Place · maritime kingdom · Thailand

Tambralinga / Nakhon Si Thammarat

Date

1025 CE

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

8.430, 99.960 (approximate)

Connections (3)

• Strait networkPalembang / Srivijaya

  Tambralinga, generally associated with Nakhon Si Thammarat on the peninsula, is another of the Tanjore inscription's named targets, and the campaign's places together span the Malay peninsula and Sumatra — the geography of the Srivijayan network rather than of a single state. Tambralinga later sent its own king, Chandrabhanu, to invade Sri Lanka twice in the thirteenth century, so the traffic across the Bay of Bengal ran in both directions.

• CampaignAnurādhapura

  Tambralinga on the peninsula is named in the Tanjore inscription as one of Rajendra's targets in 1025, and two centuries later its king Chandrabhanu invaded Sri Lanka twice, in 1247 and again in the 1260s, and held part of the north for a time. The Bay of Bengal was not a one-way street from India: a Malay peninsular polity mounted seaborne invasions of Anuradhapura's successor kingdoms.

• CampaignYapahuwa

  Chandrabhanu of Tambralinga invaded Sri Lanka in 1247 and again in the 1260s and held part of the northern peninsula for a time, and it is against that pressure that the Sinhala court moved to the rock at Yapahuwa and built a fortified capital with the Tooth Relic in it. A Malay peninsular polity named on Rajendra's conquest list two centuries earlier was now mounting its own seaborne invasions of Sri Lanka; a Pandya force from the mainland eventually killed him.

On these journeys

• Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya
• India and Southeast Asia — scripts, Sanskrit and sacred kingship
• The Indian Ocean World — the whole rim
• Texts that travel — translation and adaptation

Sources

Tanjore inscription; ISEAS, Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa

• Wikipedia