Chaliang (, ) or Sawankhalok was a political entity in the upper Chao Phraya Valley in central Thailand. Whether it was also the Si Satchanalai of the Sukhothai inscriptions is disputed. Chronicle tradition dates its founding to the early 600s, and it lay within the Dvaravati cultural sphere. Chinese sources record it as Chéng Liáng in 1001. In the late 11th and 12th centuries its Mon–Tai rulers held the former Lavo capital at Lavapura for a time.
In the 12th and 13th centuries Tai rulers from the north took Chaliang and then Sukhothai, and after 1238 Chaliang and Sukhothai stood as twin capitals of the Sukhothai Kingdom. Chaliang lost its standing after Sukhothai became a vassal of Ayutthaya, and Lan Na took it in 1462.
Etymology The English term "Chaliang" is the romanization of the Thai word "" per the Royal Thai General System of Transcription. The Thai name has been read as a compound of the Sanskrit chala (), water, and the Old Mon wang, city, giving "city of water"; the Yom River almost surrounds the site. Michael Vickery, however, took the name, written jalya in the inscriptions and jalia in the chronicles, to come from a non-Thai language whose meaning is unknown. He noted the same element in place names south of Sukhothai and north-east of Kamphaeng Phet. The Ayutthaya chronicle of Luang Prasoet writes Salieng, which he took for a Lao or Isan pronunciation of the name. He read the name, with two Mon words for kiln and dish kept in the local ceramic industry, as a sign that the people of that industry were probably Mon.
History Formation The region has been inhabited since the Neolithic and Iron Ages. Agricultural communities formed in the early 4th century and complex societies by about the 9th. Artifacts found in Chaliang-Si Satchanalai show that the communities engaged in trade with several Dvaravati polities, such as in the southeast, and Mueang Fa Daet Song Yang and Ban Mueang Fai () in northeastern Thailand.
Chusak Satienpattanodom proposes two founding groups from the position of the burials. One, adapted to the floodplain, was buried at Wat Chom Chuen on the bend of the Yom River and influenced from the central plain. The other, adapted to higher ground, was buried at Wat Chang Lom and was possibly moving down from the north. He names no language or people for either. On the same bend, around Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat, Paul Bishop and colleagues found the lowest occupation layer, with inhumation burials, earthenware and ash, lying on sterile river sand and gravel. Three samples from it give a pooled radiocarbon age of 1259 ± 28 years BP, uncalibrated. Later levels carry stoneware and no burials, and the authors describe the locality as essentially continuously occupied for at least twelve centuries.
The Fine Arts Department, summarising its own excavations at Wat Chom Chuen, reports eighteen burials cut into sterile soil 50 to 100 cm below the occupation layer. The heads lay roughly west, the postures varied, and almost all the dead were bound at the ankles and knees. Ages at death run from 5 to 35 years, and the department notes an absence of dental caries and teeth filed and polished on the cutting and outer faces. It places the burial ground in the 11th to 16th Buddhist centuries, about the mid-5th to the mid-11th century. Grave goods include cylindrical terracotta bars of a type known from Dvaravati sites such as Mueang Phra Rot and Si Thep, and heat-treated carnelian beads, which the department reads as contact with India through coastal Dvaravati towns. Wesley Clarke's survey of Dvaravati burial sites gives different figures: fifteen burials at Wat Chom Chuen, of the 5th and 6th centuries, and nine at Chaliang, of the 7th to 9th.
According to the Northern Chronicle, Chaliang was founded in the early 600s by a hermit, Satchanalai (; or Anusit in the ). He united four surrounding chiefdoms and built moats and walls to define the city's boundaries.Northern Chronicle Its centre was Haritvanlee (). Chaliang's layout served as the model for Haripuñjaya, laid out by the hermit Suthep, which places its foundation before Haripuñjaya's in 629. Its earliest territory reached , also called , to the northeast, and Sukhothai to the south.
The tradition places Satchanalai within a group of five hermits, each credited with a part in the founding of early polities in what is now Thailand. Satchanalai, founder of Chaliang, who assisted Suthep at Haripuñjaya. Suthep, founder of Haripuñjaya, who sought the advice of the hermit Sukkatanta () in Lavo on the choice of its first ruler; Sukkatanta proposed the Lavo princess Camadevi. Sukkatanta, teacher of Camadevi. Phutthachatil ( or ), asked by Camadevi's son Anantayot () to build him a city; he declined and sent him to Suprom. Suprom (, , or ), who founded Lampang for Anantayot.
Early Tai city-state From the second half of the first millennium Tai speakers came to dominate the Yom and Nan valleys of what is now northern Thailand, and several independent Tai principalities emerged. Other groups in the area, among them Austroasiatic speakers, were taken captive and Tai-ised over time.
Chaliang was at first subordinate to Mon-ruled Sukhothai, itself a trading centre of the Lavo Kingdom. It opened relations with Tai Chiang Saen to the north in the late 10th century, when a daughter of King Supojarat married its ruler Sri Thammasokkarat, possibly Phrom, and their son was later enthroned at Chaliang. This marked the beginning of Tai influence over the Chao Phraya Valley. In the chronicle traditions that Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit summarise, one stream of Tai settlement branches south from the Mekong down the Ing River, founds Phayao and then moves on to Chaliang. The Chinese Song Shi, volume 489, records it as an independent polity centred on Chéng Liáng (程良) in the fourth year of the era, 1001. It lay 60 chéng (程) north of Tambralinga and met the Lavo Kingdom to the southeast.
The name San-lo (), which appears in the Lingwai Daida of 1178, and which Lawrence P. Briggs took for an early Chinese rendering of the name of the country or people of the upper and central Menam, was probably Chaliang. The Chinese were soon to call the region Xiān () and Xiānluó () in the 13th century. The Chinese dates agree with the archaeology, which shows continuous occupation from the prehistoric period into the Dvaravati period, when the region fell under Lavo influence.
To the southeast, Lavo's Lavapura met a succession of reverses, among them conquest by Tambralinga in 927/928 and nine years of Angkorian civil war, ending in the sack of Lavapura by Suryavarman I in 1002. These may account for the decline of Lavo's hold over the northern polities, Chaliang and Sukhothai among them.
Suphannabhum and Haripuñjaya together took Lavapura from Angkor in 1052 and the capital moved to Ayodhya in the 1080s. The chronicles ascribe the move to Lavo's king, Phra Narai. The seat at Lavapura then stood vacant from 1087 to 1106, until Kraisornrat (), king of Chaliang, took it. Chaliang thereby became in effect Lavapura's northern fortress, held by the crown prince. Santi Phakdeekham writes that Angkor moved to recover Lavapura in 1181, when Jayavarman VII appointed his kinsman Narupatidnavarman to govern it. Under that pressure the Tai ruler Sri Thammasokkarat (), also of Si Satchanalai, withdrew to Nakhon Si Thammarat. Lavapura was probably taken in the 13th century by a Tai prince from Phraek Si Racha (, present-day Sankhaburi). The Mon–Tai house of Chaliang also intermarried with the Siamese (Xiān) rulers of Ayodhya. Their descendants, later known as the Uthong (Lavo) dynasty, ruled Ayodhya until the traditional formation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1351.
The Pu Khun Chit Khun Jot Inscription () records a dynastic tie between and Chaliang, which later extended to Sukhothai. The Wat Phra That Chang Kham recension of the Nan Chronicle agrees.
Sukhothai period
In 1157/58, Chaliang was taken by a Tai ruler from Chawa (, Muang Sua) or the Nam Ou basin. His line is said to have extended its influence to Sukhothai in 1175. Nobles of the Lavo faction took Sukhothai in 1181, and the rulers of Mueang Rat and Mueang Bang Yang joined forces to take it back in 1238.
After Chaliang led by Sri Naw Nam Thum annexed Sukhothai in 1157, the seat moved there, and the Sukhothai Kingdom was established in 1238. Sri Naw Nam Thum is thought to have been a Tai noble from what is now Uttaradit province, in the Nan River basin north of Sukhothai.
Chusak reads the walled city as a foundation of the late 13th century, about 2 km upstream of the Chaliang centre. He attributes the move to the Yom cutting its bank, a growing population, and a better defensive position at Kaeng Luang. It was thereafter also called Sawankhalok or Si Satchanalai. Bishop and colleagues, from the river's deposits, held that the Yom has had roughly its present course past the site since its first settlement. They found the tradition of a change of course after the town's founding difficult to sustain. They also judged impossible Le May's statement of 1925 that Chaliang was the oldest settlement, before Si Satchanalai was founded and the river changed course. Floods, they note, came before, during and after the city's life, and the wall was built across the flood channels.
The Fine Arts Department describes the monuments of the 13th century at the bend as work in the Khmer Bayon manner: the gate tower of Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat Chaliang, a laterite core faced with stucco and carrying four faces which it surmises to be a bodhisattva, and the single tower of Wat Chao Chan, later converted to a Theravada temple. At Wat Chom Chuen a chedi was built over a structure resembling a Khmer prasat. White-glazed Southern Song wares from the Dehua kilns in Fujian, of the same century, were found outside the wall at Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat.
Sujit Wongthes placed the first community around Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat and Wat Chao Chan on the bend of the Yom. He read Si Satchanalai as its enlargement to the north-west, walled to enclose Khao Phanom Phloeng and Khao Suwannakhiri, and traced an earlier earthen wall running from south of Wat Chao Chan. The names themselves are disputed. Michael Vickery argued in 1990 that the temples at the bend and the walled area to the north formed a single settlement, which he called Chaliang–Sawankhalok. He read the inscriptions as naming Si Satchanalai as a place distinct from Chaliang. Inscription 10, of 1404, names Chaliang alone. He judged the most likely site of Si Satchanalai to be a group of deserted temples and old wells about 20 km to the south, near the Fa Kradan River. Bishop and colleagues reported his argument and left the question open.
Sukhothai's kings were at first reckoned rulers of Chaliang as well. That held until the death of Ram Khamhaeng in 1298, after which Sukhothai's authority weakened and its dependencies broke away; Chaliang went nearly 50 years without a ruler until Lithai was appointed in 1340.
Several Sukhothai inscriptions treat Si Satchanalai as the equal of Sukhothai, both being capitals of a Sukhothai–Si Satchanalai kingdom under one line of kings.
In the 14th century Sukhothai–Si Satchanalai expanded northward, destroying and annexing the Tai Yuan city-state of and deporting much of its population.
After Lithai's reign Sukhothai declined, and both towns became vassals of the Ayutthaya Kingdom. Legend has Khottrabong () appointed ruler. He was probably deposed in 1429 by a usurper, Saeng Hang ().
Ayutthaya period