Lop Buri, Thailand

The city has a history dating back to the Dvaravati period more than 1,000 years ago. Karen Mudar's locational study of the moated settlements of the central plain gives the enclosure at Lopburi 137.5 ha and ranks it a regional centre, the second of four administrative levels; the region she assigns to it holds fourteen moated settlements, more than any of the other six. It also has the widest span of control in her sample, the capital's area standing to the summed area of the settlements under it at about one to four against about one to one west and north of the bay, a difference she attributed to different ways of raising grain rather than to different degrees of authority. Between Lopburi and the regional centre at Pra Rot lies a gap of 130 km, and halfway along it the settlement of Utapao, which grew from 15.3 to 83 ha; Mudar suggested it may have been a regional centre in its own right that was later absorbed, and that dating its moat expansion against the growth of the two capitals would settle the question. Epigraphic evidence indicates that the dominant population of the city was Mon. Baker and Pasuk enter a caution about the site itself, holding Lopburi to be probably the Lavapura of the inscriptions but its early form obscured by later building.

The chronicle tradition gives the town a foundation in the seventh century. According to the Northern Chronicles, Lavo was founded by Phraya Kalavarnadishraj, who came from Takkasila in 648 CE. Thai records make his father Phraya Kakabatr, also of Takkasila, which has been taken to be either Tak or Nakhon Chai Si, the setter of the Chula Sakarat era in 638 CE, which the Siamese and the Burmese used until the 19th century; the son is said to have founded the city a decade later.

Lavapura became one of the most important centres in the Chao Phraya basin. Inscriptions record that it was incorporated into the administrative structure of the Khmer Empire during the reign of Suryavarman I, which gave the empire access to the trade passing through the Kra Isthmus. There is some evidence that the empire under Suryavarman II fought the Mon over suzerainty in the 12th century. Lopburi sent embassies to China in 1115 and 1155. Baker and Pasuk set out the reading those missions have been given, that Lavo was under Angkorian control from the 10th to the 13th centuries but sent missions of its own whenever Angkor was occupied with succession disputes, and finally broke free before 1289; they judge it more likely that the relationship was always somewhat flexible.

After the foundation of the Ayutthaya Kingdom in the 14th century, Lopburi was a stronghold of Ayutthaya's rulers. It became the capital of the kingdom during the reign of King Narai the Great in the mid-17th century, and the king resided there about eight months a year.