Chên Li Fu () was a short-lived polity on the northern shore of the Gulf of Siam, west of Chenla, known almost entirely from Chinese records of the years around 1200. It has been located in the Phraek Si Racha–Suphan Buri region of present-day Central Thailand, with a sphere of influence across the western Chao Phraya basin reaching as far south as the modern provinces of Phetchaburi and Prachuap Khiri Khan, bordering Po-Ssu-lan (modern Chanthaburi) to the south-east and Tambralinga to the south.
The polity emerged from the political fragmentation that followed the decline of Dvaravati, when authority in the Menam valley passed to a series of competing regional centres. Chinese sources record embassies from Chên Li Fu in 1200, 1202 and 1205, after which the name disappears from the record, a disappearance that coincides with the accession of Uthong II at Ayodhya in the same year.
Two questions dominate the scholarship. The first is where the polity lay. Proposals have ranged from the eastern gulf coast to U Thong, to Suphan Buri and, most recently, to Phraek Si Racha. The second is its relationship to Angkor: O. W. Wolters treated it as an Angkorian vassal that broke away around 1200, whereas Walailak Songsiri holds that it stood outside Angkorian political authority, its rulers' Khmer titles and Indic names having been adopted for prestige in dealings with the Chinese court.
Name
The name is known from its Chinese transcription (Zhēn Lǐ Fù; conventionally romanised in the older literature as Chên Li Fu). No indigenous form is attested, and the identification of the underlying toponym remains part of the localization debate. G. E. Gerini derived it from Candanapura (Chanthabun), while proponents of a western-basin location have sought its centre at sites identified with Suvarṇapura, a toponym of the Preah Khan inscription. Wolters observed that the final syllable renders -pura or -puri, a common element in Chinese transcriptions of Southeast Asian place names of the period, but proposed no derivation for Chen-li.
Chinese records style its rulers Zhǔ (, "chief") rather than Wáng (, "king"), and the regnal names preserved incorporate the Khmer title Kamrateng. The second of the two, transcribed Se-li-Mo-hsi-t'o-pa-lo-hung, was first read as Sri Mahendravarman; Cœdès proposed Mahīdhara instead, on the ground that 13th-century inscriptions use that element more often, and the form Mahīdhāravarman follows his suggestion.
Localization
Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit place the polity in the upper gulf and some way up a river, but leave it unidentified, and report without comment a proposal that it may be Suphan Buri.
Eastern gulf hypotheses
Wolters considered that Chên Li Fu might have lain on the eastern coast of the Gulf of Siam in the Chanthabun area, in the Mae Klong valley, or across both. Gerini argued on phonological grounds that the name rendered Candanapura or Chanthabun, an identification accepted by Friedrich Hirth, W. W. Rockhill and L. P. Briggs, while George Cœdès placed it more cautiously on the Gulf of Siam. Briggs's own ground was a bearing in Ma Tuan-lin, who puts Chên Li Fu on the south-western frontier of Chenla, bounded on the south-east by Po-ssu-lan and on the south-west by Teng-liu-mei, which Briggs identified with Tambralinga. Since in his view neither the Menam valley nor any part of the peninsula belonged to Cambodia at that date, the bearing left the Chanthabun region. Wolters himself rejected the Chanthabun identification. He reasoned that the short distance between Chanthabun and Yaśodharapura, the Angkorian capital in present-day Cambodia, made Angkorian loss of control there improbable, and proposed that Chanthabun corresponded instead to Po-Ssu-lan, the south-eastern neighbour of Chên Li Fu. David K. Wyatt drew the western conclusion from the same material. Setting Wolters's finding that the polity held both a port and an inland capital beside the reconstruction of the ancient shoreline by Phōngsi Wanasin and Thiwa Supcanya, which shows numerous old towns on the western fringe of the plain and few on the eastern, and beside Wolters's own note that early Chinese navigators rarely called on the eastern coast of the Bay of Bangkok, he suggested that Chên Li Fu should be looked for as a state centred on Ratchaburi, Nakhon Chai Si or even Suphan Buri. A Song miscellany, the Yunlu Manchao (), bears on the same question from another direction. In listing the countries whose trading vessels the maritime commissioner of Fujian visited, it names Zhenla (, Chenla) and adds that it also went by the name Zhenlifu ().
U Thong
Wolters located the centre of the polity at U Thong. On that identification, archaeological evidence from the site would imply an existence reaching back to about 300–600 CE. Paul Wheatley, however, identified U Thong instead with the city-state of Chin Lin, which King Fan Man of Funan is reported to have attempted to annex in the 4th century.
Three lines of evidence weigh against the U Thong hypothesis. The Northern Chronicle records that U Thong and Suphan Buri were in this period ruled by monarchs affiliated with the earlier Dvaravati polity at Nakhon Pathom. Archaeological survey around U Thong indicates a low settlement density in the relevant period, in sharp contrast to the prosperity Chinese sources attribute to Chên Li Fu, and the site appears to have been abandoned around the 12th century. A copper plate from U Thong dated to the 6th to mid-7th centuries names a King Harshavarman, whom Jean Boisselier took for a Dvaravati ruler and Cœdès for a Khmer king whose plate had been carried to the site; neither attribution sits easily with the dating, since Harshavarman I of Angkor reigned from 910 to 923.
Suphan Buri
The abandonment of U Thong has been explained by a shift in the river, which cut the site off from easy access to the gulf, and on that reading its people may have moved some 30 kilometres north-east to Suphan Buri. Baker and Pasuk read the plan of Suphan Buri as a hybrid, a site in a river bend with a major forest temple outside the walls in the manner of the older towns, but with a strictly rectangular moat of 1.9 by 0.7 kilometres in place of the usual conch shape and a relic stupa at the centre in Angkorian style. Both wall and stupa may date to the 12th century, the period in which Chên Li Fu is recorded.
Earlier scholarship proposed a centre near Nong Chaeng village in Sra Krachom subdistrict (), Don Chedi, Suphan Buri province, on the strength of the substantial remains of a large rectangular moated city there, tentatively identified with Suvarṇapura of the Preah Khan inscription. An alternative places Suvarṇapura at the Nern Thang Phra archaeological site (), some 20 kilometres north-east of Nong Chaeng.
Other writers equate Chên Li Fu with Suphannabhum directly. That equation conflicts with the Northern Chronicle, which places Suphannabhum under a different line of rulers in the same period, specifically Uthong I, who is said to have taken its vacant throne in 1163.
Phraek Si Racha
Walailak Songsiri and place the centre of Chên Li Fu at Phraek Si Racha, with subsidiary regional centres including Suphan Buri. Srisakra traced the route inland from the Chao Phraya mouth, through the channels that preceded the Bangkok and Ko Kret shortcut canals, past Khlong Bang Khwai and Khlong Bang Toei near Sam Khok, and up the Noi River to Phraek Si Racha. This localization sets the polity within the same framework as the early Siamese polities described in the Ayutthaya Testimonies, in particular Indaprasthanagara, whose material there spans the 9th to 12th centuries.
Walailak qualifies the identification. Of the small towns running from Phraek Si Racha south to the Suphan and Tha Wa rivers, Phraek Si Racha is the only one that does not continue from the Dvaravati period, and excavation has not settled whether its occupation begins under the Southern Song or under the Yuan. Its rampart and moat are larger than those of the older square towns nearby. She accounts for this by proposing that the seat of the confederation moved out of the smaller inland waterways onto the larger river.
Mueang Sawan Thewalok The mentions a city called Mueang Sawan Thewalok (), where Phra Phanom Thale Sri and his younger brother Uthong I settled after moving south from Mueang Chaliang around the mid-1150s. Around the 1160s, U Thong I was given the vacant throne of a city to the south of Mueang Sawan Thewalok, generally identified as Suphan Buri. Phanom Thale Sri, identified as Intharacha () in the Ayutthaya Testimonies, later succeeded his relatives as ruler of Mueang Sing and moved farther south to reconstruct Phrip Phri in the 1170s and 1180s, respectively. The chronicle says that the two brothers were followed from Mueang Chaliang by a large following of as many as 54,000 people. The group therefore appears to have remained at Mueang Sawan Thewalok for roughly 15–20 years before continuing south. At Phrip Phri, Phra Phanom Thale Sri was succeeded by his son, Uthong II, who later moved to a seat in the north, whose location remains uncertain, before moving southwest to Ayodhya.
The Menam valley after Dvaravati
The 12th and 13th centuries formed a transitional phase after the decline of Dvaravati, marked by political fragmentation and competition among newly emergent centres in the Menam and Mae Klong basins, several of which later developed into historically attested Siamese states. The former supra-regional centres lost much of their earlier standing: Si Thep remained under Angkorian authority but declined in political and economic weight and is generally taken to have been abandoned by about the 13th century, while Nakhon Pathom and its associated site of Khu Bua appear to have been substantially depopulated as authority shifted toward the Mae Klong basin at modern Ratchaburi and Mueang Sa Kosi Narai ().
The two sites mentioned aboved have been identified respectively with Jaya Rajapuri and Sambukapattana of the Preah Khan inscription (K. 904), and both show clear Angkorian cultural influence, as does nearby Pong Tuek. New sites appeared at the same time along the Suphan-Thachin and Mae Klong rivers carrying features of Angkorian town planning, among them roughly square plans aligned to the compass, a central monument, a surrounding moat or earthwork, ponds or baray outside it, and dykes thrown across the slope to catch run-off for irrigation. The two river systems differ in their material. The Mae Klong ruins are mainly laterite and have yielded images of the radiating Avalokiteśvara and other traces of Bayon-style Mahāyāna work, while those on the Tha Chin are mainly brick and have yielded Buddha images under the nāga. Baker and Pasuk read that contrast as a sign of two groups of migrants from the Khmer country rather than one.
Within this configuration the principal power of the western valleys appears to have been centred at Mueang Sing, in the present-day Mueang Sing Historical Park, while authority in the eastern plain rested at Lopburi, which alternated between Angkorian control and periods of local autonomy. Both are identified in the Preah Khan inscription as Sri Jayasimhapuri and Lavodayapura respectively. The inscription names six cities of the plain in all, which Baker and Pasuk give as Lavodayapura, Svarnapura, Sambūkapura, Jaya-Rājapuri, Jaya-Simhapuri and Jaya-Vajrapuri. They gloss these in turn as Lopburi, Suphan Buri, possibly Ban Pong, Ratchaburi, Mueang Sing, and either Phetchaburi or Kamphaeng Phet. Their placing of the Sambūka name therefore differs from its identification with Mueang Sa Kosi Narai, and the last of the six they leave unresolved.