The Mon monastery a street back from Khaosan Road, restored by Rama I's brother and renamed for his victories, with the ashes of the Front Palace princes walled into five niches behind the principal image.
วัดชนะสงครามราชวรมหาวิหาร · Wat Chana Songkhram Ratchaworamahawihan
| Official name | วัดชนะสงครามราชวรมหาวิหาร — Wat Chana Songkhram Ratchaworamahawihan |
|---|---|
| Where | Chana Songkhram, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | Second class royal temple, Ratchaworamahawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นโท ราชวรมหาวิหาร) The class rests on Silpakorn University's temple database alone, which states เป็นพระอารามหลวงชั้นโทชนิดราชวรวิหาร — second class. The sub-rank is contested and the majority reading is used here: the Fine Arts Department's register writes the temple as ราชวรมหาวิหาร and so does Ramkhamhaeng University's library and the Tourism Authority of Thailand, while the Silpakorn page says ราชวรวิหาร. These are different sub-ranks and cannot both be right; the National Office of Buddhism register, which would settle it, refused every request. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Carried in the national monument register; no gazette registration recorded Two Fine Arts Department services independently return the status โบราณสถานขึ้นทะเบียนและกำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน for site 0000010 — registered, with the monument land boundary determined. No gazette citation for it exists in any database we could read, and the temple appears in neither of the department's two published indexes of its own announcements. There is also an internal inconsistency worth stating: although the status field says a boundary was determined, the department's boundary-polygon layer holds no row for this monument and its boundary-marker layer returns none, while the same queries return rows for comparable temples. So the registration status is solid and the citation and the registered area are not. |
| Coordinates | 13.760301, 100.495744 Fine Arts Department monument register, site 0000010 |
Thai temple histories mix two different kinds of statement, and this guide keeps them apart. What a register, a gazette entry, an inscription or a dated royal act shows is one thing. What the chronicles and the temple itself hold is another, and it is worth telling as what it is.
The renaming to Chana Songkhram, victory in war, is undated in every acceptable source. Silpakorn says only that later, when he had won victory over the enemy, the name was bestowed; Sukhothai Thammathirat attributes the bestowal to Rama I with no year; the Tourism Authority says it commemorates three victories, again with no year. The three elements — a prince who won those battles, a temple he restored and a royal name meaning victory in war — are each documented. The causal link joining them into a dated event is not, and the year 1786 that circulates widely has no source behind it that we would cite.
Wat Chana Songkhram sits one street back from Khaosan Road, and the traffic passing its wall obscures how unusual a place it is. Its name means victory in war, and the temple carries that name because a king gave it — but the year, and the battle, are not on any record we could reach. That gap is the honest centre of this page.
The register is unambiguous about what the temple is now. The Fine Arts Department lists it as monument 0000010 and it is registered with its land boundary determined, a status two separate departmental services confirm. The subdistrict around it takes its name from the temple rather than the other way round. The register also does something worth noticing: it assigns every one of the temple's twenty-nine registered structures to the Rattanakosin period. Tradition insists the temple is older than Bangkok — Silpakorn University's library says it was built since the Ayutthaya period, and Sukhothai Thammathirat's exhibition on Mon communities in the capital agrees. But the state's own survey of what is physically standing dates the fabric to the Bangkok era. Both statements can be true, since an old foundation may be rebuilt wholesale, but they are different claims and only one of them is a record.
Before it was Chana Songkhram it was Wat Klang Na, the temple in the middle of the fields, and Silpakorn explains the name plainly: the ground around it was open paddy. Then it acquired a second name, and here the sources become genuinely interesting, because Silpakorn offers two rival explanations and refuses to choose. In the first, Rama I appointed a Mon ecclesiastical dignitary for the capital, reviving an Ayutthaya practice, and settled Mon monks at this temple, which was then called Wat Tong Pu after a Mon temple of Ayutthaya. In the second, the name travelled with people rather than with policy: Mon families from the village of Tong Pu in Hanthawaddy resettled in Siam and brought with them the name of the temple that had been their refuge. That the Fine Arts Department itself writes the temple in its own prose as Wat Chana Songkhram, with Wat Tong Pu in parentheses, confirms the alternative name is officially acknowledged even though it appears nowhere in the register's structured fields.
This matters for how the temple's Mon identity should be described. It is well attested in university scholarship and in departmental writing. It is not a register attribute — the monument record contains no ethnic or sectarian field at all. A Mon temple according to the historical record is defensible; registered as a Mon temple would be false.
The victory that gave the temple its present name belongs to Prince Maha Sura Singhanat, Rama I's younger brother and Front Palace, born on 19 September 1743 and dead on 3 November 1803, nicknamed the Tiger. The Fine Arts Department lists his campaigns in order and lists this temple among those he restored. What it does not do is connect the restoration or the renaming to any one campaign, or give a date for either. So the widely repeated claim that the temple was renamed in 1786 to mark the Nine Armies War has no source we would cite behind it. The elements are each documented; the dated event joining them is received account.
What happened afterwards is better documented, because Silpakorn draws on the Fine Arts Department's 1995 survey of Rattanakosin monuments. Rama II's Front Palace had a throne hall dismantled and its timber reused to build monks' quarters here. Rama III ordered a restoration that ran on into Rama IV's reign, with new quarters completed in 1853 and a celebration held. Rama V repaired the ordination hall roof and formed an intention that outlived him: to build a repository for the ashes of the Front Palace princes. His son's reign carried it out. Queen Sri Bajarindra gave her own funds to wall the space between the rear columns of the ordination hall into five niches, each pierced with small compartments holding princely ashes arranged by reign; the Tourism Authority records that the work was finished under Rama VII, with Prince Damrong presiding over the body that built it and Prince Naris carrying it out, and that the ashes were brought from the Front Palace and installed in 1927. It is the detail that makes this temple singular among Bangkok's royal monasteries: the Front Palace line, the parallel kingship that Rama V allowed to lapse, is physically archived behind the principal Buddha image.
The ordination hall is recorded in the register at 21.60 m high and built of brick, with a stored footprint of 1,168.76 square metres. Silpakorn describes it as a rectangular brick-and-stucco building of thirteen bays with no surrounding verandah, on a lotus-and-bead moulded base, its roof in three descending tiers of coloured glazed tile with the usual finials. The two gables differ and it is worth looking up: the front gable's ground pattern is praying celestials, the rear gable's an interlaced foliate scroll, both with gilded mirror-glass inlay. Above the window openings runs Narayana mounted on Garuda, and every eaves bracket around the building is carved with vines twining its full length.
The boundary stones are on the walls rather than in the ground — affixed at all four outer corners and on the inner walls — with one free-standing set on a platform behind the prince's royal memorial, waisted in profile with a four-leaf motif at the centre.
Behind the principal image, on the rear terrace, is the thing that makes this temple unusual: the space between the rear columns walled into five niches, each pierced with small compartments holding the ashes of the Front Palace princes, arranged by reign.
Five chedis stand around the hall. Two are square, twenty-indented-corner chedis in brick and stucco at the front; two are round, behind the hall, on high bases with a single stair and a circumambulation path around each; a fifth is round. The register contradicts itself on their heights — its height field says 11.90 m for the square pair while its own prose says 15 m, and 11.80 m for the round pair while its prose says about 8 m — so no single figure is printed here.
The Tourism Authority of Thailand names the principal image with a long ceremonial name and gives it as stucco clad in tin, lacquered and gilded, in the attitude of subduing Mara, with a lap 2.50 m wide and a height of 3.50 m, on a high base with two chief disciples beside it and sixteen further images on the surrounding columns. That is the only source we found for the name and the measurements. The Fine Arts Department's own register of important Buddha images returns no entry for this temple, and no university source describes the image at all.
Eight wayside pavilions at a recorded 7.20 m each survive but are much altered: the temple partitioned them into classrooms for its monastic school. Two scripture libraries at 8.60 m, three sets of monks' quarters, four gateways, a low precinct wall, a royal mounting platform at 1.80 m, three wells and a bathing place complete the registered fabric. Behind the ordination hall is a replica Buddha footprint, and beside it a Chinese-style shrine to Guanyin with a three-tier roof and dragons coiled around its front columns.
This is a working place of worship for millions of people rather than an attraction, and it is treated as one at the gate. Where a figure below is blank, no source we are prepared to cite states it.
| Hours | Daily 08.00 to 16.00, per the Tourism Authority of Thailand. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Not established from an official source. |
| Dress | Not established from an official source. |
| Photography | No source we found states a rule, so we print none. |
| Getting there | At 77 Chakraphong Road, Chana Songkhram, bounded north by Chakraphong Road and west by Soi Phongsan, a street behind Khaosan Road and a short walk from Phra Athit pier. |
Every temple reference repeats claims nobody has checked. These are the ones we went looking for and could not stand up, listed so you know exactly where this page stops.
Because Rama I gave it that name after his younger brother, Prince Maha Sura Singhanat, won a series of campaigns against Burmese armies — the Nine Armies War at Lat Ya in 1785, Tha Din Daeng in 1786, Tavoy in 1787 and Chiang Mai in 1795, all dated by the Fine Arts Department. What no acceptable source gives is the year of the renaming, or a link to any one of those campaigns. Silpakorn University says only that later, when he had won victory over the enemy, the name was bestowed, and the Tourism Authority says it commemorates three victories, again with no year. The date of 1786 that circulates widely has nothing behind it that this guide would cite.
According to the historical record, yes, and it is worth being precise about what kind of record. Two university sources — Silpakorn and Sukhothai Thammathirat — describe Mon monks settled here and the Mon community around it, and the Fine Arts Department itself writes the temple in its own prose as Wat Chana Songkhram with the Mon name Wat Tong Pu in parentheses. What is not the case is that this is a register attribute: the monument record contains no ethnic or sectarian field at all. Silpakorn also gives two rival explanations of the Mon name, one about royal policy and one about a village name that travelled with resettled families, and declines to choose between them.
The princes of the Front Palace — the parallel kingship that Rama V allowed to lapse. Rama V formed the intention and died before acting on it; his son's reign carried it out. Queen Sri Bajarindra gave her own funds to wall the space between the rear columns of the ordination hall into five niches, each pierced with small compartments holding princely ashes arranged by reign. The Tourism Authority records that the work was completed under Rama VII, that Prince Damrong presided over the body that built it and Prince Naris carried it out, and that the ashes were brought from the Front Palace and installed in 1927.
Not established, and the two kinds of evidence point in different directions. Silpakorn University and Sukhothai Thammathirat both describe it as an Ayutthaya-period foundation, originally called Wat Klang Na because the ground around it was open paddy. But the Fine Arts Department's register assigns every one of the temple's twenty-nine registered structures to the Rattanakosin period. Both can be true — an old foundation rebuilt wholesale after 1782 — but only the second is a record of what is physically standing, and no founding year appears in any state document we could read.
The Tourism Authority of Thailand gives it a long ceremonial name beginning Phra Phuttha Norasi Trilokachet, and describes it as stucco clad in tin, lacquered and gilded, in the attitude of subduing Mara, with a lap 2.50 m wide and a height of 3.50 m. That is the only source we found for either the name or the measurements. The Fine Arts Department's register of important Buddha images returns no entry for this temple at all, and no university source describes the image. The name is repeated widely online but always on sources this guide does not use, so it is attributed here rather than asserted.
Before you go, read the guide to Buddhism and temple etiquette in Thailand — dress, footwear, where photography is not welcome and how to behave around monks. The rest of Bangkok’s temples are covered here too.
Every temple here sits in a place worth reading about on its own terms. The nationwide temple guide covers the other provinces to the same documentary standard as this page, and says on each one what the record establishes and what it does not.
If you are thinking about more than a visit: work out which Thai visa route fits your situation, and see what is available to rent and buy in residences across Thailand.
Every fact on this page is drawn from the sources above. Where they disagree, this page says so rather than choosing silently. Registrations, fees, hours and access change; confirm anything you are relying on with the authority concerned. BAANLYY LLC is a Nevada company and a listing portal, does not represent any temple, and offers no legal or religious advice.