Qizhangmo

Qi-zhang-mo () is the name recorded in the Chinese Tongdian for a ruler of the Tou-he kingdom (), commonly identified with Dvaravati, who is placed in the first half of the 7th century. Thai legend separately preserves a ruler of Nakhon Pathom of the same period named Shridravya (, ). No identification between the two has been established, and the historicity of the legendary figure remains uncertain. Epigraphy supplies a third and separate designation for the same centre: the Lopburi inscription K.577, of about the 8th–9th century, refers to a king of Sambuka, a name several scholars place at Nakhon Pathom, without naming him.

Chinese record

The Tongdian names Qi-zhang-mo as ruler of the Tou-he kingdom. In the same entry the ruler of Tou-he-luo () is given as Pu-xie-qi-yao (), to whom the tributary mission of the Zhenguan period (, 627–649) of Emperor Taizong of Tang is attributed and who is understood to have followed Qi-zhang-mo on the throne.

The entry sets Qi-zhang-mo apart from the ruler named just before him. Where the first is given a surname, Qi-zhang-mo is said to have none. Where houses in the first account are roofed with tile and their walls painted, in his the roofs are of grass. His residence is likened to a Buddhist stupa, ornamented with gold, its door opening to the east. It was in the Zhenguan period that envoys came bearing a gold-plate letter and several tens of kinds of goods. The Cefu Yuangui records missions from Tou-he-luo in 638, 640, 643 and 649, and from a dependency named Tuoheng in 643 and 647. In 649 the ruler sent ivory and fire-beads and asked for fine horses, Tuoheng having asked two years earlier for horses and a bronze bell; Lin Ying and Huang Jiaxin note that such requests were unusual in a tribute system whose return gifts were normally silk, the only recorded grant of horses to a South Seas polity under the Tang being two sent to the king of Linyi in 713. Lin Ying and Huang Jiaxin suggest an immediate prompt for the request: in 647 the Qurykhan of the northern steppe had presented a hundred fine horses, which Taizong selected and named himself and which the envoys from the dependency may have seen at court. The missions of 638, 640, 643, 647 and 649 are the only five recorded from the polity in the Zhenguan period, and none is recorded at any later point under the Tang.

The same passage describes the country. Its people were chiefly farmers and traders, rode elephants and horses though the whole land held fewer than a thousand horses, and made music with conch and drum. The Tongdian adds that the horses went unharnessed and were controlled by a bridle passed through the mouth. No rate of tax was fixed and each paid what he chose. Punishment for grave theft was death, for lesser offences the piercing of the ear or temple, and for counterfeit coin the severing of the wrist. The dead were cremated and the ashes placed in a glass jar and released into a river; a son shaved his head in mourning for a parent. There were schools, and the script differed from the Chinese.

The mission of 649 is the last recorded from Tou-he, and is attributed to his successor Pu xie qi yao rather than to Qi-zhang-mo himself. Chinese sources of the following decades refer instead to Ge Luo She Fen, whose king Pú jiā yuè mó is named in the entry for the fifth month of 665, which records that the envoy sent in his name had set out nine years earlier, in 656, a change Tatsuo Hoshino reads as reflecting the southward extension of Si Thep's authority over the Nakhon Pathom region.

Thai legend

The Thai account survives in a local fable of Miang kham and is transmitted in fragmentary and confused form. Rather than standing as an independent tradition, the story of Shridravya is interwoven with that of a much later figure, the 9th-century ruler Phraya Pan (), in the Legend of , which makes his historical plausibility difficult to assess.

The fable recounts that the king of Isanapura in Chenla sought reconciliation in 637/638 by offering his daughter in marriage to Shridravya, then a prince under the ruler of Nakhon Pathom, after which Shridravya took the throne of Nakhon Pathom. It also implies a succession at Nakhon Pathom in this period, naming first Cakranarayana (), identified as the brother of a preceding ruler, and then Shridravya, described not as Cakranarayana's son but as the son of that earlier monarch.

If Shridravya did hold kingship at Nakhon Pathom, modern reconstructions place his reign in the mid-7th century: after Kalavarnadisharaja left for Lavapura in 648 and after the brief rule of Cakranarayana, and before Pu xie qi yao, to whom the embassy of 649 is attributed and who was in turn followed by Pú jiā yuè mó, king of Ge Luo She Fen, whose envoy set out in 656 and reached China in 665, and who came from Si Thep and, on Tatsuo Hoshino's reading, extended his territory south to take in the Nakhon Pathom region.