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The Lavo Kingdom was a mandala in the lower Chao Phraya basin from the 7th century until 1388. Its centre was Lavapura until the 1080s, when it moved to Ayodhya (Xiān). Ayodhya and Lavo sent separate embassies to the Chinese court in the late 1200s, so the two may have been distinct states.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Lavo Kingdom”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Lavo Kingdom (Thai: อาณาจักรละโว้) was a mandala in the lower Chao Phraya basin from the 7th century until 1388. Its centre was Lavapura until the 1080s, when it moved to Ayodhya (Xiān). Ayodhya and Lavo sent separate embassies to the Chinese court in the late 1200s, so the two may have been distinct states.
Before the 9th century Lavo was one of the supra-regional centres of the mandala-style polities of Dvaravati, with Si Thep, Sema, Phimai and Nakhon Pathom. Climate change and invasion from neighbouring polities reduced several of those centres, and the mandalas of the Menam valley then fell into three groups. Lavo (modern Lopburi) lay to the east, in closer contact with the Angkorian and pre-Angkorian worlds; Suphannaphum (modern Suphanburi) to the west, in closer contact with the Mon and Malay worlds; and the northern polities, more mixed than either in culture, ethnicity and language. Meanwhile, the Mun–Chi mandalas allied with Kambujadesa in the Tonlé Sap basin.
The capital is Lavapura (ลวปุระ) in Indic form, the city of Lava, and Lavo (ละโว้) in Thai tradition; the site is modern Lopburi. Tang dynasty chronicles record tribute from Lavo under the name Tou-ho-lo (堕和罗国). The monk Xuanzang called it Tou-lo-po-ti, a form that seems to echo Dvaravati, and placed it between Chenla and Pagan. By the Song dynasty it was Luówō (羅渦). Puthep Prapagorn assigns the same characters to Xuanzang instead, holding that Lavo was known as Luó-wō-guó (羅渦國) by 629.
Records of the 13th and 14th centuries render it Luó hú (羅斛), which stands beside Xiān (暹) in Yuan tribute lists and in the compound Xiānluó hú (暹羅斛) adopted after the two were joined. The pairing outlasted the union, and Chinese records treat the two as Xian-Luo thereafter, and sometimes extend the compound to Xian-Luohu-Sumenbang by adding Suphan Buri. The name is older than the Yuan lists. Song merchants record Luó Hú (罗斛) among four polities of the lower Menam basin, beside Zhēn Lǐ Fù (真里富), Róng Lǐ (茸里) and Xún Fān (浔番).
Chit Phumisak argued that the derivation runs the other way, and that Lavo is the older form rather than a Thai contraction of Lavapura. Old Khmer epigraphy writes the name with the two consonants in cluster, Lvo in the 1022 inscription of Suryavarman I at Lopburi and Lvodayapura under Jayavarman VII. Khmer scribes trained in Sanskrit, he argued, would not have reduced Lavapura to Lvo had the Indic form been the original. He connected the element instead to a Mon–Khmer word for hill or mountain, comparing the ethnonyms ละว้า (Lawa) and ลัวะ (Lawuea) and the Lao place-name ละแว (Lawae). On his reading the Sanskritised Lavapura, and the modern ลพบุรี (Lopburi) formed from it, are later back-formations made once the town had been drawn into the cult of Rama, whose son was Lava. Pali chronicles of the north adopt the Sanskritised form uniformly. Gordon Luce had argued along similar lines that the Lawa once held much of central Thailand as far south as Lopburi, on a proposed link between the seventh-century Lavapuri and the ethnonym Lawa.
Northern texts, among them the Jinakalamali, the Northern Chronicle and the Kalyani inscriptions, call Lavo Kamboja (กัมโพช). Sujit Wongthes argued in 1983 that the name there denotes Lavo and a group of towns linked to it, among them Sukhothai, Sawankhalok, Phichai and Thung Yang, rather than Cambodia. Reading it as Cambodia had, in his view, led historians to treat Lavo as a Khmer dependency.
Phiset Chiajanpong proposed that Lopburi is the town recorded as Dvāravatī, on the strength of its Dvaravati remains and of a long tradition making it a gathering place of relics. He cites Sukhothai inscription 2, which has Phra Maha Thera Si Sattha rebuild a ruined great relic monument standing in the middle of a city of Lord Kṛṣṇa, a restoration it places in the 14th or 15th century. He cites also the Royal Autograph Chronicle, which under 1777 calls Lawo, that is Lopburi, a gathering place of relics standing in the middle of the Thai land. Walailak Songsiri rejects any such identification, holding that the name covers the whole set of polities of the plain and that no single town can stand for it.
Mon-speaking populations had been established in what is now Thailand for centuries. Between the 6th and 9th centuries a Theravada Buddhist culture associated with them developed in central and northeastern Thailand. The Mon Buddhist kingdoms that rose in the central plain of Thailand and in what is now Laos were collectively called Dvaravati.
Conflict between the Dvaravati and Qian monarchies is traced to the 6th century. Siddhijaya Brahmadeva of Manohana, commonly identified with Ayojjhapura and further equated with Si Thep, the principal centre of Qiān Zhī Fú, relocated westward in 590 to establish his authority in the western Menam Valley, in the vicinity of modern Nakhon Pathom. This brought him into conflict with the Brahmanical leadership under Kakabhadra, who had ruled the polity since 569.
In 629 Kakabhadra's son Kalavarnadisharaja commissioned Brahmans to build a new settlement in the eastern valley, south of Si Thep. Following Kakabhadra's death, Kalavarnadisharaja succeeded to power at Nakhon Pathom in 641. He then reduced Tou Yuan (Si Mahosot) to vassal status in 647. In 648, he transferred the political centre to the newly founded settlement, later known as Lavapura, and formally proclaimed the establishment of the Lavo Kingdom. Some sources put the foundation a century earlier, in 538. Tradition credits him with hegemony over all the major polities of the Menam valley.
No source records a direct war between Lavo and Si Thep in this phase. The Jinakalamali instead describes hostilities between Si Thep and Dvaravati's Nakhon Pathom, held after Kalavarnadisharaja's departure by Anuruddha. In it Dvaravati forces capture the Si Thep king Manohanaraj and carry him off, after which a puppet monarch was installed at Si Thep.
The Northern Thai Chronicles give the founding from another tradition. In them Lavo is founded by Kalavarnadisharaja, who came from Takkasila in 648, a year after Dvaravati made Tou Yuan its vassal. He was a son of Kakabhadra, king of Takkasila, a city assumed to be Nakhon Chai Si of Kamalanka, who set the Chula Sakarat era in 638, which the Siamese and Burmese kept until the 19th century.
Stone inscriptions in ancient Mon script from northern and central Thailand indicate that the Lavo and Haripuñjaya mandalas were probably populated by the same group, the "Mon" or another Austroasiatic-speaking people. Dynastic ties kept the two on good terms for the first 300 years.
The only native language attested in early Lavo is Old Mon. The migration of the Tai peoples into the Chao Phraya valley is thought to have taken place during the kingdom's lifetime.
Theravada Buddhism remained prominent in Lavo, though Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism from the Khmer Empire were also influential. Baker and Pasuk caution that the vocabulary of sectarian affiliation, the term Theravada among it, is a modern coinage, and that the Chinese monk Yijing found in the late 7th century that Hinayana and Mahayana approaches were practised in a mixed way in the region.
Around the late 7th century Lavo expanded to the north. The Northern Thai Chronicles, among them the Cāmadevivaṃsa, make Camadevi, first ruler of Haripuñjaya, a daughter of a Lavo king. Late in the century the Legend of the Arhat (ตำนานนิทานพระอรหันต์) has Balidhiraja, eldest son of Kalavarnadisharaja and ruler of Sukhothai, march south into the western valley and depose its ruler, while Balidhiraja's elder son Balipatijaya took Lavo about 700.
Little is recorded of how the kingdom worked, and most of what is known comes from archaeology. Local rulership at Lavapura is attested by a Sanskrit inscription on the lotus base of a standing stone Buddha, recovered in 1924 from a mound at the north-eastern corner of the perimeter wall of Wat Mahathat (LB 5; K.577). It records that Nāyaka Ārjava, chief of the people of Taṅgura and son of the Lord of Śāmbuka, erected the image. Cœdès connected Śāmbuka with the Śamvūkapaṭṭana of the Preah Khan inscription (K.908), in a string of towns answering to Lopburi, Suphan Buri, Ratchaburi, Sing Buri and Phetchaburi. Baker and Pasuk give the six as Lavodayapura (Lopburi), Svarnapura (Suphanburi), Sambūkapura, which they place tentatively at Ban Pong, Jaya-Rājapuri (Ratchaburi), Jaya-Simhapuri (Mueang Sing) and Jaya-Vajrapuri (Phetchaburi or Kamphaeng Phet), six of the twenty-five cities to which the image was sent. Their reading of the third name differs from Cœdès's in form and in place, and they put the fifth at Mueang Sing rather than Sing Buri.
Isanavarman I (r. 616–637) of Chenla extended Khmer influence into the Menam valley by marriage and by campaign in the 7th century, but exercised no political control there.
During the Sui period (581–618), two sister kingdoms, Zhū Jiāng, identified as a Dvaravati-influenced polity, and Cān Bàn, made royal intermarriages with Chenla. They then fought several wars against Dvaravati Tou Yuan to the northwest. Tou Yuan later became a vassal of Dvaravati in 647, and known as Lavo in 648. The warfare between Chenla and Dvaravati continued into the Tang period, drawing in Qiān Zhī Fú, Xiū Luó Fēn and Gān Bì. The New Book of Tang groups the three as alike in customs and credits 20,000 warriors each to the first two, 40,000 to the pair, and 5,000 to Gān Bì. Some of these battles may belong to the wars between Lavo and the neighbouring Mon kingdom of Haripuñjaya in the early 10th century.
Tatsuo Hoshino makes the connection from the Chinese side. He identifies the Qian Tuo Huan that fought Chenla in the New Book of Tang with the Tuo Huan the same work lists among Dvaravati's vassals, and both with pre-Khmer Lopburi. Many wars were fought between Chenla and Lopburi in the Tang period, and some of them, he suggests, may be the conflicts between Lopburi and Haripuñjaya recorded in the Jinakalamali, the Munlasatsana and the Chamadevivamsa. He also observes that the Tang sources name Chenla's wars with Huan Wang before those with Lopburi, and reads that order as implying the eastern front was the graver of the two.
In addition to Lavo, Chenla also encountered Línyì to the northeast. Through royal connections, Cān Bàn thereafter became a complete vassal of Chenla, until its disintegration in the late 7th century, after which it came under Wen Dan. The Chenla power struggle that led to the kingdom's dissolution also diminished its power in the Menam Valley.
The Ban Wang Pai inscription (K. 978), found in Phetchabun province, names a Bhavavarman as the son of a king of Si Thep. Some scholars have suggested he is Bhavavarman II rather than Bhavavarman I (r. 580–598), on letter forms that may put the inscription after 627.
Modern Thai historians hold that the Tai peoples originated in northern Vietnam and Guangxi province in China. Tai speakers were living in northern mainland Southeast Asia by the 8th century. Five linguistic groups emerged. The northern Tai in China (ancestors of Zhuang); the upland Tai people in northern Vietnam (ancestors of the Black, White and Red Tai); the Tais in northeastern Laos and bordering Vietnam (ancestors of the Tai of Siang Khwang and the Siamese in Ayutthaya); the Tai in northern Laos; and the Tai west of Luang Prabang, northern Thailand and in the adjoining parts of Laos, Yunnan and Burma.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Lavo Kingdom”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.