War with Larncharng

It was at this moment that Cambodia's attention was turned for some time towards Larncharng (Laos), when King Setthatirat launched two attacks against Cambodia.

King Setthatirat son-in-law of King Mah Chakrapat by marriage with Princess Tepkasatri, daugther of the famous Queen Suriyotai who died in 1555 helping her husband fight the Burmese, sent an elephant of enormous size with two ambassadors and 1000 men to Cambodia, challenging Borom Reachea to find an elephant to fight his. The defeat would mean that Cambodia would have to acknowledge Lao suzerainty. He was so sure of victory since there could be no elephant that size ever to be found again. The Cambodian elephant was two cubics shorter, but it did put the Lao elephant to fight. Borom Reachea kept both elephants and the 1000 Lao escorters as slaves and sent back the two mandarins alone to announce his victory. Setthatirat could not lose face. He at once invaded Cambodia by land and boat. 50,000 of his men descended the Mekong River and 70,000 men by land in 1570. The first army met Sattha, Borom Reachea's son, at Srey Santhor and was defeated. The second army was met by the King in person at Phnom Sonthok and was routed. King Setthatirat was not baffled by this. He invaded Cambodia again in 1573 with 20,000 men and met the Cambodians north of Phnom Penh. This time Setthatirat lost his life, and most of his men heavily butchered or drowned in the river.

Briefly in the mid-16th century, the kingdom of Lan Na, centered on Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, was absorbed into Lan Xang. But the Lan Xang king at the time, Xetthathirat, was renowned more for his valiant defiance of the Burmese than for ruling Lan Na. Twice during Xetthathirat’s reign, Burmese armies ravaged Lan Xang, and twice they were driven from Lao soil. Xetthathirat moved the Lao capital south to Vientiane, a site more defensible than Louangphrabang and more central, for by this time Lao settlers had migrated into southern Laos (Champasak) and across the Khorat Plateau into what is now northeastern Thailand. Xetthathirat beautified his capital by building the great That Luang stupa and a temple to house his own favorite Buddha image, the Emerald Buddha. At the height of his power, however, Xetthathirat went too far in his military ambitions. He invaded Cambodia and disappeared when his army was routed. In the ensuing anarchy, Laos fell to the Burmese.

In 1571 King Setthathirat disappeared when coming back after his invasion into Cambodia. Lan Xang delined rapidly without a leader, the kingdom was attacked constantly by the Burmese.

Setthathirat married a princess from Ayutthaya (Thailand) and formed a political alliance with the Thai against their common enemy, Burma. During a Burmese invasion in about 1565, Setthathirat's military strategy preserved the autonomy of his kingdom. Still regarded by the Lao as a national hero, Setthathirat is a central figure in the spiritual cult of some mountain peoples in southern Laos.

King Setthatirat son-in-law of King Mah Chakrapat by marriage with Princess Tepkasatri, daugther of the famous Queen Suriyotai who died in 1555 helping her husband fight the Burmese

Hmmm...yes it was a sad loss to have his armies routed by the khambujian army. The general of the khmer kingdom must have been an able military man to have sustained such blows, yet survived the lan xang onslaught. However, not strong enough to survive the army of Ayudhaya, which conquored Khambujia completely.

Hongsawadi was the ruler of the Mons?

I watched the Legend of Suriyothai; so the guy who invaded Ayuthaya was a Mon ruler? Hmmm

I don't think King Setthatirat ever got to marry Queen Suriyotai's daughter. The marriage was prevented by Phisanulok's governer who sided with the Burmese. If you watch the movie "Suriyothai" you might get some hints that Phisanulok's governor (Maha Thammaracha) won't stay loyal to Ayutthaya after the queen's death.

However, Lan Xang and Ayutthaya did try to ally against the Burmese agression in the mid 15th century. But it wasn't so successful. Eventually both kingdoms fell to the Burmese (and so did Mon Hongsawadi, Shan states, and Lanna).

Setthathirat married a princess from Ayutthaya (Thailand) and formed a political alliance with the Thai against their common enemy, Burma. During a Burmese invasion in about 1565, Setthathirat's military strategy preserved the autonomy of his kingdom. Still regarded by the Lao as a national hero, Setthathirat is a central figure in the spiritual cult of some mountain peoples in southern Laos.

eye! This one! your talking is as fat as your physical figure. I wondered if your $hit is as big as an elephant $hit.

are you sure? in another source, it said he did.. maybe the movie Suriyothai isnt as accurate as the stuff written down in books..

The Fall of Siam and Lan Xang
- After losing its ally, Lan Xang also fell to the Burmese. I'm not sure about King Setthatirat though. He probably fled to somewhere else and died there. Lan Xang regained independence from the Burmese in 1583

"In 1572, a conspiracy between a Lord Phya Nakhon and the former abbot of Wat Maximavat, who held personal grudges against Setthathirath, led to the king's murder in the southern frontier of the country. He was 38 years of age.

Because Setthathirath left only a toddler as his heir, the child's maternal grandfather, a military commander of common birth named Saensurin (or Sene Soulintha), declared himself king. This began a period of turbulence, with different men ruling unsteadily for short periods, which saw the country finally conquered by Bayinnaung (the Burmese would rule Laos for eighteen years)"

(Sirikittong @ Jan 6 2006, 08:52 AM)
Hmmm...yes it was a sad loss to have his armies routed by the khambujian army. The general of the khmer kingdom must have been an able military man to have sustained such blows, yet survived the lan xang onslaught. However, not strong enough to survive the army of Ayudhaya, which conquored Khambujia completely.

Cambodia's Struggle for Survival 1432-1887
(...)

Following the fall of Angkor Thom, the Cambodian court abandoned the region north of the Tonle Sap, never to return except for a brief interlude in the late sixteenth century. (…) During the sixteenth century Cambodian armies …invaded the Thai kingdom several times.

In the meantime, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites, the Khmer established a new capital several hundred kilometers to the southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh. This new center of power was located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sab rivers. Thus, it controlled the river commerce of the Khmer heartland and the Laotian kingdoms and had access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to the international trade routes that linked the China coast, the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean. A new kind of state and society emerged, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor. The growth of maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) provided lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who controlled royal trading monopolies. The appearance of Europeans in the region in the sixteenth century also stimulated commerce.

King Ang Chan (1516-1566), one of the few great Khmer monarchs of the post-Angkorian period, moved the capital from Phnom Penh to Lovek. Portuguese and Spanish travelers who visited the city, located on the banks of the Tonle Sab, a river north of Phnom Penh, described it as a place of fabulous wealth. The products traded there included precious stones, metals, silk and cotton, incense, ivory, lacquer, livestock (including elephants), and rhinoceros horn (prized by the Chinese as a rare and potent medicine). By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Lovek contained flourishing foreign trading communities of Chinese, Indonesians, Malays, Japanese, Arabs, Spanish, and Portuguese. They were joined later in the century by the English and the Dutch.

The Thai, however, had dealt a fatal blow to Cambodian independence by capturing Lovek in 1594. With the posting of a Thai military governor in the city, a degree of foreign political control was established over the kingdom for the first time. The Thai capture of Lovek marked the beginning of a decline in Cambodia's fortunes.  A new Khmer capital was established at Odongk (Udong), south of Lovek.

In 1620 the Khmer king Chey Chettha II (1618-28) married a daughter of Nguyen Phuc Nguyen, one of the Nguyen lords (1558- 1778), who ruled southern Vietnam for most of the period of the restored Le dynasty (1428-1788).

There were periods in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, when Cambodia's neighbors were preoccupied with internal or external strife.. The Vietnamese were involved in a lengthy civil war until 1674. Thailand…was itself involved in a new conflict with Burma. In 1767 the Thai capital of Ayutthaya was besieged and destroyed.  The Thais recovered.

A renewed struggle between Thailand and Vietnam for control of Cambodia [took place] in the nineteenth century.  Cambodians led several widespread rebellions against Vietnamese incursions.  After two years of fighting, Cambodia and its two neighbors reached an accord that placed the country under the joint suzerainty of Thailand and Vietnam. At the behest of both countries, a new monarch, Ang Duong (1848-59), ascended the throne and brought a decade of peace and relative independence to Cambodia.

Persuaded by a missionary envoy to seek French protection against both the Thai and the Vietnamese, King Ang Duong invited a French diplomatic mission to visit his court.  In August 1863, the French concluded a treaty with Ang Duong's successor, Norodom (1859-1904). This agreement afforded the Cambodian monarch French protection in exchange for giving the French rights to explore and to exploit the kingdom's mineral and forest resources. Although the Thai attempted to thwart the expansion of French influence, their own influence over the monarch steadily dwindled. In 1867 the French concluded a treaty with the Thai that gave the latter control of Batdambang Province and of Siemreab Province. Loss of the northwestern provinces deeply upset Norodom, but he was beholden to the French for sending military aid to suppress a rebellion by a royal pretender.

In June 1884, the French went to Phnom Penh, Norodom's capital, and demanded approval of a treaty with Paris that promised the establishment of French résidents in provincial cities. The king reluctantly signed the agreement. Local elites opposed the treaty and they fomented rebellions throughout the country during the following year. Though the rebellions were suppressed, and the treaty was ratified, passive resistance on the part of the Cambodians postponed implementation of the reforms it embodied until after Norodom's death.