Suphannabhum

History

Mueang Uthong and the Dvaravati period

Local tradition makes Suphannabhum the successor of the ancient port of Mueang Uthong, which had developed into a complex state society by about 300 CE. George Cœdès regarded Mueang Uthong as the centre of Dvaravati civilisation. Numerous ruins and artefacts of the Dvaravati period have been found across the area, but contemporary documents are sparse and the available material is chiefly local chronicles and legends. One contemporary text does survive. Votive tablets from the Phu Hang Nak shrine on Khao Rang Kabit, Mahayana in type and Pallava-influenced, carry an inscription in Mon in post-Pallava script naming a king Marata as their donor, of the 9th or 10th century. For the 8th century, which falls between the Dvaravati floruit of Mueang Uthong and the foundation of Suphannabhum itself, Hiram Woodward has proposed that Si Thep, which he places within the polity known from Tang Chinese records as Wen Dan, may have exercised some control over Mueang Uthong along with Lopburi, Nakhon Pathom and Khu Bua. He has asked whether central Dvaravati should on that reading be understood as having pre- and post-Wen Dan phases. However, he offers this as a possibility rather than a finding.

The port declined when the waterway to the sea silted up and became unnavigable, and the population resettled at present-day Suphan Buri. Several regional upheavals fall in the same period and have been proposed as contributing causes. They are the campaigns of King Sujita of Tambralinga, said to have taken Lavo and subdued the Mon of the Menam valley and the upper Malay Peninsula in the 10th century; the nine-year civil war at Angkor in the early 11th century, which devastated Lavo; and the Pagan invasion of Lavo.

Tatsuo Hoshino has proposed a further, earlier connection. Reading the entry in the Cefu Yuangui that places Cān Bàn more than a thousand li south-west of Land Chenla, close to the Gulf and on swampy ground, he reasons that if it describes Cān Bàn in the 9th and 10th centuries then that polity's administrative seat must by then have moved, most probably to Suphan Buri. He had earlier placed Cān Bàn itself in the upper Pasak valley, so the proposal is one of relocation rather than of identity.

Settlement evidence and the move to Suphan Buri

On the settlement evidence Suphanburi is much the larger of the two. Karen Mudar, measuring the moated settlements of the central plain from aerial photographs, put the enclosure at Suphanburi at 366 ha, one of the three largest on the plain and a regional centre in her four-level administrative hierarchy, against 73.3 ha for Mueang Uthong, a district centre a rank below it; the region she assigns to Suphanburi holds nine moated settlements. Within the first-millennium period she covers neither moat was enlarged, unlike eight others in her sample of sixty-three, among them Nakhon Pathom and Phraek Si Racha. Baker and Pasuk, counting some forty moated towns across the plain, read the same body of settlements without a hierarchy, finding that they shared religious practice, art styles and the use of Mon for inscriptions but show no sign of political integration beyond, perhaps, local confederations.

Excavation at Mueang Uthong indicates a low settlement density in the 12th century, and the site appears to have been abandoned in the course of that century. A datable point bears on the question. David K. Wyatt notes that U Thōng is attested as a place name in the last half of the 1220s, which he treats as the earliest firm evidence for the town under that name. Walailak Songsiri reads the evidence otherwise, holding that U Thong and the country around it were occupied continuously from the Iron Age through the Funan and Dvaravati periods and into the 13th century. Baker and Pasuk put the move at some 30 kilometres north-east and call the plan of the receiving town a hybrid. It stands in a bend of the river, closed by a moat of 1.9 by 0.7 kilometres, with a major forest temple outside the walls in the Dvaravati manner, but the moat is a strict rectangle rather than the usual conch shape and a relic stupa in Angkorian style stands at the centre. They hold that both the walls and the stupa may date to the 12th century.

Foundation and the early rulers

According to the Northern Chronicle, the region's political centre between the 9th and 12th centuries lay at the old Kanchanaburi city ruins, though local legends place it at old Nakhon Pathom, then known as Nakhon Chaisri. Chalerm Kanchanakam, calculating from the Yonok Chronicle statement that Phraya Phan, the founder of Suphan Buri, came to rule Haripuñjaya in 913, estimated the town's foundation at about 877–883. The settlement evidence points to a considerably earlier date for the enclosure. Mudar's sample consists of moated settlements carrying Dvaravati material culture, which she dates as a group from the beginning of the 6th century, some three centuries before this foundation date, although she dates no individual site and the Suphanburi moat has not been dated on its own.

Japanese scholar Tatsuo Hoshino has proposed that Suphannabhum was identified in Chinese sources as Shě Bá Ruò (舍跋若), which he further interprets as the western terminus of a trans-Mekong trade confederation in the 9th century. According to this hypothesis, the confederation comprised five polities: Pó Àn (婆岸), identified with Mueang Phon; Zhān Bó, associated with Champasri; Qiān Zhī Fú, identified with Si Thep; Mó Là (摩臘), located in the coastal region of Champa; and Shě Bá Ruò, corresponding to Suphanburi.

The following rulers are recorded in the chronicles. Pansa, a son of Balaraj of Nakhon Pathom, held Suphan Buri and later Mueang Uthong, dying in 1006; he was followed by Ramapandita (1006–1046) and Anga Indra (1046–1081). On Anga Indra's death the throne passed to Kar Tayy, a noble of the Pagan Saw Lu line, who ruled until about 1121 and moved the principal seat from Mueang Uthong back to Phanthumburi, thereafter Songphanburi. No ruler is recorded for the next four decades.

Xiān period

Suphannabhum re-emerges in the mid-12th century, its revival associated with the prosperity of the Lavo Kingdom and of Angkor under Jayavarman VII, and with an influx of people from the north. Ruins in the area predating the Ayutthaya period support this: two are in the Angkorian Bayon style and two others in the Indian Pala–Sena manner also found at Lavo, Pagan and Haripuñjaya.

Chinese merchants recorded a number of polities between 1103 and 1115, during the Song dynasty, four of which have been tentatively identified with places in the lower Menam basin: Xún Fān (浔番), taken to be Suphan Buri, listed separately from Zhēn Lǐ Fù (真里富), Róng Lǐ (茸里) and Luó Hú (罗斛, Lavo).

The Preah Khan inscription names four cities of the Suphannabhum area, Suphan Buri, Samphukapatthana, Ratburi and Phetburi, and has been read as marking the region's prosperity, though the text records no exercise of political authority over them. Walailak Songsiri has argued in the same vein that Chen Li Fu, the polity Chinese records place in this region around 1200, stood outside Angkorian political authority, and reads the Khmer titles and Indic royal names borne in the western basin as court usage adopted for dealings with the Chinese court rather than as marks of subordination. Baker and Pasuk touch the same question twice and differently: they report without comment a proposal that Chen-li-fu was Suphan Buri, and reject as unevidenced a separate proposal that early Xiān was Suphan Buri.

Songsiri proposes that after the first half of the 13th century the Chen Li Fu towns developed into Suphannabhum, which on her account took in settlements on the Khwae Noi and Khwae Yai, part of the Mae Klong, part of Phraek Si Racha and part of Chainat at the mouth of the Noi, while Sing Buri and Phrom Buri belonged to the Lavo network instead. The true name of the polity the Chinese called Chen Li Fu is not known.

In 1163 the vacant throne passed to Soi La, better known as Uthong I, the younger brother of Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri of Phrip Phri; the elder brother extended his own reach north to Phraek Si Racha in 1180, over territory that also covered Suphannabhum and the region proposed for Chen Li Fu. Uthong I was succeeded in 1205 by his nephew Uthong II, who by then held Ayodhya.

Tributary of Sukhothai and union with Lavo

Suphan Buri came to control the trade of the Tha Chin River and rose in power until it was made a tributary of the Sukhothai Kingdom in 1283, as recorded in the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription. After Ram Khamhaeng's death in 1298 the tributaries of Sukhothai, Suphannabhum among them, broke away in quick succession. Phiset Jiajanphong reads the inscription differently. In his account it records a network of relationships between Sukhothai under Ram Khamhaeng and the polities around it. That network reaches south to Suphannabhum and Nakhon Si Thammarat, and is not an extension of Sukhothai's power.

The line that held Suphannabhum in this period is traced in chronicle tradition to Saen Pom, who is said to have come south from Tri Trueng and taken the vacant throne, his marriage to a princess of that town being given as the connection through which Suphannabhum came under Sukhothai. Neither his identity nor the seat he founded is settled. Chit Phumisak argued that Uthong is a personal name meaning golden cradle rather than a reference to Mueang Uthong, and that it recurred across generations of a single family, so that the tradition may preserve a grandfather, a grandson and a great-grandson of the name; on his reconstruction Saen Pom stands between two of them. His seat of Thep Nakhon (เทพนคร) has been placed both at Suphan Buri and, by Chit, at Ban Kon in Kamphaeng Phet province.

Through royal intermarriage Suphannabhum then united with Lavo to the east, the two forming a confederated polity seated at Ayodhya in 1351. Its standing in the new kingdom is reflected in the careers of Khun Luang Pho Ngua, later Borommarachathirat I, and Chao Nakhon In, later Intharacha, both of whom extended Suphannabhum's influence over Ayutthaya. The Chinese record shows the same. Of the thirty-three missions sent in the name of Xiānluó hú during the Hongwu era, three were headed by the king of Su-men-bang, whom the Chinese court described as heir to the king of Xiān. How many such missions there were is not settled; Baker and Pasuk count five, in 1374, 1379, 1388, 1396 and 1398, and read them as showing that the early Ayutthaya kings of the Suphannabhum line sent a son to preside at Suphan Buri as uparaja or deputy king. Before the union Suphannabhum had been one of four towns of the lower plain each sending its own missions to China, the others being Ayodhya, Lavo and Phetchaburi.

Under Ayutthaya

In the early Ayutthaya period Suphannabhum was governed by the kingdom's crown princes. Baker and Pasuk date the end of that arrangement to the early fifteenth century, when Nakhon In sent a son to rule at Chainat, the twin town of Phitsanulok, instead; the heir's seat moved north with the practice, and Phitsanulok served intermittently as a second capital for the next 150 years. Suphannabhum was reduced to a frontier town and fully annexed in 1438. Thereafter its economic and political scope was deliberately narrowed. It was permitted relations only with the capital, serving as a military base and a source of tribute, and its trade with China and with other cities was ended. The effect was to turn Suphannabhum into an agricultural district supplying Ayutthaya for export.

A gold-leaf inscription recovered from the finial of Phra Si Rattana Mahathat at Suphanburi, written in Pali in Khmer script, records the building and later restoration of the reliquary. Chit Phumisak read the phrase ayojjharāja paramo cakkavattī nāma vidito as naming the builder rather than merely styling him, taking cakkavattī to be a personal name on the strength of nāma, and read the rājādhirāja of the second king in the same way. On that reading the two are a father and son otherwise recorded in the Burmese chronicle and in Ming reports of embassies from the kingdom, though absent from the Ayutthayan chronicles.

Economy

Production in the 12th and 13th centuries is attested on the ground. Kilns at Ban Bang Pun on the Suphan river north of the town made large stoneware jars in the Southern Song period of the 12th and 13th centuries, on a technology brought from southern China, and sherds from them have been found as far away as the Phetchaburi city wall. Lead served as currency by weight in place of cowrie shells, and was smelted at settlements below the western hills such as Ban Nong Chaeng in Don Chedi, where the debris lies with Northern and Southern Song ceramics and Northern Song coins.

Wang Dayuan's Daoyi Zhilue, completed in 1351 from travels of the 1330s, describes Su-men-bang as a place of stony hills with little land under cultivation, growing chiefly wheat and warm through most of the year. Its people are said to have depended on other countries for food and to have sustained the country by trade; they boiled sea water for salt, wore the hair long and a long belted robe, and exported kingfisher feathers, sappanwood, beeswax and betel in exchange for sugar and cloth. Yoneo Ishii read the salt-making as an indication that Suphanburi then lay close to the sea, probably near a river mouth through which inland goods passed for export. On the same evidence he grouped Xiān, Luó hú and Su-men-bang as mainland instances of the upstream–downstream coastal state that Bennet Bronson had modelled for maritime Southeast Asia, each living at a river mouth on the exchange of inland produce. A later transfer of ceramic technology is attributed to Chao Nakhon In. Phiset Jiajanphong identifies him as the Phra Ruang of the legend in which a ruler travels to China and brings back potters. On that reading he obtained the craftsmen who made sangkhalok at Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai, and the ware became an export of Ayutthaya.

List of rulers

Notes

Art

Small bronze images of the 11th to 13th centuries are common across Suphan Buri and the provinces around it, and are most often recovered buried in Chinese jars. The photographic archive of Manas Ophakun, which records find-spots, shows them running from the hills behind U Thong up the right bank of the Tha Wa as far as Don Chedi and Dan Chang. Walailak Songsiri describes them as local castings of a distinct school. Crowned Buddhas in bhumisparsa sit beneath a rueankaeo arch overgrown by a tree, on bases carrying garuda and lion figures, and standing Buddhas in vitarka and abhaya occur beside images of Avalokiteśvara, Prajñāpāramitā, Vajradhara, Hevajra, Vishnu, Shiva and Ganesha.