Siam Confederation (Xiān)

Not to be confused with Kingdom of Siam.

Xiān 暹 (Chinese) Xiān
c. 11th century – 1438
The lower Menam (Chao Phraya) valley in the 13th century
Capital	No single centre; see § Constituent polities
Common languages	Old Mon Old Thai
Religion	Theravada Buddhism
Government	City-state confederation (11th century–1351) Mandala federation (1351–1438)
Monarch
Historical era	Post-classical era
• Earliest attestation of the name in Chinese records	1178
• Earliest attestation of syam in Khmer inscriptions	611
• First mention in Đại Việt sources	1149
• First tribute mission to the Yuan dynasty	1292
• Nakhon Si Thammarat reckoned as Siam	Late 13th century
• Union with Lavo; founding of Ayutthaya	1351
• Suphannabhum and Sukhothai absorbed into Ayutthaya	1438
Preceded by Succeeded by Dvaravati Syamapura Siam city-states Ayutthaya Kingdom
Today part of	Thailand Malaysia Myanmar

Xiān (Chinese: 暹), rendered in Thai as Siam (Thai: สยาม), is the name by which Chinese and Vietnamese records of the 12th to 14th centuries designated one or more polities in the lower Chao Phraya basin. Rather than a single centralised kingdom, most recent scholarship treats Xiān as a grouping of maritime-oriented port polities around the present Bay of Bangkok, among them Ayodhya, Suphannabhum and Phrip Phri, to which Nakhon Si Thammarat (Ligor) was added in the late 13th century. These polities emerged on the western Chao Phraya plain after the decline of Dvaravati in the 11th century and are treated as successors of Qiān Zhī Fú at Si Thep and related states.

The identification of Xiān is disputed. Earlier scholarship equated the term with the Sukhothai Kingdom, an equation questioned since 1989 on the grounds that Chinese records list Xiān and Sukhothai separately. Some scholars instead identify the Xiān of the Chinese and Đại Việt records with Ayodhya, the later capital of the Lavo Kingdom, while others read it as a collective designation for several Siamese polities rather than any one of them.

Xiān entered into union with Lavo in 1351, an event associated with the founding of the Ayutthaya Kingdom with its seat at Ayutthaya. Phrip Phri was reduced to a frontier town governed from Suphan Buri, which was itself absorbed into Ayutthaya in 1438, while Nakhon Si Thammarat retained vassal status through the Ayutthaya and Thonburi periods, with brief intervals of independence, until it was reduced to a province of Rattanakosin in 1782.

Name and terminology

The origin of the name Siam remains disputed. Its earliest form, syam, appears in Funan–Chenla inscriptions of the 7th century, most probably as a toponym denoting a locality in the lower Chao Phraya basin.

Several toponyms in 6th-century Dvaravati-period inscriptions from Nakhon Pathom — notably Śrīyānaṁdimiriṅga and Śrīyānaṁdimiriṅgapratipura — have been noted for their phonetic resemblance to syam.

Syam in Khmer and Cham inscriptions

In the surviving pre-Angkorian corpus, syam occurs four times designating female slaves (ku syam: K. 557, dated 611 CE; K. 127, 683 CE; K. 154, 685 CE; and K. 904, 713 CE) and once identifying a landholding official (pon syam) who endowed a temple with rice fields (K. 79, 639 CE). In K. 127 the entry preceding syam occupies the same syntactic position and reads vrau, a term taken to name an ethnolinguistic minority, possibly ancestral to the modern Bru or Brau people. On this parallel, syam may likewise have served as a toponym extended to the people of the area.

The term recurs in slave lists in Cham and Khmer inscriptions of the 11th and 12th centuries. From roughly the same period comes the bas-relief panel at Angkor Wat depicting mercenaries of the Khmer army labelled syam-kuk, perhaps "of the land of Siam". The ethnolinguistic affiliation of these troops cannot be established with certainty, though many scholars have taken them to be Siamese.

Syam in the inscriptions of Pagan

From about 1120 onwards, syam occurs more than twenty times in Old Mon and Burmese inscriptions at Pagan. One instance attaches to Saṁbyaṅ, an Old Mon title for a senior official, but the term appears chiefly in lists of temple slaves of both sexes. Some Syaṁ are distinguished by occupation, as dancers, weavers or carpenters.

Chinese, Vietnamese and Pali forms

Chinese sources render the name as Xiān (暹); after the union with Lavo the compound Xiānluó hú (暹羅斛) appears, later shortened to Xiānluó (暹羅). An earlier form, San-lo (三濼), recorded in the Lingwai Daida of 1178, is held to be an early attempt to transcribe the name of the country or people of the upper and central Chao Phraya, which Khmer inscriptions called Syam.

Vietnamese sources write the name with the same graph, rendered in Vietnamese as Xiêm and in its extended form as Xiêm La, which remained the usual Vietnamese name for Siam into the modern period. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư uses the compound 暹羅 in its entries for 1149, 1182, 1241 and 1360, and the phrase 暹人 ("people of Xiān") in the entry for 1313; the recorded of tribute presented during the Ai Lao campaign of 1335, has "country of Xiān" (暹國).

In the Jinakalamali, a Pali chronicle of the northern Thai principality of Lan Na, the forms siam-desa and siam-rattha denote the "region (desa)" or "state (rattha)" of Siam; one passage identifies this with the Sukhothai region.

Identification and historiography

Prince Damrong proposed in 1914 a unilinear scheme of Thai history in which the history of the Thais in Siam proper began with the founding of the Sukhothai Kingdom in 1238, succeeded in turn by Ayutthaya, Thonburi and Rattanakosin. Translated and edited by Cœdès in 1924, the scheme was disseminated through his influential The Indianized States of Southeast Asia and became standard in Thai school textbooks. On this model, Xiān in Chinese records was taken to mean Sukhothai.

The equation was contested in 1989 by Yamamoto Tatsuro, who argued that the Xiān of the Dade Nanhai-zhi (1297–1307) was a polity politically superior to Sukhothai rather than Sukhothai itself. The decisive evidence is that Chinese records of 1297 and 1299 list Xiān and Sù gǔ chí (速古漦, Sukhothai) as separate tributaries, which indicates that the lower Chao Phraya basin then held at least three distinct polities: Lavo, Sukhothai and Xiān. Subsequent studies have accordingly rejected the proposition that Sukhothai was the first independent Siamese polity.

Beyond this negative conclusion there is no settled positive identification. Yoneo Ishii treated Xiān as a confederation of port polities on the Bay of Bangkok, whereas Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit identify the Xiān of the Chinese and Vietnamese records with Ayodhya, the relocated capital of Lavo. Other proposals point to Suphannabhum, on the strength of Hongwu-era tribute missions sent in the name of the king of Su-men-bang (蘇門邦), identified with Suphanburi.

Attestations in Chinese and Vietnamese records

Possible early references

Two earlier notices have been connected to the region, though neither uses the name Xiān.

During the early Tang dynasty a polity called Xiū Luó Fēn, said to lie west of Chenla, sent tribute to the Chinese court. It is described as commanding large forces and as having customs broadly similar to those of Gē Luó Shě Fēn, which Thai scholars have identified either with Dvaravati-period Nakhon Pathom or with Sambuka of the Bhavavarman II inscription.

The San-lo (三濼) of the Lingwai Daida (1178) has been read by Thai scholars as a reference to the new centre of Chaliang at Sawankhalok.

A much later text, the Shū yù zhōu zī lù of 1583, asserts retrospectively that the kingdom to which the Sui dynasty sent an embassy between about 605 and 618 — Chi Tu — had by then already been renamed Xiān. Written nearly a millennium after the events it describes, the passage is of limited evidentiary value, but it is notable for pairing Xiān and Lavo in the same contrast of terrain that appears in earlier sources:

暹古名赤土, 羅斛古名婆羅剎也. 暹國土瘠不宜耕種, 羅斛土田平衍而多稼.
The ancient name of Xiān is Chì Tǔ, and the ancient name of Luó Hú is Póluó Shā. The land of Xiān is poor and unsuited to cultivation, while the fields of Luó Hú are level and abundantly cropped.

— Yán Cóng-jiǎn (严从简), Shū yù zhōu zī lù, chapter 8: Zhenla

Xiān in Yuan-period records

Xiān first appears in the Yuán Shǐ (元史) under 1278, when the Yuan dynasty dispatched He Zi-zhi (何子志), a commander of ten thousand households, as envoy to Xiān; the mission was detained by Champa. The Yuán Shǐ records that the party never arrived: it was seized while passing Champa, and He Zi-zhi, Huang Fu-jian and more than a hundred companions were put to death there early in 1283. The same source preserves the deliberation that preceded the mission, in which the minister Jia-lu Na-da-si argued that these were small countries whose conquest would bring little advantage and that envoys should be sent before any resort to arms. Xiān appears on the list of territories Kublai Khan intended to subdue after the completion of the Mongol conquest of China in 1279, together with Lavo and polities of the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, South India and Ceylon.

A first tribute from Xiān is recorded in 1292. The court sent envoys to press for submission the following year, which Xiān refused, and a further imperial summons was issued in 1294. In 1295 the king of Xiān, Gan-mu-ding (Kamrateng, กมรเต็ง) of Pi-ch'a-pu-li (Phrip Phri; present-day Phetchaburi), appeared at court in person bearing tribute and a golden plate. Tribute followed again in 1296, and envoys from Xiān, Luó hú (羅斛, Lavo) and Jambi (Srivijaya) are recorded in 1297. In 1295, having received the submission of both parties, the court issued an edict directing Xiān to do no harm to Ma-li-yu-er (Melayu), with whom it had long been at war. In 1299 the king of Xiān asked for the horse trappings, white horse and gold-threaded robe granted in his father's lifetime; the minister Wan-ze Da-la-han advised that giving horses to so small a kingdom would invite criticism from its neighbours, and only the robe was sent. Further missions came in April and July 1314, in 1319, and lastly in 1323.

The Dade Nanhai-zhi (大德南海志) of 1304 states that "Xiān controls Sù gū dǐ (速孤底, Sukhothai), which lies upstream" (暹国管 上水速孤底). Yamamoto took this to mean that Sukhothai was under Xiān's control, while the Thai scholar Keatkhamjorn Meekanon suggests instead that Sukhothai depended on Xiān for access to export markets.

Xiān also appears in the biography of Chen Yi-zhong in the Song shi, which records that in the nineteenth year of the Zhiyuan era (至元, 1282–83) the imperial army attacked Champa and that Chen fled to Xiān, where he died. Chen Yi-zhong was a defeated minister of the Southern Song who had sought refuge in Champa; his onward flight has been taken to indicate that Xiān was a flourishing commercial port in the post-Srivijayan trade order, with a resident community of compatriots.

Xiānluó hú and Xiānluó

Main article: Ayutthaya Kingdom

According to the Daoyi Zhilüe, Luó hú (Lavo) annexed Xiān in 1349, a notice consistent with the founding of Ayutthaya through the union of Lavo with Siamese Suphan Buri. Chinese records name the resulting polity Xiānluó hú (暹羅斛), later shortened to Xiānluó (暹羅). It sent 41 tribute missions during the Hongwu era, 33 under the former name and the remainder under the latter.

Đại Việt records

Xiān and other countries paid tribute to Đại Việt during the Trần dynasty campaign against Ai Lao of 1334–1336, as recorded in volume 9 of the Khâm định Việt sử Thông giám cương mục. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư mentions Xiān on five further occasions under the Lý and Trần dynasties.

References to Xiān in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư

Year	Reign	Original text	Summary
1149	Lý Anh Tông	己巳十年〈宋紹興十九年〉春二月, 爪哇、路貉、暹羅三國商舶入海東, 乞居住販賣, 乃於海島等處立庄, 名雲屯, 買賣寳貨, 上進方物.	Merchants from Xiān (暹羅) and other countries reached Hǎidōng (海東) and sought permission to trade and to establish a trading post at Yún tún (雲屯).
1182	Lý Cao Tông	暹羅國來貢.	Xiān came to pay tribute.
1241		暹羅、三佛齊等國商人入雲屯鎮, 進寳物, 乞行買賣.	Merchants from Xiān, Srivijaya and other countries came to Yún tún with goods and requested permission to trade.
1313	Trần Anh Tông	時占城被暹人侵掠, 帝以天覷經畧乂安、臨平徃救. 後凣西邉籌畫, 明宗悉以委之.	Xiān raided Champa; the emperor sent forces to Champa's aid.
1360	Trần Dụ Tông	冬十月, 路鶴、茶哇哇音鴉、暹羅等國商舶至雲屯販賣, 進諸異物.	Merchants from Xiān arrived at Yún tún to trade.

Geography and economy

The Daoyi Zhilüe describes Xiān as ringed by high mountains and deep valleys and as occupying poor land, so that its people depended on neighbouring Luó hú (Lavo) for rice and supported themselves by commerce. Zhou Daguan, who travelled to Zhenla in 1296–1297, places Xiān to the south-west of Chenla.

Ayodhya, one of the constituent centres, stood in the middle of the lower Chao Phraya deltaic floodplain; before modern drainage works the monsoon turned the city into what has been described as an island in the middle of a sea. The Chinese court included Xiān among the "maritime" kingdoms from which it demanded submission.

The Xin Yuanshi describes how rice was grown in the valley. A large river runs from Xiān through Lavo to the sea, and each summer sea water pushed up into its inland reaches; farmers sowed at that season and the seedlings rose with the water, a foot of growth for every foot the river rose, ripening as it fell. Seed was sown but the ground was not ploughed, which the account gives as the reason grain was abundant and cheap. The same source states that Xiān and Lavo had both formed part of Funan.

Exports listed in the Daoyi Zhilüe (1351) include sappanwood, tin, chaulmoogra, ivory and kingfisher feathers.

History

Relief at Angkor Wat, dated to the early 12th century, showing Siamese mercenaries led by a noble of Cheng Shan (เชงฌาล), a city that later became a major rival of Angkor.

Background: the decline of Dvaravati

The Xiān city-states took shape in about the 11th century, following the collapse of Qiān in the late Dvaravati period. That collapse has been attributed to a combination of pressures: the conquest of the Chao Phraya valley and the upper Malay Peninsula by King Sujita of Tambralinga in the mid-9th century, invasion from the east by Angkor, and the Pagan incursion into the valley around the mid-11th century. Together these are held to account for the decline of the earlier states of the region.

The region, along with Junk Ceylon (Phuket) and Tambralinga, was raided by the Mau Shans of the Shan States during their Indochina campaign between 1220 and 1230.

Maritime expansion

By the close of the 13th century Xiān appears to have begun expanding southward at the expense of the Malay Peninsula. The Chinese imperial admonition of 1295 — that Xiān should not harm Ma-li-yü-êrh (Melayu) — reflects this movement. A maritime attack on the Samudera Pasai Sultanate in Sumatra, probably between 1299 and 1310, failed; the force may have been launched by the southernmost Xiān polity, Nakhon Si Thammarat, from naval bases at Takua Thalang, Trang or Syburi. Champa was raided in 1313.

Wang Dayuan characterised the polity in similar terms:

Its people are aggressive. Whenever they see another country in a state of disorder, they immediately dispatch as many as one hundred ships full of sago to invade it. Recently more than seventy ships invaded Dān mǎ xī (單馬錫, taken to be Tumasik, or Singapore) and Xī lǐ (昔里).

— Wang Dayuan, Daoyi Zhilüe, p. 155 (1351)

This accords with the account of Ma Huan, who visited Ayutthaya in 1421–22 and reported that its people were practised in fighting on water and that the king regularly sent commanders to subdue neighbouring countries.

Union with Lavo and the founding of Ayutthaya

Xiān — recorded in the late 13th century as Suphan Buri and Nakhon Si Thammarat — entered into federation with Lavo in 1351, producing the Ayutthaya Kingdom with its federal seat at Ayutthaya. Phrip Phri was reduced to a frontier town under the administration of Suphan Buri, which was in turn fully absorbed into Ayutthaya in 1438. Nakhon Si Thammarat retained vassal status through the Ayutthaya and Thonburi periods, with short intervals of independence, before becoming a province of Rattanakosin in 1782.

Peoples and society

The peopling of modern Thailand. Government policy in the late 1930s and early 1940s brought about the forced assimilation of various ethnolinguistic groups into the dominant Central Thai (Siamese) population.

The inscriptional record of the Dvaravati period, taken together with the archaeological evidence from the same area, suggests that the earliest population of the Xiān region was Buddhist Mon. Tai-speaking migration into the Chao Phraya basin followed from around the 9th century. Trade contact between the polities, together with intermarriage, has been proposed as the mechanism of the subsequent language shift in the region.

The Daoyi Zhilüe describes the people of Xiān as maritime in orientation. It records that the dead were preserved by the injection of mercury, that men and women dressed alike and in the same manner as the people of Lavo — hair worn in a bun and wrapped in a cotton turban, with a long shirt — and that shell money served as currency. Of Lavo, whose customs it says the people of Xiān shared, the same work records that decisions in matters of money, of grain and of travel rested with the women, whom it describes as more decisive than the men, and that salt was boiled from sea water and liquor fermented from glutinous rice.

Zhou Daguan, writing of his 1296–97 embassy to Zhenla, noted that Siamese settlers had recently arrived in Cambodia and, unlike the local population, practised sericulture, having brought their own mulberry trees and silkworms from Siam. They wove a black patterned silk for their own clothing, and because Siamese women were skilled in sewing and mending, locals with torn garments brought them to be repaired.

A separate tradition records a party of Siamese under Passara, a son of the king of Siam, who settled in Java and founded the town of Passaraan in 800 CE after a storm prevented them from reaching Makassar in Sulawesi.

Constituent polities

Phrip Phri in 1196, one of the Xiān polities.

On the Chinese evidence, early Xiān comprised at least two principal polities: Phrip Phri, which sent envoys to the Yuan dynasty from the late 13th into the early 14th century, and Su-men-bang (Suphannabhum), which later joined Lavo in the formation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Ligor came to be reckoned as Siamese after the fall of its predecessor Tambralinga, brought about by losses in the Sri Lankan wars of 1247–70, the Javanese Singhasari invasion of 1268–69, and the plague of 1270. It was subsequently revived by Siamese from Phrip Phri and developed into the Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom.

Although archaeology shows the region to have been an active node in long-distance maritime trade between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea from the beginning of the 1st millennium, written records of these polities are scarce and much of the surviving evidence is local legend. Earlier entities in the region named in Chinese records include the five cities of Tun Sun and its northern neighbour Chin Lin. The scarcity is generally attributed to the shift in maritime routes away from the Kra Isthmus after about 500 CE, and to the decay of paper, the preferred writing material in this Buddhist region.

Rulers

For a list of rulers of Xiān's Si Thep, see Qiān Zhī Fú § Rulers. For a list of rulers of Xiān's Suphannaphum, see Suphannabhum § List of rulers. For a list of rulers of Xiān's Phrip Phri, see Phrip Phri § Rulers.

The lists below derive chiefly from Thai chronicle traditions rather than from contemporary documents, and the reign dates should be treated as approximate.

Xiān of Phraek Si Racha

Name		Reign	Notes
English	Thai
Māgha Shili		Early 7th century	As king of Duō Miè Kingdom
Mórú Shīlì		c. 661	As king of Duō Miè Kingdom
Under Lavo		Late 7th – early 8th century	Golden age of Dvaravati Lavo
Gomerāja	โกเมราช	Early 8th century
Ketumāla	เกตุมาลา	?–757	Son of the preceding
Padumasuriyavamsa	ปทุมสุริยวงศ์	757–800	Adoptive son of the preceding; reckoned the first Siamese monarch
Padum Kumara	ปทุมกุมาร	800–?	Son of the preceding
Under Si Thep		?–859?
Under Kamphaeng Phet		?–?
Bharattakabba	ภะรัตกับ	?–892	No male heir
Sai Nam Peung	สายน้ำผึ้ง	892–922	Formerly a noble at the preceding ruler's court
Sudhammaraja	สุธรรมราชา	922–957	Son of the preceding. In 946 the eastern Chao Phraya valley (Si Thep or Lavo) fell to Angkor
Visnuraja	วิษณุราชา	957–987	Of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa line
Vijayaraja	พิไชยราชา	987–1027	Younger brother of the preceding
Srisimha	ศรีสิงห์	1027–1062	Son of the preceding
Surindraraja	สุรินทราชา	1062–1100	Son of the preceding
Suryavamsa	สุริยวงศ์	1100–1132	Younger brother of the preceding
Anuraja	อนุราชา	1132–1167	Younger brother of the preceding
In 1167 the Phraek Si Racha region was conquered by Sri Dharmasokaraja II of Tambralinga.
Sri Dharmasokaraja II	ศรีธรรมโศกราชที่ 2	1167–1180	Ruled from Lavo (r. 1157–1180)
In 1180 the region was taken by a dynasty possibly connected to the Mahidharapura line and re-established as Chen Li Fu.
Fang-hui-chih	พนมทะเลศรี	1180–1204	Son of Anuraja
Mahīdhāravarman	มหิธรวรมัน / อู่ทองที่ 2	1204–1205	Son of the preceding
In 1205 the seat moved to Ayodhya, where Mahīdhāravarman (Uthong II) continued to rule until 1253.

Xiān of Ayodhya

Name		Reign	Notes
English	Thai
Narai I	พระนารายณ์	1082–1087	Son of Chandrachota, king of Lavo at Lopburi
Vacant		1087–1089	Two-year succession struggle among nine nobles
Phra Chao Luang	พระเจ้าหลวง	1089–1111
Sai Nam Peung	สายน้ำผึ้ง	1111–1165	Son-in-law of the preceding; Xiān–Đại Việt trade relations established in 1149
Dhammikaraja	พระเจ้าธรรมิกราชา	1165–1205	Xiān sent tribute to Đại Việt in 1182
Uthong II	พระเจ้าอู่ทอง	1205–1253	Son of Mahesvastidrādhirājakṣatriya, king of Phrip Phri
Jayasena	พระเจ้าชัยเสน	1253–1289	Son-in-law of the preceding
Suvarnaraja	พระเจ้าสุวรรณราชา	1289–1301	Grandson of Uthong II. Xiān began campaigns against Angkor and Melayu in the 1290s and sent five tribute missions to China between 1292 and 1299
Dhammaraja	พระเจ้าธรรมราชา	1301–1310	Son-in-law of Suvarnaraja
Baramaraja	พระบรมราชา	1310–1344	Son-in-law of Suvarnaraja; Xiān invasion of Champa, 1313–1315
Ramathibodi I	รามาธิบดีที่ 1	1344–1369	Formation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1351

See also

• Lavo Kingdom
• Suphannabhum
• Qiān Zhī Fú
• Tambralinga