Xiān (), rendered in Thai as Siam (), is the name by which Chinese and Vietnamese records of the 12th to 14th centuries designated one or more polities in the lower Chao Phraya basin. Rather than a single centralised kingdom, Yoneo Ishii proposed that Chinese usage covered several maritime-oriented port polities around the present Bay of Bangkok, naming Ayodhya, Suphan Buri and probably Ligor. Phrip Phri sent embassies to the Yuan court in its own name, and Nakhon Si Thammarat was reckoned as Siamese from the late 13th century. These polities emerged on the western Chao Phraya plain after the decline of Dvaravati in the 11th century and are treated as successors of Qiān Zhī Fú at Si Thep and related states.
The identification of Xiān has been interpreted in different ways. Earlier scholarship equated the term with the Sukhothai Kingdom, an equation questioned since 1989 on the grounds that Chinese records list Xiān and Sukhothai separately. Some scholars instead identify the Xiān of the Chinese and Đại Việt records with Ayodhya, the later capital of the Lavo Kingdom, while others read it as a collective designation for several Siamese polities rather than any one of them.
Xiān entered into union with Lavo in 1351, an event associated with the founding of the Ayutthaya Kingdom with its seat at Ayutthaya. Phrip Phri was reduced to a frontier town governed from Suphan Buri, which was itself absorbed into Ayutthaya in 1438, while Nakhon Si Thammarat retained vassal status through the Ayutthaya and Thonburi periods, with brief intervals of independence, until it was reduced to a province of Rattanakosin in 1782.
Name and terminology
The origin of the name Siam remains disputed. Its earliest form, syam, appears in Pre-Angkorian inscriptions of the 7th century, most probably as a toponym denoting a locality in the lower Chao Phraya basin.
Syam in Khmer and Cham inscriptions
During the period of intensified contact between Chenla and Dvaravati polities, including warfare and dynastic alliances under Isanavarman I and Bhavavarman II, syam appears four times in references to female slaves (ku syam: K. 557, dated 611 CE; K. 127, 683 CE; K. 154, 685 CE; and K. 904, 713 CE) and once in the name of a landholding official (pon syam) who endowed a temple with rice fields (K. 79, 639 CE). In K. 127, the entry preceding syam occupies the same syntactic position and reads vrau. Jenner takes vrau to refer to an ethnolinguistic minority, possibly ancestral to the modern Bru or Brau. On this parallel, syam may likewise have been a toponym extended to the people of the area. The term disappears from the inscriptions after the disintegration of Chenla in the 8th century.
The term recurs in a slave list in the Cham Po Nagar Inscription at Nha Trang, dated to 1050. Around the mid-12th century, it is found on a bas-relief at Angkor Wat depicting mercenaries of the Angkorian army labelled syam-kuk, perhaps meaning "of the land of Siam". The ethnolinguistic affiliation of these troops cannot be established with certainty, although many scholars have identified them as Siamese. A later occurrence is found in the Cham inscription C.30 B1 at Po Nagar, dated to 1233/34 CE. In the slave lists of this kind Arlo Griffiths renders the term Siamese. He sets the name in a table of the peoples attested in two or more of the Khmer, Cam and Javanese corpora, in which every other name answers to a polity known from elsewhere.
Syam in the inscriptions of Pagan
From about 1120 onwards, syam occurs more than twenty times in Old Mon and Burmese inscriptions at Pagan. One instance attaches to Saṁbyaṅ, an Old Mon title for a senior official, but the term appears chiefly in lists of temple slaves of both sexes. Some Syaṁ are distinguished by occupation, as dancers, weavers or carpenters.
Syam in Old Javanese sources
Canto 15.1 of the Old Javanese Deśawarṇana, better known as the Nagarakertagama, names the Siamese of Ayodhya, together with Dharmanagari, Marutma, Rajapura, Singhanagari, Champa, Cambodia and Annam, among the constant friends of the Javanese court. Theodore Pigeaud read syangkayodhyapura ... dharmanagari as three names, Syangka for Siam, Ayodhyapura for Ayutthaya and Dharmanagari for Ligor, and took syangka to be the Syam of the mid-11th-century Cham inscription and of the 13th-century Khmer inscriptions, with the Sanskrit suffix -ka. Stuart Robson instead separated syangka from ayodhyapura, reading the first as the people or the country as a whole and the second as a particular place, and restored syangka before dharmanagari, where the conjunctive kimuta stands in its place. Ishii took Robson's reading to show that Xiān could cover Ayodhya and Ligor alike.
Chinese, Vietnamese and Pali forms
Chinese sources render the name as Xiān (); after the union with Lavo the compound Xiānluó hú () appears, later shortened to Xiānluó (). An earlier form, San-lo (), recorded in the Lingwai Daida of 1178, is held to be an early attempt to transcribe the name of the country or people of the upper and central Chao Phraya, which Khmer inscriptions called Syam.
Vietnamese sources write the name with the same graph, rendered in Vietnamese as Xiêm and in its extended form as Xiêm La, which remained the usual Vietnamese name for Siam into the modern period. The Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư uses the compound in its entries for 1149, 1182, 1241 and 1360, and the phrase ("people of Xiān") in the entry for 1313. The record of tribute presented during the Ai Lao campaign of 1335 has "country of Xiān" ().
In the Jinakalamali, a Pali chronicle of the northern Thai principality of Lan Na, the forms siam-desa and siam-rattha denote the "region (desa)" or "state (rattha)" of Siam; one passage identifies this with the Sukhothai region.
Identification and historiography
Prince Damrong proposed in 1914 a unilinear scheme of Thai history in which the history of the Thais in Siam proper began with the founding of the Sukhothai Kingdom in 1238, succeeded in turn by Ayutthaya, Thonburi and Rattanakosin. The scheme became standard in Thai school textbooks. For the period before Ayutthaya, Damrong relied on the Chinese dynastic annals, which Khun Chenchin'aksorn (Sudchai) translated for him and which he published as phak 5 of the Prachum Phongsawadan. His other body of evidence was the Sukhothai inscriptions, edited by Cœdès in 1924. The identification of as Sukhothai was the translator's, and Cœdès accepted it and carried it into his The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. On this model, Xiān in Chinese records was taken to mean Sukhothai.
The equation was contested in 1989 by Yamamoto Tatsuro, who found in the Dade Nanhai-zhi (1297–1307) the entry and took for the Yuán Shǐ transcription of Sukhothai. A name standing as the object of , "control", cannot denote the same place as its subject , so Xiān was a polity politically superior to Sukhothai rather than Sukhothai itself. The decisive evidence is that Chinese records of 1297 and 1299 list Xiān and Sù gǔ chí (, Sukhothai) as separate tributaries, which indicates that the lower Chao Phraya basin then held at least three distinct polities: Lavo, Sukhothai and Xiān. Subsequent studies have accordingly rejected the proposition that Sukhothai was the first independent Siamese polity.
Beyond this negative conclusion there is no settled positive identification. Yoneo Ishii treated Xiān as a confederation of port polities on the Bay of Bangkok, whereas Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit identify the Xiān of the Chinese and Vietnamese records with Ayodhya, the relocated capital of Lavo, since the Chinese court used the same name for Ayutthaya afterwards. They rest the case on two features of the record, that the court listed Xiān among maritime kingdoms and that the Dade Nanhai-zhi has Xiān controlling Sukhothai, and allow that the Chinese may first have used the name for somewhere else. Other proposals point to Suphannabhum, on the strength of Hongwu-era tribute missions sent in the name of the king of Su-men-bang (), identified with Suphanburi. Baker and Pasuk report a separate Suphan Buri proposal, resting on other grounds, and reject it as unevidenced. Charnvit Kasetsiri, reported by Vickery, takes the 14th-century Chinese Xiān to name the lower Menam basin as a whole, Ayutthaya included, rather than Sukhothai.
Ishii's own ground is the variety in the names under which tribute arrived, the same series being recorded from the country of Xiānluó hú, from its king, from its crown prince, and from the crown prince as king of Su-men-bang. He drew a parallel from Sumio Fukami, who argued that Chinese Sanfoqi () may have covered either one port polity of the Strait of Malacca or all of them together. Ishii concluded that a Chinese name for a "barbarian country" need not denote a single place.
Attestations in Chinese and Vietnamese records
Tribute brought a local ruler access to trade with China together with political recognition. The court had operated the system from 240 CE, and between 600 and 850 it received 110 missions from thirty-four named places in Southeast Asia, half of which sent only one.
Possible early references
Two earlier notices have been connected to the region, though neither uses the name Xiān.
During the early Tang dynasty a polity called Xiū Luó Fēn, said to lie west of Chenla, sent tribute to the Chinese court. It is described as commanding large forces and as having customs broadly similar to those of Gē Luó Shě Fēn, which Thai scholars have identified either with Dvaravati-period Nakhon Pathom or with Sambuka of the Bhavavarman II inscription.
The San-lo () of the Lingwai Daida (1178) has been read by Thai scholars as a reference to the new centre of Chaliang at Sawankhalok.
A much later text, the of 1583, asserts retrospectively that the kingdom to which the Sui dynasty sent an embassy between about 605 and 618 — Chi Tu — had by then already been renamed Xiān. Written nearly a millennium after the events it describes, the passage is of limited evidentiary value, but it is notable for pairing Xiān and Lavo in the same contrast of terrain that appears in earlier sources:
Xiān in Yuan-period records
Xiān first appears in the Yuán Shǐ () under 1278, when the Yuan dynasty dispatched He Zi-zhi (), a commander of ten thousand households, as envoy to Xiān; the mission was detained by Champa. The Yuán Shǐ records that the party never arrived: it was seized while passing Champa, and He Zi-zhi, Huang Fu-jian and more than a hundred companions were put to death there early in 1283. The same source preserves the deliberation that preceded the mission, in which the minister Jia-lu Na-da-si argued that these were small countries whose conquest would bring little advantage and that envoys should be sent before any resort to arms. Ishii gives the year of the dispatch as 1282 rather than 1278, and, following E. Thadeus Flood, treats the deliberation as undated and falling between those two years. Xiān appears on the list of territories Kublai Khan intended to subdue after the completion of the Mongol conquest of China in 1279, together with Lavo and polities of the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, South India and Ceylon.