Sukhothai and the first kingdoms

In 1238 two local lords expelled the Khmer governor and founded Sukhothai. It wasn't just independence from the Khmer: it was the birth of a model — the Buddhist monarchy — that Thailand has maintained for eight centuries.

Before anything recognisable as “Thailand” existed, the territory the country now occupies was inhabited, conquered and abandoned by a succession of civilisations that left behind strata as distinct from one another as the layers of a geological palimpsest. The Mon, the Khmer and the first Tai groups who migrated from southern China each built their own version of power in this region, and the history of Sukhothai only makes sense if you understand what came before it.

The substrate: Mon and Khmer

The Mon were the people who first created stable political structures in the territory of modern Thailand, between the sixth and eleventh centuries of our era. Their civilisation, known as Dvaravati, flourished in the Chao Phraya valley and produced Buddhist architecture that can still be traced in the museums of Bangkok and Nakhon Pathom, where the country’s oldest stupa is preserved. The Mon did not build a unified empire but a constellation of city-states linked by trade, Buddhist faith and a common language. They were also the first to introduce Theravada Buddhism — the branch transmitted without intermediaries, directly from the teachings of the historical Buddha — into a region where Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism of Indian and Indonesian influence had been competing for centuries.

Over the Mon, the Khmer imposed themselves. The Khmer Empire, which between the ninth and fifteenth centuries built the temples of Angkor in modern Cambodia, extended its influence northward and westward to cover much of what is now Thailand and Laos. The Khmer were formidable administrators: they built a stone road network connecting the provinces to Angkor, established hospitals at road junctions, and left in Thai territory an architectural imprint still visible at Phimai, Phanom Rung and in the very urban layout of Sukhothai itself. But the Khmer Empire was also an exacting tribute system that imposed forced labour and complex dynastic loyalties on the peoples it incorporated. For the Tai groups who had been migrating southward from China for centuries into the fertile lands of Southeast Asia, Khmer domination was a constant friction.

1238: the founding

The year 1238 is a date that Thai history books treat with the solemnity that Europeans reserve for 476 or 1066. In that year, two local lords — Noen Pa Krang and Pha Muang — expelled the Khmer governor from a city-state called Sukhothai, in the valley of the Yom, a tributary of the Chao Phraya. They founded an independent kingdom. Noen Pa Krang took the name Si Inthrathit and became Sukhothai’s first king.

What made this kingdom new was not simply its independence from the Khmer, but the kind of legitimacy it sought. Si Inthrathit did not present himself as a devaraja — the “god-king” of the Khmer model, conceived as an incarnation of Shiva or Vishnu — but as a Buddhist king, a protector of the Dhamma and the sangha, a ruler whose authority derived from the accumulation of religious merit. This conceptual shift, which may seem abstract, had immense practical consequences: the relationship between the monarch and his subjects was articulated through the temple, not the palace; through generosity, not solely through coercion. It was, in embryonic form, the model of Buddhist monarchy that Thailand has maintained, with variations, to the twenty-first century.

Ramkhamhaeng and the golden age

Sukhothai’s third king, Ramkhamhaeng, ruled between 1279 and 1298 and is the foundational figure of Thai identity in the same way that Charlemagne is for European identity: a real historical figure magnified by tradition until he becomes a symbol. And with good reason, because his achievements were remarkable.

The most enduring is the alphabet. In 1283, according to the tradition recorded in the famous Ramkhamhaeng Inscription No. 1 — a stone stele discovered in 1833 and now in the National Museum in Bangkok — the king personally designed the Thai writing system. The claim has been contested by historians: some suggest the inscription was fabricated or edited in the nineteenth century. But regardless of the details of authorship, the Thai alphabet is an original system derived from Pali and Sanskrit that has remained without fundamental alteration for more than seven centuries — a cultural fact of the first order.

Militarily, Ramkhamhaeng extended Sukhothai’s territory from the plateaus of modern Laos to the mountains of modern Malaysia, and from the coast of the Bay of Bengal to the Mekong. It was a kingdom that controlled the silk and spice trade routes and had established diplomatic relations with Yuan China — the Mongols of Kublai Khan — in a geopolitical balancing act that proved decisive for the kingdom’s survival.

The Ramkhamhaeng Inscription describes a kingdom where the king is physically accessible to any subject who needs to speak with him: “Whoever wants to bring a case about land or property, the king truly investigates it.” It is tempting to read this as propaganda, but it is also the first articulation of a Thai political ideal that recurs periodically in the country’s history: the just king, accessible, protecting the poor against the powerful. An ideal that has been invoked both by absolute monarchies and by democratic movements.

The decline and the legacy

The kingdom of Sukhothai lasted less than two centuries in its independent form. The rise of Ayutthaya to the south, from 1350 onward, was gradual at first and then definitive: in 1438 Sukhothai was formally incorporated into the Ayutthaya kingdom as a tributary province. The kingdom’s last decades had already seen it fragment into rival city-states, and dynastic succession never found in Sukhothai the stability that Ayutthaya achieved.

But Sukhothai’s legacy lies not in its duration but in what it inaugurated. The artistic style it developed — Buddhas with elongated, fluid bodies, with an expression of serenity that contrasts with the frontal rigidity of Khmer art — became the canon of Thai Buddhist sculpture. The temple architecture of Sukhothai, with its Khmer-influenced prangs transformed into chedis of lighter silhouette, defined an aesthetic that persists in Thai religious architecture to this day. And the political model of the Buddhist king — the monarch whose legitimacy emanates from spiritual merit and protection of the Dhamma — travelled south with Sukhothai’s absorption into Ayutthaya and from there into the entire subsequent history of the kingdom.

What remains today

The Sukhothai Historical Park, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991, covers thirty-five square kilometres and contains the remains of 193 registered monuments. The most honest way to visit it is by bicycle — rental is available at the entrance for around sixty baht a day — and during the first hours of the morning, when the raking light gives the brick towers a texture that photographs cannot capture. There is something peculiarly moving about a Wat Mahathat whose feet are submerged in the artificial ponds that the kingdom’s founders built to manage the seasonal floods of the Yom River: the hydraulic architecture of medieval power, still visible beneath the moss and fig trees that have grown into the cracks of the walls over the past eight centuries.

The site museum, two kilometres north of the central park, houses some of the finest pieces of Sukhothai sculpture, including several images of the walking Buddha — an iconographic innovation of this period that has no equivalent in any other Asian Buddhist tradition. They deserve more time than most visitors give them.