Chanthaburi (, ) is a town (thesaban mueang) in the east of Thailand, on the banks of the Chanthaburi River. It is the capital of the Chanthaburi Province and the Mueang Chanthaburi District.

The town covers the two tambons Talat and Wat Mai of Mueang Chanthaburi District. As of 2005, the town had a population of 27,602. The town figures in the legacy of King Taksin. In 1981 the Thai cabinet passed a resolution to bestow on him the honorary title of the Great. When the Bank of Thailand issued the 12th Series of banknotes, called The Great Series, the monument of King Taksin the Great in the town's Tungnachaey recreational park appeared on the back of the 20 baht note issued 28 December 1981, the 214th anniversary of his coronation.

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, the principal church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chanthaburi, is the largest church in Thailand.

History

O. W. Wolters identified Chanthabun, the older name of the town, with the Po Ssu Lan of the Chinese records of the early 13th century, a polity named in the Song Huiyao as the neighbour lying five days' sail to the south-east of Chen Li Fu. On that reading the place was a port of the Gulf of Siam from the 7th to the 10th century, under the Sena family of Isanapura. Sherds from the Ban Bang Pun kilns of Suphan Buri, which made large stoneware in the Southern Song period, have been recovered at the mouth of the Chanthaburi River.

Inscriptions

Two Sanskrit inscriptions from Mueang Phaniet, K. 502 and K. 503, have been assigned to the reign of Isanavarman I of Chenla. K. 503 carries the name Candhrapura, which Patcharaporn Ngernkerd and colleagues read as the polity at that town. K. 502 was recovered in two fragments, at Wat Thong Thua and Wat Chai Chumphon in Mueang Chanthaburi district. With K. 447, reported from Wat Baset in Battambang, it traces a corridor running from Battambang through the Watthana Gap and the so-called Mahosot Route to the sea here. George Cœdès tied the Chanthaburi stone to Isanavarman I's reign, while Michael Vickery assigns it to the time of Jayavarman I, with the earlier king named retrospectively. Charles Higham has proposed that the overland route to the sea was used as an alternative to the restricted or second-hand access to coastal trade available to the inland polities.

A head from a Harihara sculpture, the composite of Śiva and Viṣṇu, is reported to have been found in the province and is now in the Prachin Buri National Museum. It is the only sculpture of that deity Nicolas Revire records from Thailand, where Harihara is otherwise first named in the inscription K. 1155 of 796 CE.

The Chinese record

The Song Huiyao, which names Chen Li Fu under the years 1200 to 1205, places that polity in the south-western quarter with Po-Ssu-lan on its south-eastern side and Teng-liu-mei (, Tambralinga) to the south-west. It gives the distance from Chen Li Fu to Po Ssu Lan as five days by sea, and one day further from there to Chenla. The name recurs in the Zhu Fan Zhi of 1225, where Po si lan () appears among the dependent states () of Chenla, in a list that also holds Deng liu mei (Tambralinga), Luo hu (, Lavo), San luo and Zhenlifu itself.

Wolters made the identification in the course of rejecting another. G. E. Gerini had derived the name Chen Li Fu from Candanapura, that is Chanthabun, and Friedrich Hirth, W. W. Rockhill and L. P. Briggs accepted it. Wolters held that the short distance between Chanthabun and Yaśodharapura, the Angkorian capital in present-day Cambodia, made an Angkorian loss of control there improbable, and on that ground assigned Chanthabun to Po Ssu Lan instead, as the south-eastern neighbour the notice describes. Reading the pair of neighbours together, he concluded that Chen Li Fu was not a river-mouth port but an inland riverine town about a week from the coast, with its seaport in the north-western and northern gulf.

Climate

Chanthaburi has a tropical monsoon climate (Köppen climate classification Am), with little variation in temperature throughout the year. Rainfall, however, varies dramatically by season. Rainfall is light and infrequent in the short dry season (December to February), but the wet season (April to October) features torrential rain. March and November are transitional months, during which significant rainfall may occur in some years, while in other years little rain falls.

Transportation

Route 3 (Sukhumvit Road) passes near Chanthaburi and connects the city to Rayong, Pattaya, Chonburi, and Bangkok to the northwest and Trat to the southeast. Route 317 connects Chanthaburi to Sa Kaeo.

References

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