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Thailand - Suvarnabhumi

Suvarnabhumi, which means “The Land of Gold”, is an ancient term for Southeast Asia, found in early Buddhist and Hindu literature. There were also legends, religious accounts, and foreign traders’ written accounts dating to the first millennium AD that mentioned the name “Suvarnabhumi”. These accounts have convinced scholars that the Suvarnabhumi of the past is the Southeast Asia of the present.

The links between India and Thailand can be traced back to almost 2,000 years, when under the orders of King Asoka of India, Buddhist pilgrims travelled to Suvarnabhumi, the golden land, of which Thailand was a part, to disseminate the teachings of the Buddha. It would be wrong to think that religion alone contributed to the spread of Indian culture. Missionaries were backed by traders and conquerors. Trade evidently played an important part in establishing India's relations with Central Asia and South-East Asia. The very names Suvarnabhumi and Suvarnadvipa ["golden island"] given to territories in South East Asia, suggest Indians search for gold.

By late prehistoric times (ca. 2,500-1,500 BP) human settlements became larger suggesting an increase in population size across Thailand and Southeast Asia, and during this time bronze and iron were intensively used. Iron smelting and inter-community exchange also intensified. Inter-and intra-regional contacts were more common and this might have led to the development of large settlements, that probably served as trade centers, along trade routes and in river valleys, as evidenced by the sheer increase in the number of sites dating to between 500 BC and AD 500, and the region-wide distribution of such exotic and imported items as bronze kettle drums, Roman lamps, carnelian pendants,double-headed animal ear ornaments, nephrite lingling-o penannular earrings, and glass eyed beads. Some of the items were made in India, and some were imported from China,as well as the Mediterranean world.

King Asoka Maharaja of the Moriya Dynasty sent missionaries, Buddhist monks named Sona and Utara, to Suvarnnabhumi to spread Theravada Buddhism during 232-273 B.C., or around the 3rd century B.E. It is believed that the King Asoka Maharaja actually dispatched missionaries to eight places in different realms to spread Theravada Buddhism during that time. Although it is uncertain which countries of Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, or Thailand) the Suvarnnabhumi region was located in, some academics and scholars believe that Suvarnnabhumi was the region around Suphanburi Province and was centered in the ancient town called U-Thong [Suphanburi means City of Gold, and U-Thong means Crib of Gold].

Suvarnnabhumi could refer to a civilization in Thailand that was centered on the west of the Tha Chin River from the 3rd century B.E. to the 6th century B.E. Later in the 7th and 8th centuries B.E., the commercial trading route to India was extended to China, which has been confirmed by the discovery of artifacts from the Chinese Funan Empire in U-thong and Suphanburi. During the 7th and 8th centuries B.E, U-thong became a significant town and contemporary with the majesty of the Funan Empire.

By the middle of the first millennium AD, petty state-level societies had developed in Southeast Asia as a result of interregional contacts between indigenous people in Southeast Asia and foreigners from south Asia and the Far East. Early cities and large settlements with distinct forms of government, religions, and arts and cultures that flourished during the time were scattered all over Thailand, including coastal cities like Nakhon Pathom, Ku Bua (Ratchaburi), Lop Buri, and Tambralinga (Nakhon Si Thammarat), and inland towns such as Hariphunchai (Lamphun), and Si Thep (Phetchabun).

The region has long been misunderstood both by Western and local scholars. Westerners tended to approach the region from a colonialist point of view and saw empires and colonies; Thai scholars took the nationalist point of view and imagined a state of affairs that did not come into existence until the 19th and 20th Centuries. Suvarnabhumi remains a poetic inheritance in many places in contemporary Southeast Asia, reappearing in forms such as Charles Keyes’ The Golden Peninsula or the name of the new international airport in Bangkok.

Eric C. Thompson notes that "References to Suvarnabhumi throughout Southeast Asia date to the first and early second millennia AD, described by Sheldon Pollock as an era of Sanskrit cosmopolitanism. Polities of Southeast Asia, such as Angkor, Pagan, Ayutthaya, Sri-vijaya, as well as a multitude of smaller entities were culturally interrelated through the Sanskrit lingua franca which carried with it a loosely integrated set of political and cosmological beliefs related to Brahmanic traditions later to become known as Hinduism and Buddhism. A limited amount of historical (written) documentation and a greater wealth of archeological evidence demonstrate that a substantial circulation of goods, people, and ideas bound together (at least loosely) a region stretching from the Cham principalities of what is now south and central Vietnam to the Indian subcontinent and through the Indonesian archipelago and mainland Tai, Khmer, and Bamar polities (where Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar are now located)."