Nakhon Ratchasima (, ; , ), often called Khorat or Korat (, ; , ), is one of Thailand's seventy-six provinces (changwat) and lies in lower northeastern Thailand also called Isan. At it is the country's second largest province by area, with a population of about 2.6 million. It generates about 250 billion baht in GDP, the highest in Isan. Neighbouring provinces are (clockwise, from north) Chaiyaphum, Khon Kaen, Buriram, Sa Kaeo, Prachinburi, Nakhon Nayok, Saraburi, and Lopburi.
The capital of the province is the city of Nakhon Ratchasima in Mueang Nakhon Ratchasima district, also called Khorat.
The upper Mun valley has been settled since the Neolithic, and moated towns, Sanskrit and Khmer inscriptions and the temples at Phimai and Phanom Wan mark its early historic and Angkorian periods. Little evidence survives from the centuries after about 1300. The written record resumes about 1600, when Khorat was fortified and became the provincial centre for the parts of the plateau under Thai control.
Geography
The province is at the west end of the Khorat Plateau, separated from the Chao Phraya river valley by the Phetchabun and Dong Phaya Yen mountain ranges. Two national parks are in the province: Khao Yai in the west and Thap Lan in the south. Both parks are in the forested mountains of the Sankamphaeng Range, the southern prolongation of the Dong Phaya Yen mountains. The total forest area is or 15.4 percent of provincial area.
Nakhon Ratchasima is a large province on the northeastern plateau. It is from Bangkok and has an area of .
National parks The province's two national parks, with two others, make up region 1 (Prachinburi) of Thailand's protected areas. (Visitors in fiscal year 2024) Thap Lan National Park (96,852) Khao Yai National Park (1,887,335)
History
Prehistory Settlement sequence and burial wealth Two excavated prehistoric sites lie in the upper Mun valley in Non Sung district. Iron Age deposits have also been found under later temples elsewhere in the province. An Iron Age cemetery lies beneath the main sanctuary at Prasat Phanom Wan, on the same orientation as the temple. At Ban Suai, outside Phimai, excavation found a major Iron Age presence running into the foundation of the brick temple. The final Iron Age phase of the valley is dated to the 4th and 5th centuries CE.
At Ban Non Wat, excavation found a Neolithic settlement founded in the mid-17th century BCE, where foragers met farmers who already grew rice. Stone for adzes was not available nearby, which implies exchange. Spindle whorls point to weaving. The late Neolithic is given as ending about 1280 BCE, the Bronze Age as 1280 to 400 BCE and the Iron Age as 400 BCE to about 300 CE. Elsewhere the region's transition to bronze is dated to the 11th century BCE.
Grave goods were richest between about 1000 and 800 BCE. Wealth then fell away and did not recover until about 200 BCE. The accumulation has been attributed to an emerging social hierarchy, but not the decline. Trade and climate beyond the region have been suggested, offered as speculation for want of temperature series and tree-ring studies. Lead isotopes in slag and cast metal at the site indicate copper from the Khao Wong Prachan valley in central Thailand by about 1000 BCE. At Noen U-Loke, also in Non Sung, occupation began in the late Bronze Age and ended between 400 and 500 CE. One man was buried wearing 150 bronze bangles, bronze toe and finger rings, three bronze belts and ear coils of silver covered in gold.
Moats, salt and the chiefdom question The moated sites of northeastern Thailand have been plotted against rainfall and soil permeability. Most lie where rainfall is lowest and where soils lose least water to seepage. This is read as evidence that the moats stored water through a drier phase between about 200 BCE and 500 CE. Control of water in such conditions could give local elites a means of holding power. The digging of moats and banks in the valley is dated to at least the 4th century BCE, and their maintenance through the Iron Age. The valley lies in a double rain shadow, from the Phetchabun Range to the west and the Truong Son Cordillera to the east. The moats have been read as serving several purposes at once, among them rice cultivation, a supply of fish and shellfish, and defence. Iron arrowheads and spears become commoner in the later phases. One man at Noen U-Loke was killed by an arrow that severed his spinal column. A reconstruction of the river pattern places the settlements on watercourses, some of which have since shifted.
Most, perhaps all, of the prehistoric mounds of the upper Mun are ringed by small steep-sided satellite mounds. Excavation of these yields the equipment of salt boiling, with pottery of Iron Age date. Salt has been treated as the local resource that could be traded for the glass, agate, carnelian and metals the graves contain. Pollen studies on the upper Mun floodplain are read as showing clearance from the early Iron Age, with forest regeneration at first. By the late Iron Age, about 500 to 600 CE, there was none, and grass and scrub replaced the forest.
The moated settlements and their distribution had been read as marking chiefdoms in late prehistory or the early historic period. Against this, no central places such as citadels have been found, and the low level of archaeological work does not rule them out. The reservation has been put more strongly elsewhere. Much more must be known before it can be concluded that hereditary chiefs lived in central places and controlled lesser sites around them. If they existed, they have not yet been found.
Early historic period Social organisation and political form The social ranks of the early historic period in the Mun valley have been traced back to the Late Iron Age. The account turns on an agricultural revolution of ploughing and permanent, perhaps irrigated, rice fields by the 5th century CE, which underwrote a rapid rise of local elites. Iron working and the control of salt are given as further factors, and these leaders are taken to be the poñ named in pre-Angkorian inscriptions.
A survey of the upper Mun gives a different emphasis. It finds that the valley between the 1st and 9th centuries did not sustain unified polities of the size then forming in central Thailand and in Zhenla. Settlements grew and consolidated in the Late Iron Age, but it sees little evidence of the reorganisation that multi-tiered rule on Indic models would require. Communities, on that reading, kept a village and kinship focus well into the historic period. Buddhism and Brahmanism were taken up by about the 6th or 7th century. It holds that the valley came under a single polity only in the 9th or 10th, a change it ascribes to Angkorian expansion to the northwest.
A survey of the Khmer-period landscape describes what preceded it. Before the region was integrated into the Khmer state, large settlements ringed by circular or irregular earth walls and moats stood across the Phimai region. These have been read as the probable centers of small political units. Most people lived in cluster villages of 1 to 15 ha, some moated and most not, with their rice fields lying beyond the moats. The few inscriptions available have been read as making it likely that the valley's early historic inhabitants spoke Khmer or a related language, and that they shared beliefs and traditions with the Khmer in Cambodia.
Mueang Sema The moated town of , on the Lam Ta Khong in the Mun system in Sung Noen district, covers over 150 ha. Its excavator divided the occupation into three phases. The first, of the 4th and 5th centuries, is classified as late prehistoric. The second, of the 6th to 9th, is taken as Dvaravati on the pottery and on clear evidence for Buddhism. In the third, of the 9th to 12th, Buriram ceramics and Song dynasty ware mark growing Khmer influence.
The first of those labels has been disputed. A ridge ware from the earliest layers also occurs in two layers at Chan Sen, where it develops into a common Dvaravati type. A second earthenware group of the Pasak region appears at Chan Sen in a layer dated to the mid-4th to 6th century. The site has no earlier prehistoric levels at all, which on that reading makes late prehistory the wrong term here and proto-Dvaravati the better one.
The finds from the town include a dhammacakra and a sandstone Buddha in the mahāparinirvāṇa posture 11 metres long. Its sema stones are another matter. Seventeen are recorded, none of them carrying narrative scenes or motifs, and all are either badly eroded or plain, which does not match the size and standing of the site. Some remain in place around a Dvaravati structure that may have been an ordination hall. The dhammacakra is the only one known from the whole of the Khorat Plateau, against more than forty recorded in central Thailand. It has been held that apart from Mueang Sema it is hard to make a case for a strong or meaningful political presence of Dvaravati overlords on the plateau.
A survey describes villages ringing the town, each centred on a temple. They held Dvaravati Buddha images and Lopburi-style door posts, and alignments of standing stones lie at Ban Hin Tang. An earthen dam across the Huai Krok Chanuan and a set of canals were read as irrigation works. The reclining Buddha was put at up to 12 metres, with a view reported that it was first a standing image that later fell.
Religion and patronage A small bronze standing Buddha found at Nakhon Ratchasima has been read as a southeastern Indian or Ceylonese Amaravati or Anuradhapura style of 100 to 400 AD. Such isolated sculptures are portable, which makes their interpretation problematic. Silver images of the Buddha, Avalokitesvara and two goddesses were found at Khon Buri and at the nearby moated site of Ban Fai. Some bronzes of the hoard found at Prakhon Chai in Buriram province resemble them.
The Wat Chan Thuek inscription, from Pak Chong, names a devī of the ruler of Dvāravatī and is the only stone inscription to do so. The stone is dated to the 7th century. How it should be read is disputed. One reading makes the queen and the daughter two people and another makes them one. The image set up has also been read as the goddess Śrī rather than the Buddha.
Religious foundations in the province between the 8th and the 10th century are recorded on three stones. K. 1155, found at Ban Phan Dung, opens with a salutation to Śiva. It records that a certain Śrīvatsa installed images of Harihara and Viṣṇu in 718 śaka (796 CE), the earliest mention of Harihara in the epigraphy of Thailand. The stone is now in the Mahaviravong National Museum. The same stone later records a hermitage and an image of the Buddha in 747 śaka (825 CE). K. 1141, the Mueang Sema inscription of 892 śaka (970 CE), retells that sequence and carries it further. The Buddha image was replaced by a Devī set up by the Brahmin Śrī Śikharasvāmī, and the Devī in turn by a large Śiva-liṅga raised by an unnamed king in 761 śaka (839 CE). The two stones have been taken to refer to a single sacred site, named Damraṅ in the Khmer portion of K. 1141.
The Phimai National Museum also holds an inscribed stone found in Kaset Sombun district in Chaiyaphum province. It is in Sanskrit written in Khmer script and mentions a Buddha image set up inside a boundary marked by sema stones.
The Bo Ika inscription (K. 400), also from the area of Mueang Sema, carries a donation by the śrīcanāśeśvara, the lord of Canāśa, to the local Buddhist community on one face. The other face is dated 790 śaka (868 CE), invokes Śiva as the supreme deity, and records the installation of a golden liṅga by one Aṁśadeva. The group has been read as showing Hindu images installed both before and after a Buddha, with nothing to mark either as the superior.