Dvaravati, the ‘First Mon Kingdom’ of the Central Plain: Rulers, Figures and Neighbours (6th–11th Century)

It left no certain capital, no king list and no chronicle of its own. Yet Dvaravati is the name engraved, in the 7th century, on silver medallions found in the oldest Buddhist cities of the Chao Phraya plain. From Nakhon Pathom to U Thong and Si Thep, inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2023, archaeology traces a group of cities open to the Indian Ocean and linked to pre-Angkorian Cambodia, to the Pyu of Burma and to the northern valleys. Here is a portrait of the few figures we can name: a nameless king, an enigmatic Harṣavarman, a legendary queen. And of the neighbours alongside whom this Mon world took shape, and then faded away.

A king without a name, engraved in silver

In 1943, at Noen Hin, not far from the Phra Prathon Chedi in Nakhon Pathom, a terracotta jar was unearthed. A chedi is a reliquary monument in the form of a dome or tower. The jar held silver coins stamped with a conch and silver medallions. On the reverse, one shows a cow with her calf, another a flowering vase. The other face bears a short Sanskrit formula: śrīdvāravatīśvarapuṇya. It is engraved in the 7th-century Pallava script, an alphabet of South Indian origin. George Cœdès translated it in 1963 as ‘meritorious work of the king of Dvāravatī’. The discovery was not published until 1964, by J. J. Boeles, more than twenty years after the find.

This, then, is where the name of an entire civilisation comes from. It does not come from a chronicle, but from an object tied to religious merit (puṇya), a central notion in Buddhism. In Sanskrit, dvāravatī means ‘she who has gates’. Yet the first ruler associated with this name remains anonymous: a ‘king of Dvāravatī’ who had his title engraved without revealing his identity.

This faceless king left a geographical imprint. Medallions bearing the same formula have been found at several points across the plain:

• at In Buri (Sing Buri), Khu Bua (Ratchaburi) and U Thong (Suphan Buri);
• at Ban Khu Mueang, some 150 km north of Nakhon Pathom;
• at Dong Khon (Sankhaburi, Chai Nat).

These last two finds were recorded by Ronachai Krisadaolarn in 2016. The only medallions recovered in a controlled excavation came to light in 1997 at U Thong: three examples in a jar, at Monument 7 of Khok Chang Din. From the shores of the gulf to the middle reaches of the Chao Phraya, then, a single royal title was in circulation. What this distribution means politically remains to be determined.

The testimony of the Chinese pilgrims

The name also appears in 7th-century Chinese sources. The monk Xuanzang travelled in India from 629 to 644. In 646 he completed an account placing the country of ‘Duoluobodi’ between Śrīkṣetra, the Pyu city of Burma, to the west, and Īśānapura, in Cambodia, to the east. The monk Yijing (635–713) uses the same form. Chinese texts know other transcriptions too: Duheluobodi, Duoheluo, Duheluo, Tuhuoluo.

Nicolas Revire proposes reading Duoluobodi as Dvārapati, ‘the lord of Dvāra[vatī]’. The travellers would then have recorded the ruler’s title rather than the name of the country. This reading chimes with the vocabulary of the medallions: in both cases, it is the royal figure who gives his name to the whole.

Dvaravati also sent embassies to the Tang court, but their number is debated. Philippe Beaujard counts two, in 638 and 649. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, like Stephen Murphy following Robert Brown, count three, with an additional mission in 640. The question remains open.

Kingdom, network of cities or shared culture?

The phrase ‘first Mon kingdom of the central plain’ is convenient, but it is contested. Depending on the author, Dvaravati has been described as:

• a unified kingdom;
• a group of regional cities or a chiefdom;
• a mandala, that is, a political model in which the authority of a centre radiates, in fluctuating fashion, over tributary cities;
• a network of equal cities;
• or simply a shared artistic and religious tradition.

The Thai archaeologist Phuthorn Bhumadhon points out that the medallions attest to the occupation of the central plain. On their own, they do not prove the existence of a kingdom.

Where was the capital?

Nakhon Pathom is often presented as the capital or cultural centre of Dvaravati. It has the greatest concentration of monuments: Phra Pathom Chedi, Phra Prathon Chedi, Chula Prathon Chedi, Wat Phra Men, Wat Phra Ngam, Wat Dhammasala. But the royal copper plate found at U Thong suggests that it, too, was at least at one point a seat of power. Lavo, present-day Lopburi, for its part gained importance in the late phase. Rather than a fixed capital, we should perhaps imagine successive or rival centres.

When does Dvaravati begin and end?

The boundaries vary from one author to another:

• 6th–10th century for UNESCO;
• 7th–10th century for Robert Brown;
• around 600–1000 for Ian Glover.

Glover speaks of a ‘Dvaravati gap’: the continuity between regional prehistory and these cities is poorly documented. Other authors extend the period into the 11th or even the 12th century, and distinguish an earlier ‘proto-Dvaravati’. Radiocarbon dates from U Thong, cited by Charles Higham, place the emergence of complex societies around 300–600. Stephen Murphy points out that the period was first defined by an artistic style. Its limits are therefore those of the style, even when excavations suggest revising them.

Mon, and which Buddhism?

The inscriptions are written in Pali, Old Mon and Sanskrit. In 1977, Piriya Krairiksh suggested speaking of a ‘Mon style’ rather than a ‘Dvāravatī style’. Peter Skilling, for his part, asks that we always specify what the word ‘Mon’ covers.

Religion was no more uniform. On the basis of the Pali inscriptions, Cœdès saw a predominant Theravāda Buddhism. But the cave of Khao Thamorrat, near Si Thep, housed a Mahāyāna Buddhist monastery. U Thong has yielded an ekamukhaliṅga, an emblem of the god Śiva adorned with a face, which attests to a Brahmanical cult.

The rulers glimpsed through the inscriptions

Harṣavarman, the enigma of the U Thong plate

In the moat at U Thong, a copper plate engraved in Sanskrit was found (catalogued as K.964); it is now in the U Thong National Museum. According to the reading reported by Charles Higham, it refers to ‘Śrī Harṣavarman, grandson of Īśānavarman’, who, ‘having extended the sphere of his glory, obtained the lion throne by regular succession’. It also mentions gifts made to a liṅga, an emblem of Śiva.

Its dating remains disputed. Higham places it in the mid-7th century. Other authors propose a range from the 6th to the mid-7th century. The Bangkok Post, for its part, suggests the 8th–9th centuries for this 28 × 42 cm plate bearing six lines in Pallava script.

The king’s identity is just as divisive:

• Jean Boisselier saw him as a king of Dvaravati;
• George Cœdès thought the plate came from Khmer territory and referred to a Khmer king;
• Michael Vickery proposed a different lineage.

A chronological objection rules out the most obvious hypothesis. Harṣavarman I of Angkor reigned from 910 to 923, and his grandfather was Indravarman I, not Īśānavarman.

If the ancestor named is indeed Īśānavarman I, ruler of pre-Angkorian Zhenla in the 7th century, the plate bears witness to dynastic alliances between the central plain and Cambodia. Nicolas Revire develops this reading, but the thesis has yet to be confirmed.

A daughter of the ‘lord of Dvāravatī’ on the Khorat Plateau

An inscription on a statue from Wat Chan Thuek (Pak Chong, Nakhon Ratchasima) mentions a queen, ‘daughter of the lord of Dvāravatī’. Revire notes in it the expression dvāravatipateḥ, which in his view supports the Dvārapati reading of the Chinese pilgrims. Above all, it is direct evidence of a marriage alliance between the elites of the plain and those of the Khorat Plateau, to the north-east. The princess is anonymous, but she embodies a diplomacy by marriage that linked Dvaravati to its eastern neighbours.

The names in the Chinese annals

The Chinese sources provide a few names, of low reliability. According to the Tongdian, the king of ‘Tou-he’, identified with Dvaravati, was called Qi-zhang-mo. A king of ‘Tou-he-luo’, Pu-xie-qi-yao, is said to have sent an embassy during the Zhenguan era (627–649). Whether this is the same person is unknown.

Some authors link these names to ‘Shridravya’ and ‘Kalavarnadisharaja’, rulers from popular tales. These figures belong to legendary tradition, not to established history.

The Cefu Yuangui also mentions a principality, Tou Yuan, which is said to have sent embassies in 643 and 647. Tatsuo Hoshino places it at Lopburi, Piriya Krairiksh at Si Mahosot. The idea that it became a vassal of Dvaravati is unverified. At any rate, these mentions suggest that several entities in the region dealt separately with China.

Cāmadevī: from Lavo to Hariphunchai, between chronicle and history

The most famous figure associated with the world of Dvaravati appears in no inscription from the plain. Cāmadevī (Chamathewi) is known from northern chronicles written long after the events: the Cāmadevivaṃsa, the Jinakālamālī and the Singhanavati.

According to tradition, several hermits, among them Vāsudeva (Suthep) and Sukkadanta, founded the city of Hariphunchai, present-day Lamphun, in the Ping valley. They are said to have given it a conch-shaped plan. They then asked the Mon king of Lavo to send his daughter to rule there. Cāmadevī fought the Lawa, the indigenous people of the region, then married her two sons to the daughters of the defeated chief. Tradition gives as her successors her son Hanayos (Mahantayasa), followed by Kumanjaraj, Rudantra and Sonamanjusaka. A popular version makes her a girl from Lamphun carried off by a giant bird: here we are firmly in the realm of legend.

The chronicles’ dates are unsettled. They place the foundation between 629 and 657, and Cāmadevī’s reign in 662–669, 662–679 or 659–688 depending on the version. Scholars generally consider these dates too early and suggest instead the mid-8th century, around 750; this point remains to be confirmed.

Beyond the narrative, the tradition says something important. For the northern literati, the Mon Buddhist culture of their region came from Lavo, and thus from the central plain. The founding queen symbolises this expansion towards the northern valleys. The motif of her sons marrying the Lawa chief’s daughters conveys, in narrative form, an integration of local populations rather than their mere erasure.

A crossroads between Cambodia, Burma and the Indian Ocean

From Funan to Zhenla

Cœdès had Dvaravati emerging from the break-up of Funan, the power of the Mekong delta. Dynastic links going back to the Funan period have also been proposed.

For the 7th–8th centuries, Revire challenges the model of a Buddhist Dvaravati opposed to a Hindu Zhenla. He describes instead a ‘transregional ritual complex’. His arguments are the K.964 plate from U Thong and the K.1155 inscription from Ban Phan Dung (Nakhon Ratchasima), held in the Mahaviravong National Museum. In this reading, Dvaravati developed in dialogue with pre-Angkorian Cambodia, not in opposition to it.

The Pyu of Śrīkṣetra

To the west, Xuanzang placed Śrīkṣetra, the great Pyu city on the Irrawaddy. According to Peter Skilling (2005), the Pyu and Dvaravati often engraved the same Pali texts, a sign of close religious ties. Artistic parallels were noted by Gordon Luce as early as 1965, and later by Robert Brown in 2001. The two worlds shared a common Buddhist culture, grounded in canonical texts in Pali.

Ports, passes and caravans

Dvaravati also looked towards the sea. Caravans linked the Andaman coast, near present-day Dawei, to the central plain by way of mountain passes and rivers. At Nakhon Pathom, a terracotta seal depicting a sailing ship bears the Prakrit word Varapata(na), ‘excellent port’. U Thong, enclosed by a moat measuring 1,690 × 840 m, has yielded:

• Tang-period Chinese ceramics;
• glazed ceramics from the Persian Gulf;
• Abbasid coins;
• glass beads from India, the Middle East and China.

These objects place the cities of the plain within the great trade of the Indian Ocean, at the very time when the Tang were opening up their maritime routes.

Śrīvijaya, a parallel rather than a partner

On the peninsula, the so-called Śrīvijaya art is classified as a parallel artistic period (5th–10th century). None of the sources gathered here attests to direct political relations with Dvaravati. On this point, a gap must be acknowledged.

The end of a world and the reshaping of the plain

The end of Dvaravati has no date. Art historians follow the period with a ‘Lopburi period’, defined as a phase of Khmer domination. The annexation of Lavo by Angkor is commonly placed in the 11th century, but exactly how and when it unfolded remains to be established. To the west, Burmese tradition records the capture of the Mon city of Thaton by Anawrahta of Pagan in the mid-11th century. Its effects on the Mon of the central plain are not documented here. The Mon world thus found itself caught between two expanding powers.

Power then fragmented among regional centres. An entity that Chinese sources call Chên Li Fu, sometimes identified with ‘Suvarnapura’, sent embassies to China in 1200, 1202 and 1205. According to the Thai historian Srisakra Vallibhotama, the population of these cities was mixed. It combined a Mon-Khmer substratum, temple servants of Tai origin and Chinese. What we see here is not an abrupt break but the slow reshaping from which the Tai kingdoms of the plain would later emerge.

To speak of ‘Siam’ for these centuries would be anachronistic. The cities of Dvaravati are not the direct ancestors of a nation-state. They form one of the foundations, religious, urban and artistic, on which other powers were built.

Those who brought Dvaravati into being

Dvaravati is also a scholarly construction, and its modern ‘characters’ matter almost as much as its kings.

• Prince Damrong proposed in 1919 to locate ‘Suphannaphum’ at U Thong. In doing so, he incorporated the pre-Tai past into a history of the country.
• Pierre Dupont excavated Wat Phra Men and Chula Prathon at Nakhon Pathom in 1939–1940, with the Fine Arts Department. From this work came L’archéologie mône de Dvāravatī (1959).
• Jean Boisselier dated the first phase of Chula Prathon to the 7th–8th centuries.
• George Cœdès translated the medallions and set out the framework of a Dvaravati born of Funan and dominated by Theravāda.

In their wake, Dhida Saraya published Sri Dvaravati: The Initial Phase of Siam’s History in 1999. The title neatly captures what is at stake in writing this past into a national narrative. In 1996, Robert L. Brown devoted a study to the wheels of the Law (dhammacakra), emblems of the Buddha’s teaching. Peter Skilling, Piriya Krairiksh, Ian Glover, Stephen Murphy and Nicolas Revire subsequently dismantled the image of a homogeneous kingdom.

On 19 September 2023, the World Heritage Committee, meeting in Riyadh for its extended 45th session, inscribed ‘The Ancient Town of Si Thep and its Associated Dvaravati Monuments’. It is the seventh Thai site to be inscribed. The property comprises three components:

• the twin town of Si Thep, with its inner town (Muang Nai) and outer town (Muang Nok), both surrounded by moats;
• Khao Klang Nok, the largest surviving Dvaravati monument;
• the cave of Khao Thamorrat.

More than 112 monastic sites have been identified there. UNESCO recognises a ‘Si Thep School of Art’, which went on to influence other civilisations in the region. It also uses the word ‘empire’, which many scholars would consider excessive.

Perhaps this is the best summary of Dvaravati. A nameless king, a princess married on the Khorat Plateau, a Harṣavarman claimed by both the plain and Cambodia, a queen whom the chronicle turned into a founder: the figures are few and uncertain. The networks, by contrast, are tangible. They run through Chinese pilgrims, Abbasid merchants, Pyu monks and Khmer elites. Dvaravati is best understood not as a kingdom with clear borders, but as the moment when the central plain entered, for good, the Buddhist and Indian worlds and the trade of Asia.

Sources and further reading

1. Thailand NOW, See the Ancient City of Nakhon Pathom through the San Somdet, Thailand NOW (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Thailand), n.d..
2. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, The Ancient Town of Si Thep and its Associated Dvaravati Monuments, UNESCO, 2023.
3. Excavation of a Pre-Dvāravatī Site at Hor-Ek in Ancient Nakhon Pathom, Journal of the Siam Society.
4. Collectif ; Anna Bennett, Defining Dvāravatī (dont Anna Bennett, Precious Metals in Dvāravatī Culture), DASTA / Buddhadasa Indapanno Archives.
5. Nicolas Revire, Dvāravatī and Zhenla in the seventh to eighth centuries: A transregional ritual complex, via Scribd / ResearchGate.
6. Nicolas Revire, Pierre Dupont's L'archéologie mône de Dvāravatī and Its English Translation, Journal of the Siam Society, vol. 99, 2011.
7. Collectif (R. L. Brown, P. Skilling, S. A. Murphy et al.), Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014.
8. Philippe Beaujard, The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, ch. 1 : Tang China and the Rise of the Silk Roads, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
9. Ian Glover, The Dvaravati Gap – Linking Prehistory and History in Early Thailand, Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.
10. Article sur les relations artistiques Pyu, Môn et Dvāravatī, Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association.
11. Reliving ancient civilisation, Bangkok Post.
12. Bernama, Thailand's Ancient Town Of Si Thep Added To Unesco World Heritage List, Bernama, 2023.
13. Si Thep Historical Park Now a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site, SEAArch – Southeast Asian Archaeology, 2023.
14. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Dvaravati, Wikipedia.
15. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Mueang Uthong, Wikipedia.
16. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Suvarnapura Kingdom, Wikipedia.
17. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Shridravya, Wikipedia.
18. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Tou Yuan, Wikipedia.
19. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Cāmadevivaṃsa, Wikipedia.
20. Haripuñjaya, Reference.org.
21. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Sudeva, Wikipedia.
22. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Dvaravati art, Wikipedia.
23. Teaching & Learning Guide for: Buddhism and Thai Art, Religion Compass (Wiley), 2010.