The first independent Tai kingdom, carved from Cambodian territory and raised to a power reaching the Bay of Bengal under Ram Khamhaeng, who adapted Khmer script into the first Thai alphabet before Ayutthaya reduced his successors to vassalage.
Gradual absorption1370Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
Languages of administration
Thai
Writing system: Thai script
Core region
The upper Chao Phraya basin, north-central Thailand
How it was governed
0 of 4 coded
Army raised byHow the fighting force was recruited, not how it fought.
No cited figure
Revenue fromWhat the state lived on. The values are unranked: the field cannot express which mattered most.
No cited figure
Succession byThe rule in force, not the outcome. A rule repeatedly violated is still the rule.
No cited figure
Right to rule fromThe ground publicly asserted — on coins, in the khutba, in titles.
No cited figure
Each line is drawn from a source that addresses the question directly. A line reads No cited figure where no source consulted does — never because the answer seemed obvious.
Turning points
3 hinges
12381370
1238
A city taken from CambodiaBattle
Two allied Tai chiefs, Khun Bang Klang Tao and Khun Pha Mueang, defeated a Cambodian army sent to restore order and took the city of Sukhothai, then a northern outpost of the Cambodian empire. Khun Bang Klang Tao was crowned King Sri Indraditya, founding a kingdom the Tai people would come to remember as the origin of an independent Siam.
Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
1283
An alphabet for the Tai languageReform
King Ram Khamhaeng adapted the Khmer alphabet then in use across Siam into a new script suited to writing Tai words, first brought into use in 1283 and essentially the same alphabet still used to write Thai today. It spread with his own conquests across the Chao Phraya basin and beyond.
Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
1370
A vassal of AyutthayaSuccession crisis
After an eight-year reign, King Thammaraja II was forced to accept vassal status under the newer kingdom of Ayutthaya, founded twenty years earlier at Ut'ong. Sukhothai's kings continued to rule locally for another half-century, but the independent Tai kingdom Ram Khamhaeng had built was, from this point, a subject state.
Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
Chapters
3 in order · about 4 minutes
A city taken from Cambodia
formationDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
By the early thirteenth century Tai chiefs across the upper Chao
Phraya basin had grown troublesome to Cambodian rule, encouraged by
the example of independent Tai states already founded further
north. The Cambodian king sent a general, Khlon Lamphong, to
restore order, but two allied Tai chiefs, Khun Bang Klang Tao and
Khun Pha Mueang, met him in pitched battle and defeated him outright.
A king crowned in the enemy's own capital
Following their victory, the two chiefs entered Sukhothai itself,
then the northern capital of Cambodian rule in the region, and Khun
Bang Klang Tao was consecrated king there with the title Sri
Indraditya - a title that had originally belonged to his own ally,
Khun Pha Mueang, conferred by the Cambodian king himself. It was,
in effect, a kingdom founded with the enemy's own honours. The
capture so captured the Tai imagination afterward that later
generations attached to Sri Indraditya the attributes of a legendary
hero, Phra Ruang, a name later applied indiscriminately to every
king of Sukhothai who followed him.
Wat Mahathat at Sukhothai.
Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924) · Gary Todd · Public domain
A war won by a prince on an elephant
Sri Indraditya spent his reign extending his new kingdom at
Cambodia's expense and at his western neighbours', a task helped
enormously by a wave of Tai refugees who fled south into Siam after
Kublai Khan's Mongol armies conquered the Nanchao kingdom of Yunnan
in 1254. An inscription records a war with the Prince of Chot, who
had attempted to seize the town of Tak; in the fighting Sri
Indraditya's third son, the young Prince Ram Khamhaeng, distinguished
himself in single combat against the Prince of Chot, both men mounted
on elephants, and forced his opponent to flee the field with his
entire army. It was a preview of the reign that would follow.
An alphabet for the Tai tongue
peakDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
Sri Indraditya's eldest son died young, and his second son, King
Ban Mueang, reigned only briefly before his death around 1275
brought his younger brother to the throne: Ram Khamhaeng, who over a
reign of more than forty years earned the title "the Great." Under
his direction the struggling state his father had carved out of
Cambodian territory grew into a wide and powerful kingdom. At his
death, cities and districts as far as Phrae, Nan, Luang Prabang,
Nakhon Si Thammarat, Tenasserim, Martaban and Pegu were subject or
tributary to him - a reach that carried Sukhothai's influence all
the way to the Bay of Bengal, even if, as the source notes, not
every one of these distant territories submitted to his effective
control.
Sukhothai at its widest under Ram Khamhaeng; a modern map.
Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924) · Thames Mapping · CC BY-SA 4.0
The bell of justice
Ram Khamhaeng is remembered as much for how he ruled as for how far.
He is said to have hung a bell at Sukhothai for any of his subjects
who had suffered wrong to ring, summoning the king himself to hear
the complaint in person; no one, the tradition holds, ever appealed
to him in vain. When he once wronged a weaker neighbour and was
shown to be in error, he apologized rather than seeking to punish the
man who had proven him wrong - conduct his own chroniclers took as
proof that his greatness rested on more than conquest alone.
An alphabet of his own
Ram Khamhaeng's most lasting achievement, however, was neither
military nor judicial. Until his reign, Siam had written with
various forms of the Cambodian alphabet; Ram Khamhaeng altered and
adapted those characters to suit the sounds of the Tai language,
introducing the new script in 1283. In its essential features it is
the same alphabet still used to write Thai today, and it spread with
his own conquests across the kingdom he had built - the clearest
mark any king of Sukhothai left on the country that grew from it.
The inscription of Ram Khamhaeng, dated 1292, the earliest text in the new script; its authorship is disputed.
Bangkok National Museum · Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924) · Michael Gunther · CC BY-SA 4.0
A vassal of the new city
endDrafted from Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924)
The kingdom Ram Khamhaeng left behind did not long survive him
intact. His son and successor, King Loethai, proved unable to
defend what his father had won: the King of Pegu threw off his
allegiance and seized Tavoy and Tenasserim almost as soon as Loethai
took the throne, and an attempt to recover them in 1330 failed
outright. Closer to home, a new power was rising at Suwannaphumi, or
Ut'ong, under an energetic prince descended from the princes of
Chiang Saen; before Loethai's reign ended, this prince had already
annexed a large part of Sukhothai's own former dominions. In 1350 he
founded a new city at Ayutthaya and crowned himself King Rama
Thibodi I.
A pious king who did not fight to recover his kingdom
Loethai's own son, Thammaraja Lutai, inherited a kingdom reduced to
little more than Sukhothai itself and a handful of nearby towns. He
made no attempt to recover what had been lost, devoting his reign
instead to temples, monasteries and Buddhist images brought from
contacts with Ceylon, to roads and canals linking his shrunken
capital with its remaining towns, and, by 1361, to becoming a
Buddhist monk himself. Later tradition remembered him as a ruler
whose "mercy and charity were as boundless as the waters of the
ocean," under whom no man in his kingdom was a slave.
Wat Chang Lom at Si Satchanalai, Sukhothai's twin city.
Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (1924) · Gary Todd · Public domain
The end of independence
That peace did not survive Thammaraja Lutai's own reign. His son,
Thammaraja II, held the throne for eight years before he was forced
to accept vassal status under the newer, stronger kingdom his
grandfather's rival had founded at Ayutthaya. By the source's own
reckoning, this marked the end of the independent Tai kingdom of
Sukhothai, 132 years after Sri Indraditya's coronation in the city
his allies had won from Cambodia. Sukhothai's kings continued to
govern locally as Ayutthaya's vassals for another half-century, a
diminished afterword to the kingdom that had once reached the Bay of
Bengal and given the Tai language its own alphabet.
After an eight-year reign, King Thammaraja II was forced to accept vassal status under Ayutthaya, ending 132 years of independent Sukhothai kingship, though Sukhothai's own kings continued to rule locally for decades afterward.
The shaded band is this polity’s span; the dark part of each bar is the stretch the two shared.
Derived from cited spans, not from a separate source. Where both spans are ranges and they meet only on the widest reading of each, the pair is listed as possible rather than resolved to one answer. Unlinked entries are here for scale and are not written up.
Extent
The historical-basemaps snapshots are world maps at fixed years, and none of the ones falling inside this polity's lifetime names it among the polities it draws.
Rating
Four axes, all computed from cited numbers and never from editorial judgement. Percentiles are against every polity written up here — 419 of them — plus 49 more included for scale. Absolute figures. A missing axis is excluded from the total rather than counted as zero.
Reach
No cited figure
Longevity
132 years
33rd percentile
Demographic weight
No cited figure
Influence
Three separate counts. This site never publishes a single influence number of its own; the sliders on the rankings view fuse them only in your view.
Descendant scripts
1
Thai script
Religions carried
No cited figure
Successor claims
No cited figure
Weighted total
63rd percentile
computed from 2 of 4 axes, renormalised across the axes that have figures. A polity with two documented axes is not penalised against one with four.
