Indaprasthanagara

Indapraṣṭhanagara (; also rendered Indaprasthanagara) is an ancient toponym attested across the chronicle and legendary traditions of several Tai-speaking societies of mainland Southeast Asia. The name is an Indic compound of Indapraṣṭha with nagara, "city", echoing Indraprastha, the Pandava capital of the Mahabharata; such names were adopted widely in the region and do not in themselves mark a link to any particular polity. It appears in Central Thai, Lan Na, Lao, Isan and Khmer texts, in which the city figures variously as a royal capital, a tributary overlord, a place of dynastic refuge and a setting for Buddhist foundation narratives.

These traditions situate the city's historical memory between roughly the late 4th and the early 14th century CE, after which the name disappears from the record with the rise of the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya kingdoms. No archaeological site has been securely identified with the toponym, and no inscription names it directly. On Vickery’s dating, reported by Lorrillard, the name is absent from Angkorian epigraphy and appears in Khmer inscriptions for the first time only in 1579. In Lao literature the name is frequent but does not necessarily answer to a precise place, attaching instead to a city or kingdom of great prestige.

Thai and Cambodian historiography long equated Indapraṣṭhanagara with the Angkorian capital of Yaśodharapura. Michael Vickery challenged that identification in 1995 on philological grounds, and it has since been questioned on chronological, religious and geographical grounds. The traditions place the city several centuries before Yaśodharapura was founded in the late 9th century; they present its rulers as Theravāda patrons at a period when the Tonlé Sap basin was predominantly Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava and Mahāyāna; and the voyages and exchanges they describe suit the Chao Phraya system rather than the Mekong.

An alternative localization, drawing chiefly on the Ayutthaya Testimonies, places the city in the Phraek Si Racha historical region east of Sankhaburi, in the central Chao Phraya basin. In the 1869 recension of the Northern Chronicle, the name belonged successively to two other seats rather than to a single fixed site, and the last seat was said to have been 15 days' travel north of Ayodhya. This relocation has implications for reconstructing relations among Sukhothai, Lavo, Angkor, Ayutthaya, and Lan Xang between the 11th and 14th centuries.

Name

The toponym is an Indic compound of Indapraṣṭha with nagara ("city"), echoing Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. Such Indic royal names were adopted widely across mainland Southeast Asia and do not in themselves indicate a link to any particular polity.

The 1932 Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa derived the name instead from the Cambodian toponym Indrapat combined with the royal title Indrāditya, and on this basis identified the city with the Khmer capital. Prasert ṇa Nagara proposed the same derivation for the Sukhothai royal name Indrapatīndradity of Sukhothai Inscription No. 2. Vickery rejected it on two grounds. Indrapat is not recorded as a name for the old Cambodian capital before the late 16th century, and the long vowel of Indrapatīndradity represents the sandhi of pati and indra. Cambodian historiography associated the toponym further with sruk indraparāś, a place name attested in several Angkorian inscriptions (K. 235, K. 259, K. 380). Saveros Pou cites the form from an 11th-century inscription, and Vickery held that it may not be assimilated to indraprastha and that in that context it does not refer to the capital.

The name is cited very frequently in Lao literature. Lorrillard observes that it does not there necessarily answer to a precise geographical reality, but is always attached to a city or a kingdom of immense prestige.

Textual attestations

The sources in which Indapraṣṭhanagara appears are chronicles, legends and testimonies compiled well after the periods they describe; the dates they assign to the city are retrospective, and several traditions preserve mutually incompatible accounts. They are grouped below by cultural tradition.

Central Thai traditions

Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa

The Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa, compiled in 1932 by combining several legendary narratives, such as those of Saen Pom, Phra Ruang, and Ketumāla of Cambodia, into a single narrative, dates the establishment of Indapraṣṭhanagara to the early 8th century. According to the text, the infant prince Ketumāla and his mother were expelled by his father, Gomerāja, ruler of Pranagara Khemarājadhānī (). When the prince was three, mother and son founded a settlement on the forested frontier of that kingdom near the Dong Phaya Fai range and named it Indapraṣṭhanagara. After Ketumāla repeatedly refused to return to the capital, his father formally enthroned him there as a local ruler.

Ketumāla is said to have adopted Padumasūriyavaṃśa, who founded a second settlement on accreted land, likewise named Indapraṣṭhanagara, and ruled from it after his adoptive father's death. The chronicle gives no absolute dates, but Padumasūriyavaṃśa has been identified with a figure named in 17th-century European accounts of Siam — Du Royaume de Siam and the Instructions Given to the Siamese Envoys Sent to Portugal in 1684 — which place his enthronement in 757 CE.

The concluding portion of the chronicle, which equates Indapraṣṭhanagara with Angkor, recounts that a cattle trader named Phrom was raised to the throne, founded a new city east of the river, made it his principal seat, and reigned twenty years before being succeeded by an unnamed son. This episode has been cited against the Angkorian identification, since Angkorian epigraphy records succession within established royal lineages and does not attest the accession of a commoner of mercantile background.

Ayutthaya Testimonies

The Ayutthaya Testimonies give the most geographically specific reference, placing Indapraṣṭhanagara east of Sankhaburi in the Phraek Si Racha historical region, an area corresponding broadly to the central Menam basin and the Si Thep zone. The text also states that the city already existed before the reign of Padumasūriyavaṃśa, conventionally dated from 757 CE.

Two passages indicate that Indapraṣṭhanagara was distinct from neighbouring polities sometimes conflated with it. The Ratanabimbavaṃsa records that Adītaraj of Ayojjhapura, often identified with Si Thep, campaigned against Indapraṣṭhanagara while the latter was suffering a severe flood following the death of its great king, while the Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa lists Lavo, also east of Phraek Si Racha, as a tributary of Indapraṣṭhanagara. On this reading the three were separate polities.

Northern Chronicle and the Legend of Phra Ruang

A version of the Legend of Phra Ruang preserved in the Northern Chronicle concerns Sricandradhipati, also known as Phra Ruang II of Sukhothai (r. 959 – early 11th century). In this account he was a commoner of Lavo charged with collecting tribute for delivery to Indapraṣṭhanagara; after the king of Indapraṣṭhanagara ordered his arrest he fled to Sukhothai, where he later rose to kingship.

The same chronicle names the ruler of Indapraṣṭhanagara as Phraya Kreak (), also called Sindhob Amarin. In the passage on Sai Nam Peung in the Ayutthaya Testimonies, Phraya Kreak appears instead as ruler of Phraek Si Racha, there called Phra Nakhon Sawan Buri (), who took the regnal title Sindhob Amarin after conquering Mueang Wat Derm (, later Ayodhya).

The Northern Chronicle also relates that Anuruddha, king of Arimadhanapuri, identified by scholars with ancient Nakhon Pathom in the lower Chao Phraya basin, travelled to Sri Lanka and returned with a Buddha image and copies of the Tipitaka. The vessel carrying them lost its course and arrived instead at Indapraṣṭhanagara; Anuruddha demanded their return, but only the scriptures were surrendered, the image being retained and later associated with a major flood at the city.

The oldest available version of the Northern Chronicle, published in 1869, gives a somewhat different account. It states that Phraya Kreak was also known as Gautamadevarāja () and succeeded the throne of the old Indaprasthanagara established by his grandfather Sudarsana. Phraya Kreak subsequently moved the seat eastward, reportedly because a person of greater merit and prestige had appeared at the former location. He took his family and as many as 80,000 people with him on the journey, which took about 15 days. The new settlement had previously been known as Koṇḍaññagāma () and was ruled by Koṇḍaññabrāhmaṇa (), described as the greatest of all brāhmaṇas.

The chronicle further records that Phraya Kreak had a son named Vaiyākṣa (), also known as Kāñcanakumāra (), who succeeded him. Three further rulers are said to have followed Vaiyākṣa, although their names are not given. The last of these rulers had only a daughter as heir, who subsequently married Uthong II, described as the son of a wealthy merchant. Seven years after Uthong's accession, the city was struck by a severe plague. He subsequently moved southward, a journey of about 15 days, to a new location described as an island. The chronicle identifies this location with modern Ayutthaya.

Legend of Nakhon Si Thammarat

The records that Sri Dharmasokaraja I, king of Indapraṣṭhanagara, fled southward in 1117 with his brother Candrabhānu I (Sri Dharmasokaraja II) and his son Vaṃśasurā I (Sri Dharmasokaraja III) in the face of severe epidemic disease and demographic collapse in the royal city. He is said to have re-founded Nakhon Si Thammarat as his new seat.

An alternative version presents Sri Dharmasokaraja I as a foreign ruler whose origins lay in Hanthawaddy, then under Pagan suzerainty, who established a royal centre at Indapraṣṭhanagara, governed the surrounding Menam basin, and transferred his power base to Nakhon Si Thammarat, which he had re-founded in 1077, after the epidemic of 1117.

Northern, Isan and Lao traditions

Yonok Chronicle and Legend of Singhanavati

The and the Legend of Singhanavati, in their accounts of the legendary Yonok monarch Phrom (r. 379–444), place Indapraṣṭhanagara within the Chao Phraya basin with direct access to the sea, and describe it as the region into which the Khom retreated after their defeat by Phrom. This is the earliest of the attestations in narrative time.

Lan Xang Chronicle and the Legend of Khun Borom

The Lao Legend of Khun Borom attributes the founding of Indapraṣṭhanagara to Khoun Kôm ( or ), a son of Khun Borom, whose floruit David K. Wyatt tentatively placed in the 7th century.

The Lan Xang Chronicle records a later episode in the early 14th century, when Khun Yak Fah (), also called Khun Phi Fa (), father of Fa Ngum, was expelled from Muang Sua. Fa Ngum accompanied him into exile at Indapraṣṭhanagara, where he was adopted by its ruler Siri Juntarat () and married the ruler's daughter Nang Yad Kham (). The military support he received through this patronage enabled the campaigns that culminated in the foundation of Lan Xang in the mid-14th century.

Lorrillard reads this tradition as literary rather than remembered. He notes that the Nithān Khun Borom has Fa Ngum born with thirty-three teeth, a number drawn from Buddhist mythology; that the prince exiled on a raft, and the foreign king's support obtained through the good offices of a religious, are recurrent themes in Lao literature; and that the events related are at least a century and a half older than the redaction. He also observes that the Fa Ngum tradition is the only place in the Lao historical documents where Cambodia is mentioned explicitly.

On his reading the chronicle of the Phra Bang, the Lao palladium, scarcely differs from those of the Phra Kaeo and the Phra Sihing, both native to Lan Na, and shares their themes of a fabulous creation in Laṅkā and a transfer to Inthapattha Nakhon or to Siridhamma Nakhon. The legendary reference to Inthapattha Nakhon was indispensable to the sacralisation of the statue and could not be removed by the annalists, so that Fa Ngum's story was adapted to it.

Legend of Phaya Khan Khak

The Roi Et–Yasothon and Sisaket recensions of the Legend of name the ruler of Indapraṣṭhanagara as King Ekajara (), who appears in the Ayutthaya Testimonies as ruler of Muang Sing and of the same lineage as Phra Phanom Thale Seri of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa dynasty. Ekajara's son was born with rough, pitted skin resembling a toad's, whence his epithet Phaya Khan Khak (); through adherence to the Dharma and observance of the dasavidha-rājadhamma his appearance was restored on his accession. He then led an expedition against King Taen () of the Mekong basin, who was able to withhold rain from the Mun–Chi basins and from Indapraṣṭhanagara for several years.

The description parallels that of the King of Bāla () in the Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa, who succeeded his father Padumasūriyavaṃśa at Indapraṣṭhanagara in 800 CE. The accounts differ in that the King of Bāla was born with normal skin that later became pitted through illness before being cured by a r̥ṣi; the chronicle also credits him with victories over a Nāga king who was his maternal grandfather.

Phra That Phanom Chronicle

Epigraphic evidence

No inscription names Indapraṣṭhanagara directly. Michel Lorrillard, following Vickery, reports that the name is absent from Angkorian epigraphy altogether and appears in Khmer inscriptions for the first time only in 1579. Four bodies of epigraphic material have nonetheless been brought to bear on its identification.

• Dong Mae Nang Mueang inscription (K. 766). Found north of the Phraek Si Racha region in present-day Nakhon Sawan province and dated to 1167 CE, it records Sri Dharmasokaraja I as deceased and attests the succession of Sri Dharmasokaraja II. Read together with the Legend of Nakhon Si Thammarat, it has been taken to suggest that Sri Dharmasokaraja II sought to recover his father's former northern territories in the Phraek Si Racha and Lavo regions, and thus to support a location in the lower Menam valley.
• Angkorian inscriptions K. 235, K. 259 and K. 380, which attest the toponym sruk indraparāś. Saveros Pou cites the form from an 11th-century inscription, and Vickery held that it may not be assimilated to indraprastha and that in that context it does not refer to the capital.
• Wat Kok Svay Chek inscription (K. 754), the earliest Pali inscription from Angkor securely associated with Theravāda, dating to the reign of Srindravarman (r. 1295–1308).
• Sukhothai inscriptions. The Sukhothai Inscription No. 1 of Ramkhamhaeng (r. 1279–1298) records dynastic ties extending to Vientiane and Luang Prabang and places Phraek Si Racha () within the Sukhothai sphere. The Khao Sumanakut Inscription (; Inscription No. 8), of the reign of Maha Thammaracha I (r. 1347–1368), sets Sukhothai's eastern limit at the territory of "Phraya Thao Fa Ngom", identified with Fa Ngum.

Identification and localization

The Angkorian identification

The equation of Indapraṣṭhanagara with Yaśodharapura was first articulated in the Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa, composed in 1932, on the etymological grounds set out above. It was reinforced by later Thai and foreign scholarship, including the 1957 Thai recension of the Lan Xang Chronicle, and by Cambodian historiography through the sruk indraparāś inscriptions. It remains the mainstream position in Thai scholarship. The derivation was still being defended when Vickery wrote against it in 1995.

It has been observed that the apparent convergence of Thai and Cambodian traditions on this point does not constitute independent corroboration, since the Cambodian reception of the equation postdates a period of substantial Siamese cultural influence at the Cambodian court.

Chronological objections

The inferred accession of Padumasūriyavaṃśa in 757 CE precedes the accepted foundation of Yaśodharapura in the late 9th century by nearly two centuries. Indapraṣṭhanagara is moreover named in connection with the reign of Phrom of Yonok, conventionally placed in the 3rd–4th centuries of the Shaka era (4th–5th centuries CE), some four to five centuries earlier still. The name itself is also late in the record. Vickery held that Indrapat, with its variants indraprat and Inthapat, is not recorded as a name for the old Cambodian capital before the late 16th century. Pou's dictionary assigns indraprastha in that sense to the middle period, which it reckons from the 15th century.

The political geography of the period presents a further difficulty. Vickery characterized the Tonlé Sap basin of the 8th century as politically fragmented, whereas the Thai traditions depict the reign of Padumasūriyavaṃśa as one of territorial consolidation encompassing Lavo, Sukhothai and Talung ().

Religious objections

The Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa, the Phra That Phanom Chronicle, and others portray the rulers of Indapraṣṭhanagara as patrons of the Buddhist saṅgha whose merit drew neighbouring polities into tributary relations founded on devotional allegiance rather than conquest. Such a portrayal presupposes a region in which Theravāda already supplied the principal source of royal legitimacy.

The religious landscape of the Tonlé Sap basin in the same period is not consistent with that premise. Contemporary inscriptions attest a predominantly Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava court religion under the Chenla rulers, and such Buddhist practice as is attested — for instance the Avalokiteśvara dedications recorded near Siem Reap in 791 CE — belongs to the Mahāyāna tradition. The earliest securely Theravāda Pali inscription from Angkor, K. 754, dates only to the reign of Srindravarman (r. 1295–1308).

Geographical objections

The Northern Chronicle account of Anuruddha of Arimadhanapuri has been read as incompatible with an Angkorian location. Under that identification, a vessel returning from Lanka to Nakhon Pathom would have entered the Gulf of Thailand and then drifted to Angkor, and Anuruddha's subsequent demands would have required sustained communication between Nakhon Pathom and Angkor across separate river systems. If Indapraṣṭhanagara lay in the Phraek Si Racha region, both the navigational error and the diplomatic exchange become straightforward, since Nakhon Pathom and Phraek Si Racha share an interconnected waterway network reached from the Gulf by way of the Chao Phraya.

A related difficulty arises from the identification of Anuruddha of Arimadhanapuri with Anawrahta of Pagan (r. 1044–1077), proposed on phonetic grounds. The Jinakalamali associates Anuruddha directly with Camadevi of Haripuñjaya, conventionally dated to the mid-7th century, roughly four centuries before Anawrahta. If Arimadhanapuri is taken as Pagan rather than Nakhon Pathom, the geography becomes less plausible still. A vessel returning from Sri Lanka to Pagan would sail north through the Bay of Bengal and up the Irrawaddy River, whereas Angkor lies to the south-east in a separate drainage reached by the Mekong or Tonlé Sap.

The Legend of Singhanavati adds a further inconsistency, situating Indapraṣṭhanagara in the Chao Phraya basin and associating it with the southward retreat of forces defeated by Phrom of Yonok toward present-day Kamphaeng Phet.

Phraek Si Racha hypothesis

An alternative localization places Indapraṣṭhanagara in the Phraek Si Racha region east of Sankhaburi, based on the geographical indications in the Ayutthaya Testimonies together with traditions concerning Sri Dharmasokaraja I and II and the evidence of K. 766.

The name was used for three successive seats. The first stood east of Sawankhaburi. The Ratanabimbavaṃsa records a campaign by Adītaraj of Ayojjhapura against the city while it was suffering a severe flood following the death of its great king, then the first Indapraṣṭhanagara was left abandoned.

The second appears in the 1869 recension of the Northern Chronicle, where Phraya Kreak succeeded his grandfather Sudarsana at a seat called Indaprasthanagara. He then moved eastward, a journey of about fifteen days, to a settlement known as Koṇḍaññagāma. The settlement thereafter took the name Indaprasthanagara, forming the third seat in the sequence.

The same chronicle gives the distances between the later seats. The third Indaprasthanagara stood about fifteen days' journey north of Ayodhya, where Uthong II later established his seat, while the second stood about fifteen days' journey west of the third. It was from the second seat that a descendant of the ancestor of Uthong II's queen fled.

The and the Legend of Singhanavati place Indapraṣṭhanagara in the Chao Phraya basin with access to the sea. These Lan Na traditions describe the forces of Phrom of Yonok pursuing their defeated opponents southward as far as Kamphaeng Phet and the surrounding region. The territory south of Kamphaeng Phet and extending to the sea is described as the domain of Indapraṣṭhanagara.

Implications for regional history

Relations with Sukhothai and Chen Li Fu

Under the Phraek Si Racha localization, the Ayutthaya Testimonies record Sukhothai as a long-standing tributary of Indapraṣṭhanagara, with obligations maintained since the reign of Padumasūriyavaṃśa. The same tradition extends his authority eastward to Talung (), corresponding to modern Prakhon Chai district in Buriram province. The lapse of these payments during the reign of Candraraja (r. 1184–1214) broke the established order and precipitated the confrontation that led to Sukhothai's de facto independence in about 1208. An independent claim over the same district has been advanced on art-historical grounds: Hiram Woodward treats the hoard of Buddhist bronzes from the temple site on Plai Bat hill in Prakhon Chai and Lahan Sai as plausibly the work of Wen Dan, the polity known to the Tang court as Land Chenla, and holds that craftsmen were moved north as Wen Dan expanded in the first half of the 8th century, placing Si Thep within that polity. The chronologies are adjacent rather than concurrent, Woodward's expansion falling in the first half of the century and the regnal dates of Padumasūriyavaṃśa, 757 to about 800, in the second, which ends at about the date of Wen Dan's last recorded embassy to China in 798.

In this period Phraek Si Racha has been identified with the polity known in Chinese sources as Chen Li Fu, which existed from roughly 1180 to the early 13th century. The conflict with Sukhothai coincides with the reign of Se-li-Mo-hsi-t'o-pa-lo-hung or Mahīdhāravarman of Chen Li Fu, which began in 1204/05.

Both Indapraṣṭhanagara and Chen Li Fu disappear from the record in these years, coinciding with Uthong II's consolidation of authority over Ayutthaya and the southward relocation of the royal seat in 1205. A connection has been suggested between Uthong II's father Phanom Thale Sri, said to have married a mixed Cham-Chinese princess, and the earlier Chen Li Fu ruler recorded as Fang-hui-chih, who sent an embassy to the Chinese court at a time when tributary missions from Southeast Asia were otherwise not being received.

Dynastic links with Sukhothai and Ayutthaya

The Ayutthaya Testimonies describe the royal houses of Indapraṣṭhanagara and Sukhothai as belonging to a single lineage, and present the earlier rulers of the Menam valley — the Phraek Si Racha line — as progenitors of both the Sukhothai and Ayutthaya dynasties. Walailak Songsiri has further associated the rulers of Chen Li Fu with Phimai and the Angkorian Mahidharapura lineage. On this reading, Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Angkor and Indapraṣṭhanagara appear as interconnected polities linked by dynastic alliance rather than as isolated or uniformly antagonistic states.

The same framework bears on accounts of the defeats inflicted on Phraek Si Racha rulers by Sri Dharmasokaraja II in the Lavo region in 1157 and in Phraek Si Racha in 1167, after which two princes are recorded as withdrawing northward into the upper Menam basin: Suryaraja, grandfather of Si Inthrathit, to the area of modern Kamphaeng Phet, and Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri to the Sukhothai–Nakhon Thai region. These movements form part of the longue durée processes behind the emergence of the Sukhothai Kingdom in the 13th century.

Following the decline of the Phraek Si Racha dynasty, Angkor under Jayavarman VII intervened militarily and took Lavo in 1180. In the same year a former Siamese ruling house under Fang-hui-chih, identified with Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri and probably allied with the Mahidharapura dynasty, seized Phraek Si Racha from Sri Dharmasokaraja II and re-established the polity as Chen Li Fu. The Legend of Nakhon Si Thammarat further records an attempt by the same ruler to invade Tambralinga, by then the only remaining dominion of Sri Dharmasokaraja II after his defeat in the Menam basin.

Evidence adduced for such alliances includes the marriage of Pha Mueang of Sukhothai to Princess Sukhara Mahādevī, a relative of Jayavarman VII; depictions of Xiān (Siamese) mercenaries in the Angkor Wat reliefs; the large Siamese population recorded at Yasodharapura in the 13th century by Zhou Daguan; and the Buddha images dispatched by Jayavarman VII to polities of the Menam basin, as attested in the Preah Khan inscription (K. 908). Also cited are a week-long religious observance undertaken after 1188 by Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri at Lavapura, then under Angkorian control, and the accession of his descendant Uthong II at Ayodhya in 1205, on territory previously held by Chen Li Fu, without recorded conflict.

Within this framework, figures such as Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong, traditionally cast as Angkorian officials who usurped Sri Naw Nam Thum of Sukhothai, may instead represent rivals aligned with a competing domestic faction. This reading accords with scholarship treating early Sukhothai and Angkor as linked by dynastic alliance rather than defined by rivalry.

Pagan intervention in the Menam basin

The version of the Legend of Nakhon Si Thammarat presenting Sri Dharmasokaraja I as a ruler of Indaprasthanagara–Lavo of Hanthawaddy origin bears notable parallels to the Northern Chronicle account of late Dvaravati events. The extension of Pagan influence into the Menam basin between the 1050s and 1080s, the establishment of the Pagan noble Kar Tayy (r. c. 1081–1121) at Suphannaphum, the invasion of Ayodhya in 1087 and the death of King Narai I, and a two-year interregnum before the accession of Phra Chao Luang, a ruler of uncertain origin. The recorded northward removal of the Siamese ruler Surindraraja (r. 1062–1100) from Phraek Si Racha to Chai Nat in the same period has been read as part of the same upheaval.

These local records of Pagan penetration between the 11th and late 12th centuries are consistent with the early 13th-century Chinese Zhu Fan Zhi, which places Pagan on Chenla's western border, and with Burmese traditions recording repeated conflict between Pagan and Angkor under Anawrahta (r. 1044–1077), including claims of a temporary seizure of Angkor itself. They accord further with the interpretation that Tambralinga lay under Pagan suzerainty from the mid-11th to the early 13th century.

The foundation of Lan Xang

The Lan Xang Chronicle account of Fa Ngum's adoption by Siri Juntarat of Indapraṣṭhanagara has conventionally been read alongside the Angkorian identification, implying that the forces behind the foundation of Lan Xang came from Angkor. That reading is George Cœdès's. He accepted the Luang Prabang tradition without reserve and identified Fa Ngum's Khmer patron with Jayavarmaparameśvara, the last Khmer king named in Sanskrit epigraphy. Paul Lévy and Martin Stuart-Fox explained the Indapraṣṭha support as deliberate policy, the creation on Indapraṣṭha's marches of a strong allied power able to contain the expansion of Ayutthaya.

Several difficulties have been raised against that reading. The mid-14th century was a period of marked contraction at Angkor. The last Sanskrit inscription dates to the reign of Indrajayavarman (r. 1308–1327), a dynastic change in 1336 severed continuity with the preceding lineage, and Zhou Daguan had already recorded severe damage from Siamese campaigns at the time of his visit in 1296–1297. The foundation of Lan Xang in 1353 moreover falls within a period of direct Ayutthayan occupation of Angkor. After campaigns in 1350 and 1351 during the reign of (r. 1347–1352/53), Ayutthaya installed a succession of Siamese governors — (1352/53–1356), (1356–1357) and (1357).

The proposal that Fa Ngum's patron was instead Jayavarman IX (r. 1327–1336) raises its own problems, since Jayavarman IX was deposed by Trasak Paem in 1336, seventeen years before the foundation of Lan Xang; the successor dynasty would then have had to tolerate the ward of the ruler it had overthrown and to commit forces to his campaigns in the 1350s.

Michel Lorrillard raises a further difficulty, which bears on the sources rather than on the chronology. The Lao traditions that carry the episode are northern, written at Luang Prabang. The Nithān Khun Borom was begun early in the sixteenth century and the phongsāvadān go back no further than the middle of the fifteenth, so that the events stand at least a century and a half before their redaction, and the annalists who mention Cambodia were themselves very far from it.

The direction of Lan Xang's early expansion has also been cited. Effective settlement and administrative control were concentrated in the upper Mekong basin and its western approaches, with garrison communities at Mueang Sai Khao (Ban Sai Khao, , Wang Saphung district) and Mueang Nong Bua facing the Ayutthayan frontier rather than Angkor. The chronicles' own account of the conquests runs in the same quarter. On Lorrillard's reading the phongsāvadān preserve them better than the Nithān Khun Borom, and there the campaign begins at the mouth of the Nam San or the Nam Ngiep, some 150 kilometres downstream of Vientiane, and goes up to Luang Prabang by way of Xieng Khuang before turning on Vientiane and Vieng Kham. Southern Laos remained loosely integrated: Photisarath (r. 1520–1548) undertook a pilgrimage to That Sikhottabong and improvements at That Phanom in 1539 to strengthen Lan Xang's southern presence, and Setthathirath (r. 1548–1571) disappeared on an expedition thought to have reached near Attapeu.

Sukhothai epigraphy, by contrast, places the Siamese sphere of the period as extending north into the upper Mekong basin, with Inscription No. 1 recording ties as far as Vientiane and Luang Prabang and naming Phraek Si Racha within the Sukhothai sphere, and Inscription No. 8 setting Sukhothai's eastern limit at Fa Ngum's territory. Under the Phraek Si Racha localization, Siri Juntarat would accordingly be a governor within the Sukhothai network rather than an Angkorian ruler, and the military support behind Fa Ngum's campaigns would derive from the Sukhothai-Siamese sphere.

Subsequent diplomacy has been read in the same sense. After the foundation of Lan Xang, Fa Ngum's forces advanced against Ayutthayan territory, and Ayutthaya responded by invoking shared dynastic kinship, sending a princess in marriage and concluding a boundary agreement, rather than treating Lan Xang as an extension of an Angkorian adversary; nor did Fa Ngum act to relieve Angkor from Ayutthayan occupation, despite the obligations that adoption, marriage and military patronage would have created.

See also

• Dvaravati
• Chen Li Fu
• Phraek Si Racha
• Lavo Kingdom