Krathin subdistrict, Mueang district, Ratchaburi, whose inhabitants practised burial rites, were linked to regional mineral sites, and traded by sea over long distances. Trade with distant communities from the late Metal Age onwards contributed to the growth of larger settlements on the fertile alluvial plains.

Sites and artefacts of the Dvaravati period, among them Buddha images and Wheels of the Law, are distributed across the area. In Ban Lat district, traces of buildings and stone statues were recovered at Ban Nong Phra, and earthenware, moulds for Buddha statues and glass beads at Noen Pho Yai; further traces were found near Khao Krajiew in Tha Yang district, and the ruins of a large religious building at Thung Setthi, Cha-am district. The Bangkok Post, surveying the province's antiquities, reports that no Dvaravati-style community has been found in the Phetchaburi River basin itself. Karen Mudar's survey of the moated settlements of the central plain nonetheless includes one she records as Petburi, enclosing 161 ha. It is the largest site in her sample that is not a regional centre, and it marks the southern limit of the distribution. She identified the moated sites as Dvaravati from moat shape and surface material rather than from excavation. Walailak Songsiri treats Phetchaburi and Ratchaburi alike as later towns grown out of earlier centres nearby, Ratchaburi out of the moated town of Khu Bua and Phetchaburi out of the coastal site at Khao Chao Lai on the Cha-am shore.

Some of this material was made locally rather than brought in. Stone workshops of the period have been excavated in the province, and the three stone dharmacakra recovered at U Thong, among them the pillar found near monument No. 11, were probably produced at such workshops, though Robert L. Brown has questioned the reconstruction of the style's emergence on which that account rests. Phetchaburi is also among the centres with which the West Asian merchants of the Phanom Surin ship, wrecked in the Tha Chin delta in the late eighth or early ninth century, are thought to have traded.

Baker and Pasuk count some forty moated towns across the Chao Phraya plain between the 6th and 12th centuries, most of them beside rivers. They shared religious practice, art styles and the use of Mon for inscriptions, but on their reading show no sign of political integration beyond, perhaps, local confederations.

Foundation

The chronicle tradition credits Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri with founding the city in the 12th century, but the place is attested earlier. A ruler named Dhalemesvara (เทลเมศวร) is placed at Phetchaburi in the 9th century, contemporary with Phraya Kong of Nakhon Pathom, and the Legend of Phraya Kong – Phraya Pan records that Phraya Kong married a princess of his line. The Ayutthaya Testimonies then name Vijayaraja and his son Srisimha as rulers of Phetchaburi in the late 10th and 11th centuries, Vijayaraja being described as its refounder and Srisimha as having afterwards left it to rule from Phraek Si Racha; both are of the line that traced its descent from Padumasuriyavaṃśa, the same line from which Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri came. What the sources describe is therefore a seat that moved between cities, not a single act of foundation.

The seat from which the founder's other line of descent is traced, Yassouttora Nacoora Louang or Tasoo Nacora Louang (ธาตุนครหลวง) in Du Royaume de Siam, is itself unidentified. Three candidates have been proposed. They are Yaśodharapura, Lavo's Lavapura, and, on phonetic grounds, the village of Tha Sao (บ้านท่าเสา) near modern Uttaradit, reading Tasoo as Tha Sao and Nacoora Louang as "royal city", an area in which several archaeological sites lie, most notably the ruins at Thung Yang.

The Instructions, the Voyage de Siam of Guy Tachard and Du Royaume de Siam give the following sequence of capitals for the dynasty.

Date of the refoundation

The sources place the 12th-century re-establishment in two different years, and the events recorded in between belong to neither. The 1684 Instructions state that Phrip Phri was built in 1157/58 by a king who came from Soucouttae (Sukhothai), moving south with some 54,000 followers, whereas Du Royaume de Siam has the same figure, there ruling at Locontàï (Nakhon Thai), ascend the throne in 1188 and found the city then. Between those two dates the chronicle traditions record him and his brother taking a succession of towns down the valley: Uthong I came to the vacant throne of Suphannabhum in 1163, Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri succeeded a kinsman at Jayasimhapuri about 1169, and he regained Phraek Si Racha in 1180. His line had held that seat before, under Srisimha. A territorial dispute with Tambralinga followed in 1196.

The material evidence does not settle the year either. The base of the main stupa at Wat Maha That is of large bricks in the Dvaravati art style, the pagoda is in the Ayutthaya style, and several temples hold large red sandstone Buddha images in the pre-Ayutthayan U Thong Style. On the newspaper's reading the town was therefore founded before the Ayutthaya period, possibly when Buddhism reached it from Ceylon by way of Nakhon Si Thammarat.

A separate dispute over the founder's ancestry turns on how an era name is read. Manit Vallipodom's interpretation of 1973 equated the Tertiary Era of the Legend of Singhanavati with the Chula Sakarat era, which placed the later monarchs of the Singhanavati dynasty, Chaiyasiri among them, in the 10th century. Since the legend has Chaiyasiri move south into the Chao Phraya valley, earlier Thai scholars identified him with Phanom Thale Sri of the Phetchaburi line, and so made him the founder of Phrip Phri. That reading no longer holds. Phiset Chiachanphong argued that the Tertiary Era should instead be read as the Shaka era, which places Chaiyasiri in the 5th century, some seven centuries before the foundation of Phrip Phri.

Expansion and relations with Tambralinga

The Nakhon Si Thammarat chronicle describes the arrival itself. It relates that Phra Phanom Thale Si Mahesvastidrādhirājakṣatriya came with 33,000 men, 500 elephants and 700 horses, followed by some 55,000 more, and established a royal residence at Phetchaburi with a forecourt and quarters for the palace women; that he set the people to making salt and had it presented to his grandparents; and that he opened 300 fields at Bang Taphan on the coast.

The Nakhon Si Thammarat chronicle records that King Mahesvastidrādhirājakṣatriya of Phrip Phri extended his territory north to Phraek Si Racha, in present-day Chai Nat, late in the 12th century, and sent his preceptor to govern it; the area he took in also covers the region proposed for Chen Li Fu. To the south, a territorial dispute with Tambralinga in 1196 was settled by negotiation rather than conquest, and produced a lasting dynastic tie. In the early 14th century princes of Phetchaburi revived Tambralinga after its collapse under the Singhasari invasion and an outbreak of plague.

Angkorian influence

Phrip Phri is named, as Srijayavajrapuri, among several cities of west-central Thailand in the Preah Khan inscription of Jayavarman VII, but the text records no exercise of political authority over them. Architecture in the Bayon style, which belongs to Jayavarman VII's reign, is nonetheless present, notably the shrine at Wat Kamphaeng Laeng. Songsiri qualifies both points. She places the arrival of Angkorian religious forms in the western basin in the second half of the 13th century, after Jayavarman VII's reign. She also reports excavation at the Phetchaburi city wall as having recovered sherds of only three kinds, from the Pa Yang and Ko Noi kilns at Si Satchanalai, from the Bang Pun kilns at Suphan Buri, and from Fujian kilns of the Yuan period, with no Song ware among them.

The titulature bears on the same question and has been read in opposite senses. The ruler recorded by the Chinese bore the style Gan-mu-ding, a Khmer title, which has been taken to mean that Phrip Phri was not fully independent in this period. Ishii, reporting the same record, gives 敢木丁 as the king's name rather than as a title. The same style appears at Chen Li Fu, and in an inscription of 1183 at Chaiya, where a ruler is named Kamrateng An Maharaja Sri Mat Trailokyaraja Mauli Bhusanavarmadeva; Chit Phumisak read it there as the designation of a dependent governor. Several chronicles and legends likewise show dynastic relations between Phrip Phri and Lavo's Ayodhya, ruled by the Lavo or Uthong dynasty, which was in closer contact with Angkor than other parts of Siam proper and may have taken up Angkorian norms of titling its local rulers.

Against this, the Chinese texts themselves call the place chéng (城), "city" or "city-state", and not guó (國, "country"), and the same Khmer-derived style was borne in 1295, during a period of Angkorian weakness. Songsiri reads the style differently again. On her account the Khmer title and the Indic royal name were both taken up from the Khorat plateau and the Tonle Sap for formal address to the Chinese court, and the Chinese records give kamrateng for the rulers of Sukhothai, Phetchaburi and Chen Li Fu alike. The sixty and more settlements dependent on Chen Li Fu had rulers of their own, and none of them bore it.

Relations with China

The chronicle tradition places trade with China at the beginning of the polity's history. A Chinese junk is said to have called soon after the founder's arrival, and the king to have granted the sappanwood its crew requested until the vessel was full; in return the emperor is said to have given him Princess Chandradevi Sri Bat Rajaputri Sri Thong Samut (จันทรเทวีศรีบาทราชบุตรีศรีทองสมุทร) as his queen. The chronicle and Chit Phumisak give her parentage differently. The Nakhon Si Thammarat chronicle makes her a daughter of the Chinese emperor by a Cham queen, while Chit Phumisak makes her a granddaughter of a princess of Champa who had become an imperial consort. The line continued to rule Ayodhya until its descendant Uthong V united the polities of the lower Chao Phraya River valley; Uthong V is himself said to have married a Chinese princess named Pacham Thong.

In 1293 the Chinese court sent emissaries to press Xiān to submit and was refused, and a further summons followed in 1294; in 1295 the king of Xiān appeared at court in person with tribute and a golden plate. G. H. Luce identified that ruler as the king of Pi-ch'a-pu-li. Chit Phumisak dated the embassy to July 1294 and read the envoy's name in the Chinese record as a transliteration of the Khmer rank kamrateng (กัมรเตงอัญ). He noted that the court summoned the kamrateng of Xiān separately a month later, treating the two as distinct rulers. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit count the two missions separately, giving Phetchaburi one mission in 1294 and attributing the golden plate of 1295 to the ruler of Xiān, without equating the two rulers.

Absorption into Ayutthaya

The Instructions, the Ayutthaya Chronicle of Jeremias van Vliet and Du Royaume de Siam agree that the first king of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, Uthong V, had earlier been king of Phrip Phri, which the same dynasty had held for four generations. While reigning there he married the only Suphannaphum princess, which made him king of Suphannaphum as well; when he was offered the throne of Lavo's Ayodhya in 1351, the four polities he then held, Suphannaphum, Phrip Phri, Lavo and Ayodhya, were de facto united, and that union is conventionally taken as the formation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Baker and Pasuk describe the same four as towns of the lower plain that had each sent missions to China in its own name, Ayodhya as Xian, Lavo as Luohu, Suphan Buri as Sumenbang and Phetchaburi as Pichaburi.

Uthong V's own origins are unsettled. Baker and Pasuk count at least seven legends about him, among them one making him a ruler of one of the gulf cities, Phetchaburi, Suphan Buri or Lopburi, and Van Vliet's, which makes him a Chinese merchant who settled at Phetchaburi before moving north to found Ayutthaya.

Phrip Phri was thereafter dissolved and its towns placed directly under Ayutthaya. Both Phetchaburi and Ratchaburi kept functions under the new kingdom. Ratchaburi served as a frontier town against Burmese invasion, and the main sanctuary of Wat Mahathat Worawihan there shows a relation to Ayutthaya art. Phetchaburi linked the towns of the Chao Phraya basin to those of the southern coast and served as a port where merchant vessels anchored before sailing on to the capital or further south. Both kept these roles into the Rattanakosin period.

Genealogy

The chart below shows the connections between the Chinese imperial house and the local dynasties of the lower Chao Phraya valley, together with the two competing theories of the origin of Uthong II, king of Lavo's Ayodhya from 1205 to 1253.

Rulers