The Sukhothai Period

Sukhothai, one of the most remarkable architectural sites in the whole world is hidden away in the middle of Thailand !.

Some 300kms(180 miles) north of Bangkok in amongst the orchards and paddy-fields, in the heavily forested flat-lands that spread across the valleys of the parallel rivers flowing down from the northern mountains near the Chinese border, where the Mekong River also rises.

Behind a screen of mango's and coconut palms,the tall towers, the domes with their pointed steeples and the giant statues emerge proudly from the tangled undergrowth clinging to their base and almost smothering dozens of smaller monuments.

This is all that is left of a once formidable city, and the buildings still standing, apart from the ramparts and the ruins of the moats, are all shrines, temples and monasteries, though the men who built the city, and made their own dwellings out of mud and wood, had wanted to leave only the testimonies of their spiritual quest to posterity.


Sukhothai -"the dawn of happiness", is the name of this city, which between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries was the capital and whose history sums up the beginnings of the Thai nation.

A Kingdom and a dynasty were founded here in the middle of the thirteenth century, and the Thais gradually brought under their sway the whole of the land that has remained theirs, from Burma to Cambodia and, to the south, down as far as the Malay Peninsula.

For 200 years Sukhothai was the moving spirit behind this development. Its decline came about only in the first half of the fifteenth century, when a new capital farther south, Ayuthaya, was set up and became the new political centre, asserting its authority over all the cities in the new state.

The first Thai princes no doubt brought with them the Mongol hierarchical organization of society, for theirs was divided into warriors, commoners and serfs.

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