Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom
former nation in present-day Thailand
The Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom (Thai: อาณาจักรนครศรีธรรมราช RTGS: Anachak Nakhon Si Thammarat), Nagara Sri Dharmaraja or the Kingdom of Ligor, was one of the major constituent city states (mueang) of the Siamese kingdoms of Sukhothai and later Ayutthaya and controlled a sizeable part of the Malay Peninsula. Its capital was the eponymous city of Nakhon Si Thammarat in what is now Southern Thailand.
History
Before the Sukhothai period
Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit report that around ninety sites with Brahmanical material, including elaborate hilltop temple complexes, have been found on the east coast around Nakhon Si Thammarat, dating from the 5th century CE onwards. From the 12th century the city stood on a religious network as well. The unification of the monkhood under the Mahavihara at Anuradhapura linked Sri Lanka over the 12th and 13th centuries to Buddhist communities at Arakan, Thaton, Pagan, Martaban, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Sukhothai, Chiang Mai and Ayutthaya. David K. Wyatt describes the direction of that traffic as changing over the same centuries. In the 11th century men from Martaban and Nakhon Si Thammarat went to Sri Lanka to live there; by the 12th and 13th they went for what they could carry home, and what they brought back was a more exacting Theravada that required monks to read the canon in Pali. From the 1290s the sources connect the Buddhism of the north with Nakhon Si Thammarat and Sri Lanka, on a route running from Sukhothai through Suphanburi to Phetchaburi and Nakhon Si Thammarat, then overland to Trang and by sea to Sri Lanka.
Chinese works of the 12th and 13th centuries describe a polity in this region under the name Deng liu mei (登流眉). The Lingwai Daida of 1178 singles out its aromatics as the finest of any land overseas and states that the agarwood for which Zhenla was known came from there, while the Zhu Fan Zhi of 1225 places it west of Zhenla and counts it among Zhenla's dependent states (屬國).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom” as former nation in present-day Thailand. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as former nation in present-day Thailand. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1483643. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1178 and 1225.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nakhon Si Thammarat Kingdom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.