Picture courtesy of Patrick Jennings
Click on the picture for a larger view.
In 1238 AD the Mongol Horde was advancing into Europe; that year they took Kiev. In England a group of barons rebelled against Henry III's corrupt court; Louis IX was beginning to unite the feudal lords under his reign in France and thinking about leading a sixth crusade into the Holy Land. Thomas Aquinas had only just begun his efforts to reconcile reason and revelation. And Europe's Gothic art was, well, Gothic. No one in Europe yet knew that Black Death would soon take a quarter of that continent's population. And the Crusades had passed their glory days and shrunk into a stalemate. Europe still awaited the cultural rebirth of the renaissance.
But in Thailand it was the Golden Age, the "Dawn of Happiness". For 1238 was the year that Sukothai, the first truly free Thai state, threw off the shackles of Khmer rule and founded a kingdom which Thais today look back on as their political and national beginnings. Today's Thai citizens associate with Sukothai all of the emotions and nationalistic fervor that Americans associate with the Boston Tea Party, or the French with the storming of the Bastille.
Picture courtesy of Patrick Jennings
Click on the picture for a larger view.
Sukothai, though, was more than just a tea party. It was to Thailand what classical Greece was to Europe. From its independence of Khmer rule in 1238 until 1378, when Ayutthaya's King Borommaracha I captured Sukhothai's frontier city of Chakangrao (modern Kamphaengphet), and in so doing made Sukhothai a tributary to Ayutthaya, the Sukothai kingdom was the seat of Thai art and culture, the place where history originated and then rippled outward for the Thai people.
A visit to Thailand is not complete without an exploration of the historical park of the ancient capital of Sukothai.
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