The Si Satchanalai Historical Park () is a historical park in Si Satchanalai district, Sukhothai Province, northern Thailand. The park covers the ruins of Si Satchanalai and Chaliang. Si Satchanalai, whose name literally means "City of good people", is traditionally said to have been founded in 1250 as the second centre of the Sukhothai Kingdom. It was a residence of the crown prince in the 13th and 14th centuries. Michael Vickery instead placed the Si Satchanalai of the inscriptions at a separate site to the south. Chaliang, on a bend of the Yom, is the older of the two towns. The city passed between Lan Na and Ayutthaya in the 15th century and was destroyed by a Burmese army in 1766.
The walled town is roughly rectangular, with a narrow walled corridor running east along the river to Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat. Its laterite wall, with a moat outside it, has been dated to the 14th century from the flood deposit beneath it and to the 16th century or later from the gun ports in its parapet. The wall was still defended in the late 16th century, when Burmese attacks were growing. Two neighbouring hills dominate the site. The park is maintained by the Fine Arts Department of Thailand with help from UNESCO, which has declared it a World Heritage Site together with the associated historic parks in Kamphaengphet and Sukhothai. Like Sukhothai Historical Park, it draws thousands of visitors each year to its Buddha images, palace buildings and ruined temples, and it can be toured by bicycle or on foot.
History
Chaliang before Si Satchanalai
The older of the two towns in the park is Chaliang (), on a bend of the Yom River. Tai settlement of the upper Chao Phraya valley preceded it, and in the chronicle traditions that Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit summarise one stream of that settlement branches south from the Mekong down the Ing, founds Phayao and then moves on to Chaliang. The town grew into a trading centre and was referred to as an independent polity, Chéng Liáng, in the Chinese Song Shi for 1001.
Angkorian-style building reached the area in the same centuries. Baker and Pasuk place Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai, on the river systems running north, among the Angkor-influenced settlements that appeared in frontier areas around the Chao Phraya plain, alongside Mueang Sing on the Three Pagodas Pass route to the west. They add that this spread of Angkorian styles has sometimes been read as waves of conquest. How far Angkorian authority actually reached is disputed. They find no administrative trace of it west of the Khmer country. The plain has yielded none of the temple-endowment inscriptions characteristic of Angkorian provinces, and Jayavarman VII's hospital foundations reach no further west than Prachin Buri in eastern Thailand, which they take to show cultural influence rather than administration.
Sri Naw Nam Thum ruled Chaliang together with Sukhothai in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, and lost the towns about 1180 to Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong. Pho Khun Bang Klang Hao and Pho Khun Pha Mueang took them back in 1239.
The event is read in two ways. In the account of Griswold and Prasert na Nagara, Khom Sabat Khlon Lamphong was the commander of a Khmer garrison and 1238 the liberation of the two towns from Khmer suzerainty under a Tai dynasty. More recent work has withdrawn the supports for that reading. The etymological analysis finds no element of rank in the name, and the term Khom is not a reliable ethnic marker. In its place he is treated as a local figure who kept political affiliations with Lavo, itself under the influence of the Angkorian Mahidharapura line by the 1180s. Baker and Pasuk read the inscription as recording a victory by one local lord associated with Angkor over another holding a Khmer title, Pha Mueang the victor having himself received a title, a regalia sword and a princess in marriage from the ruler at Angkor.
Under Sukhothai
Under the reign of Sri Indraditya, in 1250 the new town was built in the western area of Chaliang and named Si Satchanalai. Sri Indraditya sent his son, Ban Mueang, as crown prince to govern the town. When Ban Mueang ruled the kingdom, he gave his brother Ramkhamhaeng control of the town of Si Satchanalai, and it became a Sukhothai Kingdom's royal succession tradition to have a crown prince or heir of the throne to rule Si Satchanalai. The town had been granted the status of princely city () or inner provincial city () for its strategic location to the defense of kingdom capital in the northern direction, similar to Kamphaeng Phet in the west, Pitsanulok in the east, and Old Phichit in the south. There was a direct road from Sukhothai to Si Satchanalai called Phra Ruang Road (). In 1345 Luethai wrote one of the greatest works in Thai literature, Traibhumikatha or Traiphum Phra Ruang () in Si Satchanalai.
Baker and Pasuk place that residence in the early 1340s and describe it as given over to religious study and patronage. On their account the monk brought a relic to Si Satchanalai at Luethai's invitation and placed it in Wat Mahathat, where the two made offerings together and the relic was said to rise into the air and give off rays of six colours; the reigning king then sent for it to be carried to Sukhothai, where the chronicle records that it worked no miracle at all, because that city was not where it was to remain. In 1359 Luethai came to Wat Padaeng, a forest monastery at Si Satchanalai, to preside over its abbot's funeral and appoint the successor.
The stele of Ram Khamhaeng states a stupa was erected in the center of Si Satchanalai, that took six years to build.
Lanna invasion and Ayutthaya domination
After the death of Ramkhamhaeng, Sukhothai Kingdom's dominance was reduced periodically, but unlike Sukhothai which suffered from urban decline, Si Satchanalai was still able to maintain its trading and industrial roles. In 1451, Tilokarat of Chiangmai annexed Si Satchanalai to his Lanna Kingdom and renamed the city to Chiangcheun (). In 1474, Trailokkanat of Ayutthaya started the Ayutthaya-Lanna War and recaptured the city and renamed it Sawankhalok (). During the reign of Ramathibodi II, the story of war campaigns between Tilokarat and Trailokkanat on Si Satchanalai inspired an unknown poet to write Lilit Yuan Phai (), which is considered one of the best poems of the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Si Satchanalai became the thriving center of porcelain production for the Ayutthayan court to export to overseas countries such as Philippines, Japan and Indonesia. This prosperous period started in the 13th century and continued until the 16th century. The city reached its pinnacle of economic and cultural development in the 14th century. In 1766 as part of Burmese–Siamese War (1765–67), the Burmese army from Lampang attacked Si Satchanalai and destroyed the city. After the war, the city was rebuilt in the new area of present-day Sawankhalok and the old city was abandoned.
Later development
In 1907 Vajiravudh as a crown prince, made a two-month archaeological field trip to Nakhon Sawan, Kamphaeng Phet, Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai, Uttaradit and Pitsanulok. After returning to Bangkok, he published "Phra Ruang City Journey" (; ) to promote historical and archaeological study among the general public. The work has been used as structure by later archaeologists and historians including Damrong Rajanubhab, the founder of the modern Thai education system and George Coedès, a 20th-century scholar of southeast Asian archaeology and history. As part of this trip Vajiravudh found beautiful relics of Buddha image's head, a hand and feet in Si Satchanalai and brought them back to Bangkok. In 1911 he rebuilt the Buddha image which was finished in 1913. This 7.20 meters high standing Buddha image was named Phra Ruang Rojanarit Sri Indraditya Dhammobhas Mahavajiravudh Pujaneeya Bophitr () and installed in the front of Phra Pathommachedi in Nakhon Pathom.
Bhumibol and Sirikit, king and queen of Thailand, visited old Si Satchanalai, Chaliang and Sawankhalok in 1958. The protection of the area was first announced in Volume 92, Part 112 of the Royal Gazette on August 2, 1961. In 1976 the restoration project was approved, and in July 1988 the park was officially opened. On December 12, 1991, it was declared a World Heritage Site as part of the Historic Town of Sukhothai and Associated Historic Towns together with the associated historical parks in Kamphaeng Phet and Sukhothai.
Town plan and setting
The town wall forms a rough rectangle round the monuments at Kaeng Luang, the rapids where the Yom crosses a ridge of hills. It continues east in a narrow corridor along the river and encloses Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat on three sides. Michael Vickery treated the walled area and the temples at the bend as one settlement, which he called Chaliang–Sawankhalok, and placed the Si Satchanalai of the inscriptions at a deserted site about 20 km to the south. Before the wall was built, on his reading, the town was the whole plain ringed by the hills and the river, with earthen embankments closing the gaps between the western hills. It was built of laterite blocks about 45 × 25 × 12 cm, in bonded work about 2.8 m wide, and stood 4 to 6 m high with its breastworks. Square openings about 20 cm across in the parapet may have been gun ports. Vickery, who first noticed them in 1986, took them for gun ports and dated the wall to the 16th century or later. Paul Bishop and colleagues report the Fine Arts Department's 1989 excavation of the wall east of Kaeng Luang. There the wall stood directly on a flood deposit about 2 m below the present surface, with a mean calibrated radiocarbon age in the 14th century, and they date the wall to that century. A Fine Arts Department plaque near the Ramnarong Gate reports a major battle at the town in the late 16th century. They take it to show that the wall served in defence for at least two to three centuries. Outside the north wall, Khlong Nong Kham, an old channel of the Yom, served as a moat. Vickery held that the Yom had shifted its course a good deal and had once run somewhat further north.
Floods from the Yom have repeatedly entered the town. At Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat, flood deposits interbedded with occupation layers are 4 to 5 m thick, and they have partly buried both the older Khmer-style buildings and those of the Sukhothai period. Floods broke the wall at the Donlaem Gate, where it was repaired with material salvaged from buildings, and much of the river wall shows flood damage and repair with reused blocks, brick and rock. Three drains were later cut through the wall to empty the town of water, which the authors date to after the wall had ceased to serve in defence. No historical record of these floods is known, and the authors suggest that the town tolerated them. They find it difficult to attribute the town's decline to flooding. During the 2011 Thailand floods, flood water from the Yom River entered Si Satchanalai Historical Park and inundated two historical pottery kilns.
Vickery distinguished two orientations among the monuments. The large hill temples and many small image-house shrines, inside and outside the western walls, follow a west–east axis along the ridge. Wat Chang Lom, Wat Chedi Chet Thaeo, Wat Uthayan Yai and Wat Nang Paya follow a north–south axis parallel to the river. Small shrines also stand north of the wall, at Wat Kuti Rai and at Ban Ko Noi, where Zig Kapelis excavated eight of ten mounds in 1985. Vickery read them either as images worshipped as gods or as neighbourhood wats.
Main sights
Wat Phra Si Ratana Mahathat