Northern Thailand historical timeline

The north was a separate country for most of its recorded past, and its history is not the same story as Thailand’s.

Before Lanna

The Mon kingdom of Hariphunchai, centred on present-day Lamphun, ruled the Ping valley from around the seventh century and left the earliest Buddhist monuments in the region.

The Lanna kingdom

King Mangrai founded Chiang Mai in 1296 as the capital of Lanna, the land of a million rice fields, having already taken Hariphunchai. Under Tilokarat in the fifteenth century it reached its height — a centre of Buddhist scholarship that hosted a world council of the sangha, with its own script, laws and architecture, trading with China and the Shan states.

Two centuries under Burma

Lanna fell to the Burmese king Bayinnaung in 1558 and remained under Burmese control for more than two hundred years, a period that left its mark on the temple architecture and the food, and that ended when Chao Kavila, allied with Siam, retook Chiang Mai in 1774.

Absorption into Siam

Lanna continued as a tributary kingdom with its own rulers until Bangkok, pressed by British interest in the teak forests, brought it under direct administration in the 1890s and abolished the last vestiges of separate rule in 1939.

Teak and after

British firms logged the northern forests from the 1880s, floating teak down the rivers, until logging was banned nationally in 1989 after catastrophic landslides. The opium economy of the far north was displaced from the 1970s by a royal programme that promoted coffee, tea and temperate fruit instead, and those are what the hills grow now.