Uthong I

Uthong I (), also called Uthong of Mueang Chaliang () and Soi La (), was a king of Xiān at Suphannaphum who took the vacant throne at Suphanburi in the 1190s. He was afterwards appointed by his elder brother Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri to rule either Singburi or Jayasimhapuri, when the elder brother left to rule Phrip Phri.

Records

The record of Uthong I is fragmentary and in places contradictory, which makes his role difficult to reconstruct. The Ayutthaya Testimonies identify him as the younger brother of Indraraja, equated with Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri, but the European and Thai sources diverge over his importance and his movements.

The two principal French accounts, Du Royaume de Siam and the Instructions Given to the Siamese Envoys Sent to Portugal of 1684, describe his brother as a prince from Tasoo Nacora Louang (or Yassouttora Nacoora Louang) who moved to Soucouttae (Sukhothai) and Locontàï (Nakhon Thai). Neither mentions Uthong I at all.

The , by contrast, treats him directly and places his origins at Mueang Chaliang. On that account he moved south with his elder brother in the mid-12th century, the elder taking either Singburi () or Jayasimhapuri () in 1169. The chronicle has Uthong I appointed to the throne of Suphannaphum in 1163, an arrangement the Ayutthaya Testimonies say was altered when Pra Poa Noome Thele Seri re-established his authority at Phrip Phri, at which point Uthong I was given Mueang Sing to govern as well.

End of reign

The close of his reign is not recorded. Thai scholars have proposed that he was succeeded by his nephew Uthong II, later a monarch of Ayodhya, which would place the end of his reign around 1204/05. The Northern Chronicle records that Uthong II entrusted three regional centres to his sons, and Suphannaphum is not among them, which has been read as indicating that the town had declined in importance by the early 13th century.

Later rulers at Suphannaphum

The seat appears to have stood vacant after Uthong I. The local legend of Saen Pom, dated to the second half of the 1220s, has him migrate south from the Tai polity of , in the upper valley under Sukhothai suzerainty, to Suphannaphum, where he took the empty throne. His son Uthong III succeeded him, founding the line later known as the Suphannaphum dynasty, which held the polity until the foundation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1351, when Uthong V married a Suphannaphum princess and absorbed it into his kingdom.

Khun Luang Pho Ngua has been identified as either the son or the son-in-law of Uthong III. He was later enthroned as Borommarachathirat I, third monarch of Ayutthaya and first of the Suphannaphum line, and is thought to have had ancestral ties to Sukhothai. Those ties are suggested by his marriage to a daughter of King Loe Thai of Sukhothai and by repeated intermarriage between his descendants and the Sukhothai house. Political dealings and architectural developments at Suphanburi during the Ayutthaya period point the same way, and the kinship between the two royal families may go back at least to the reign of Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai (r. 1279–1298).