Sukhothai Kingdom

The Sukhothai Kingdom was the first verifiable Siamese kingdom of mainland Southeast Asia, centred on the old city of Sukhothai in today's north-central Thailand, a market town on the routes between the Mon, the Tai and the Xian peoples that had grown into a city-state by 1127. The events of 1238, which brought Si Inthrathit to power, are traditionally taken as the kingdom's formation, though historians read them as a contest of local lords drawing on Khmer titles rather than a simple liberation from Angkor. Sukhothai stayed a separate polity until 1438, when it passed under Ayutthaya at the death of Borommapan. It is traditionally given its greatest reach under Ram Khamhaeng the Great, credited with bringing in Theravada Buddhism and the first Thai script, and with opening relations with Yuan China that taught the kingdom to make and export sangkhalok ceramics; later work reads his claims as a web of alliances rather than direct rule, but the kingdom's pull on Thai painting, sculpture and building, and on the spread of the Tai down the Menam, is undisputed. In 1365 Sukhothai became an Ayutthayan vassal, and at its end its lands were folded into Ayutthaya's provinces.