Sukhothai is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 1991 as the Historic Town of Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns under criteria (i) and (iii). The listing covers three historical parks in north-central Thailand: Sukhothai itself, capital of the Sukhothai Kingdom in the 13th and 14th centuries, where 193 ruins are spread over 70 km² about 12 km west of the modern town of Sukhothai Thani; Si Satchanalai, about 50 km to the north on the Yom River; and Kamphaeng Phet on the Ping River to the southwest. Together they preserve the first distinctly Siamese style of architecture and Buddha images, a sophisticated system of dams and reservoirs, and the inscription long celebrated as the earliest writing in Thai script, carved on a siltstone pillar 1.15 metres tall that shapes almost everything said about the place.
A Stone Pillar Found at Noen Prasat in 1833
In 1833 a royal monk named Mongkut, the future King Rama IV, made a pilgrimage to the ruined city. At Noen Prasat, the mound then believed to be the old palace, he found a four-sided stone pillar with a rounded pyramidal top and a carved stone slab thought to be the throne of the Sukhothai kings. He had both carried to Bangkok. The pillar, formally Sukhothai Inscription No. 1 and popularly the Ram Khamhaeng Inscription, is 114.5 cm high and 35.5 cm wide on each face, polished above and left rough below where it once fitted into a base. After moving through several temples and palace halls, it has been on display in the Bangkok National Museum since 1968.
The text runs to 35 lines on each of the first two faces and 27 on the other two, in a script that resembles old Khmer and, unusually, writes all its vowels on the line. It falls into three parts: Ram Khamhaeng’s own account of his youth, written in the first person; a description of the city, its abundance, its justice and its religious life; and a closing eulogy in a different hand. The inscription dates the king’s installation of a stone throne to 1292, records relics enshrined at Si Satchanalai in 1285, and credits Ram Khamhaeng with inventing the script in 1283. Mongkut set up a commission to decipher it in 1836, Cornelius Beach Bradley of the University of California published an English translation in 1909, and George Cœdès produced the authoritative French edition in 1924.
The picture it paints is of a generous ruler who levies no tolls, lets subjects trade freely in cattle, horses, elephants, silver and gold, and governs paternally. Through the 20th century that portrait made Sukhothai the official starting point of Thai history, and in 2003 UNESCO added the inscription to its Memory of the World Register.
The “Piltdown Skull” Debate, 1987 to 1990
In July 1987 the historian Michael Vickery presented a paper at the International Conference on Thai Studies at the Australian National University titled “The Ram Khamhaeng Inscription: A Piltdown Skull of Southeast Asian History?” He argued that the script, vocabulary and content did not fit the 13th century, and that passages resembling those in inscriptions made under Ram Khamhaeng’s grandson Li Thai had been copied from them rather than the other way round. In August 1988 the art historian Piriya Krairiksh went further and argued in Thai that Mongkut himself had forged the stele. If true, much of the national narrative would need rewriting, and dozens of scholars joined a heated debate carried on in seminars, a special volume of the magazine Silpa Wattanatham in 1988 and a Siam Society collection in 1991.
A 1990 analysis using scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy found the stone to be the same age, 500 to 700 years, as four other Sukhothai inscriptions. Most specialists now regard it as at least partly authentic, though the question has never been formally closed; Vickery himself later placed its writing in the late 18th or early 19th century. The quarrel left a lasting benefit: closer study of the text’s purpose. Some scholars read its list of twenty cities as personal allegiance to Ram Khamhaeng rather than territory, and others compare its ideal king with the righteous ruler of the Pali scriptures.
Sukhothai From 1238 to 1438
Outside the inscription, the kingdom’s story comes from chronicles, other stelae and the ruins. By tradition, two local chiefs, Bang Klang Hao and Pha Mueang, took Sukhothai in 1238 or 1239 (sources differ) from a ruler with Khmer-style titles, and Bang Klang Hao reigned as Si Inthrathit, founding the Phra Ruang dynasty. Older histories called this a liberation from Angkor; Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, among others, read it instead as a contest between local lords who both stood within the Angkorian orbit. Excavated earthworks show a Khmer-style town around 1200 and, later in the 13th century, a much larger walled and moated town immediately to its south.
Ram Khamhaeng, son of Si Inthrathit, is credited with spreading Theravada Buddhism with monks from Nakhon Si Thammarat and with opening trade missions to Yuan China. After his death, conventionally placed in 1298, the outer dependencies broke away. His grandson Li Thai took the throne in 1347 as Maha Thammaracha I, but Ayutthaya’s armies invaded in 1349 and forced a formal submission in 1378. In 1438 King Borommarachathirat II of Ayutthaya installed his son Ramesuan as viceroy at Sukhothai, ending its separate statehood. Sukhothai was finally abandoned in 1793, when Rama I founded a new town 12 km to the east, and Rama I later had the 8-metre bronze Buddha of Wat Mahathat brought to Bangkok, where, as Phra Si Sakyamuni, it is the principal image of Wat Suthat.
Lotus Buds and Walking Monks at Wat Mahathat
The old city is a rectangle of walls about 2 km east to west and 1.6 km north to south, with a gate in the centre of each side. Inside lie the royal palace site and 26 temples, the largest of them Wat Mahathat, the “temple of the great relic”. Founded by Si Inthrathit and enlarged in the late 13th and 14th centuries, it is laid out as a mandala, with a principal stupa, conventionally dated to about 1345, ringed by eight smaller ones. The main tower ends in a lotus bud, the shape that became the signature of Sukhothai architecture. Around its base, 168 stucco disciples walk with hands joined in salutation, and two 9-metre standing Buddhas known as Phra Attharot flank it. The precinct also holds an assembly hall, an ordination hall and some 200 lesser stupas.
Those walking disciples point to Sukhothai’s best-known contribution to Buddhist art. Sukhothai sculptors gave the Buddha a slender, flowing body, a flame-shaped finial on the head and a serene face, and created the walking Buddha, one foot stepping forward and the right hand raised to the chest, a pose closely associated with the kingdom. A stucco walking Buddha still stands on the eastern face of the mandapa at Wat Chetuphon, about 2 km south of the city wall. The mandapa of Wat Si Chum encloses Phra Achana, a seated Buddha about 15 metres high and 11 metres across that is mentioned on the stele; a narrow stair inside its 32-metre-square walls is lined with more than 50 engraved slates of Jataka scenes, the oldest surviving examples of Thai drawing.
Saritphong Dam and the Traphang Reservoirs
UNESCO’s citation singles out water management as something the three towns shared. Sukhothai was short of water, and its builders answered with earthworks. The Saritphong Dam, also called Thamnop Phra Ruang, is an earth embankment strung between two hills, Khao Phra Bat Yai and Khao Kio Ai Ma. A spillway and channels carried the stored water towards the city gates, where it filled reservoirs called traphang. Two of them, Traphang Ngoen (“silver pond”) and Traphang Thong (“gold pond”), supplied the old city and the palace, and archaeologists at Noen Prasat found terracotta pipes that probably carried water from a city lake to the palace ponds.
Temples were built into this waterscape. Wat Traphang Ngoen has its ordination hall on an island in the middle of its artificial lake, and Wat Sa Si stands within Traphang Trakuan lake northwest of Wat Mahathat. Several of those lakes still hold water today, so the park reads as islands of brick and laterite set in ponds and lawns.
Si Satchanalai and Kamphaeng Phet in the 1991 Listing
The 1991 World Heritage listing joined Sukhothai to two satellite towns, each now a historical park run by the Fine Arts Department. Si Satchanalai, traditionally founded in 1250 as the kingdom’s second centre and the seat of crown princes, stands beside older Chaliang, a trading town on a bend of the Yom already recorded in the Chinese Song Shi for the year 1001. Its Wat Chang Lom, traditionally said to have been built on Ram Khamhaeng’s orders in 1286 after a relic was found there (Michael Vickery argued for the 1370s), has a Sri Lankan-style laterite stupa ringed by 39 standing elephants; Wat Chedi Chet Thaeo nearby has 32 stupas in different styles. The Yom has flooded the town repeatedly, leaving 4 to 5 metres of flood deposits at Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat, and a Burmese army destroyed the city in 1766.
The kilns around Si Satchanalai and Sukhothai made the glazed stoneware known as Sangkhalok, the only Chinese-style ceramics Siam produced. Baker and Pasuk trace celadon from the Sukhothai kilns into the 1480s and darker Sawankhalok ware until the 1580s, an export trade that faded after Ming China lifted its ban on ceramic exports in 1567. Kamphaeng Phet, the third component, on the Ping River, protected the kingdom’s borders and trade routes. Its walled town, ancient Chakangrao on the east bank, is 300 to 700 metres wide and 2,200 metres long, and its large royal temple, Wat Phra Kaeo, was used for state ceremonies and housed no monks.
Did Loy Krathong Really Begin at Sukhothai?
Sukhothai is often named as the birthplace of Loy Krathong, and the story usually told is that a Sukhothai court lady named Nang Nopphamat floated the first decorated krathong. Historians disagree. The Nopphamat tale comes from a poem of the early Bangkok period, which Baker and Pasuk call a literary fiction meant to give a “pure Thai” pedigree to a festival rooted in Khmer Brahmin ritual. The oldest depiction of floating offerings is a bas-relief at the Bayon in Cambodia, from the late 12th or early 13th century, and nothing suggests the custom was practised in water-scarce Sukhothai. Like the stele found in 1833, the legend shows how much of Sukhothai’s image was assembled in 19th-century Bangkok.
Sukhothai’s successor state is covered in our post on the Ayutthaya World Heritage Site, and the Khmer architecture behind its earliest shrines can be traced to Angkor Wat.