A Bang Khun Phrom temple in a Lao quarter, dominated by an unfinished colossus begun by Somdet To in 1867 and completed half a century after his death.
วัดอินทรวิหาร พระอารามหลวง · Wat Intharawihan Phra Aram Luang
| Official name | วัดอินทรวิหาร พระอารามหลวง — Wat Intharawihan Phra Aram Luang |
|---|---|
| Where | Bang Khun Phrom, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | Third class royal temple, Saman (พระอารามหลวงชั้นตรี ชนิดสามัญ) Three independent sources give the same line, พระอารามหลวง ชั้นตรี ชนิดสามัญ — a royal monastery of the third class, ordinary type. Silpakorn University's Wang Tha Phra Library, whose stated bibliography is the Department of Religious Affairs' 2008 reference work on royal monasteries; the Designated Areas for Sustainable Tourism Administration; and the temple's own site. The temple states that Rama IX raised it from a commoners' temple on 22 March 2000, gazetted on 22 June 2000, and the tourism agency gives the same elevation date. This is the modest end of the royal-monastery scale, which is worth noting because the temple is far more famous than its rank. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Carried in the national monument register; gazette announcement unread The Fine Arts Department's registration service returns โบราณสถานประกาศรายชื่อในราชกิจจานุเบกษา for this site — an ancient monument whose name has been announced in the Royal Gazette. That is a weaker category than registered, and the department's own status code table places it apart from the registered classes. Which gazette issue carried the announcement is not established: the department's complete published index of its own announcements from 1917 to 2015 never names this temple in a title, and the Gazette's own site was unreachable. The department's data is also internally inconsistent here, because its boundary layer holds a surveyed polygon for the site described as the boundary per the registration announcement, covering 11 rai and 62 square wa with twenty-two boundary markers on the ground, while the year field on that same polygon is blank. |
| Coordinates | 13.767248, 100.503086 Fine Arts Department monument register, site 0005570 |
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.
There is no record establishing a founding date, and the commonly printed year is the temple's own approximate tradition. Two acceptable sources also contradict each other flatly on whether this temple was the outer or the inner half of the older Wat Bang Khun Phrom after a road was cut through it, and on whether it was Rama VI or Rama VII who ordered the final renaming. Neither dispute is resolved here.
Wat Intharawihan sits a few hundred metres back from the river at the Bang Khun Phrom intersection. Almost nobody arrives looking for the temple. They arrive looking for the enormous standing figure that rises above the wall and is visible from the road — and the honest version of this history is that the figure and the temple have separate stories that only converge in the nineteenth century.
The temple is older than the Buddha by roughly a hundred years, though how much older is not documented. Its own account and the state tourism development agency both put its origin in the late Ayutthaya period, at approximately 1752, with the builder unknown; Silpakorn University's library, working from the Department of Religious Affairs' own reference work on royal monasteries, says only that it is an ancient temple of the Ayutthaya period and declines to give a year. No register establishes a date. That absence is itself informative: an unregistered year circulating with the word approximately attached is tradition wearing the costume of a record.
What is better attested is the community. Bang Khun Phrom was a Lao settlement, a Vientiane community planted on the eastern bank after the Siamese campaigns against Vientiane, and the temple's identity is bound up with it. Here the two best sources tell the same story with different people in it. Silpakorn has Rama I granting the land for the dwellings of Vientiane families, and the restoration carried out by Chao In, maternal uncle of a chief consort of Rama I, who invited Vientiane monks expert in insight meditation to govern the temple — monks who, the page says, had been teachers of Somdet To himself. The temple's own version reaches further back, to the Thonburi period, and makes the restorer Chao Inthawong, a son of the king of Vientiane brought south and settled at the chilli fields, who rebuilt the ordination hall from a lime-kiln structure into brick and mortar, raised the pavilions, dug the canals and installed the first abbot for whom evidence survives. Both accounts converge on the name: the temple became Wat In after the prince who restored it. And Silpakorn cites something concrete for the Lao connection that is worth more than either genealogy — a Dhamma scripture written in Lao script, kept at the temple.
The standing Buddha begins in 1867. Somdet Phra Phutthachan, To Phrommarangsi — the most famous monk of nineteenth-century Siam, whose dates Silpakorn's own repository fixes as 1788 to 1872 — undertook a colossal standing image in the attitude of the alms round, the Buddha walking with the bowl held before him in the covering robe. He did not finish it. He died in 1872 and the work stopped. It stood unfinished for roughly half a century, which is the part of the story worth dwelling on: a fifty-year-old unfinished colossus in the middle of a growing capital is an unusual thing, and the temple's popular name, the temple of Luang Pho To, was earned by an object that for two generations was a torso.
The completion belongs to the 1920s, and here the sources tangle in a way the page should not smooth over. The temple states the year 2467 of the Buddhist era and attributes it to the reign of Rama VII in the same sentence, but that year corresponds to 1924 and Rama VII did not accede until 1925; Silpakorn says the reign of Rama VII and gives no year. The first celebration, three days from 4 to 6 March 1929, is the only unambiguous date in the sequence. Around the same period the temple was renamed a final time, to Wat Intharawihan, because Wat Intharam collided with a temple of the same name across the river in Thonburi — the temple and the tourism agency crediting Rama VI and naming the ecclesiastic who bestowed it, Silpakorn crediting Rama VII.
The gold is modern. In 1982, for the Rattanakosin bicentenary, the whole image was faced in twenty-four carat gold mosaic which Silpakorn's library states came from Italy. That is the only acceptable source we found for the Italian origin and it applies to that campaign alone; the temple's own records show a further re-covering in gold mosaic celebrated under the Supreme Patriarch around 2018, with no country of origin stated. Set into the crown of the image are relics presented by Sri Lanka — attested by the temple, by Silpakorn and by the tourism agency alike, and by none of them with a date or a named instrument.
The last chapter is administrative and recent. On 22 March 2000 Rama IX raised Wat Intharawihan from a commoners' temple to a royal monastery of the third class, ordinary type, and its official name has carried the words Phra Aram Luang ever since.
Three Thai-style arched gateways, and the roof figures are a signature rather than decoration. The state tourism development agency describes them precisely: the central spire carries the Great Being at the Great Renunciation on the bank of the Anoma River, the right-hand one Indra and the left-hand one Brahma. Indra is the temple's namesake.
The standing Buddha, Phra Phuttha Si Ariya Mettrai, in the attitude of the alms round, holding the bowl, in the covering robe, faced in twenty-four carat gold mosaic, with relics from Sri Lanka set into the crown of its finial. Read the note on its dimensions below before quoting any figure for it.
The ordination hall is a reinforced-concrete building with a glazed-tile roof and the usual Thai finials, its gable a stucco boundary-arch form inlaid with glass in Ayutthaya style, floored in marble and granite — an old temple with a twentieth-century hall dressed in older forms, which is why the Fine Arts Department's register does not list it among the six registered structures. Inside are murals of the life of Somdet To, and, set into the niches of the low enclosing wall, 244 sets of five-colour benjarong ware, no two patterns alike, placed there to conserve the craft. The principal image, in sand mortar, in the attitude of subduing Mara, is called Luang Pho In.
Three brick-and-stucco chedis stand behind the ordination hall, and the register corroborates the count exactly while adding the forms: two prang-form and one round.
The holy-water well was built by Somdet To at the same time as the great image, because disciples came from all over the country asking him for holy water and he made the well to serve them. A wooden shelter originally covered it; in 1987 the then abbot demolished that and built a chedi-shaped structure finished the following year. In front of it stands a wax figure of Somdet To seated in recitation. Inside the well is holy water gathered from 381 other places, together with 121 inscribed plates the temple excavated from beneath it and returned into it. People sit before it daily reciting the gatha most associated with him.
The mondop behind the great image holds a replica Buddha footprint carved in marble, described as an old object that has been with the temple all along, and is reached by stairs. The bell tower is brick and stucco with a four-gabled roof. The museum is in the basement of the ordination hall and holds the temple's old objects, gilt-and-black-lacquer manuscript cabinets, and objects excavated during restoration — but it opens only during the annual fair from 1 to 10 March. Also on the grounds are a cast image of Somdet To in the preaching hall, a white jade Guanyin, a King Naresuan shrine, an open-air museum, and three bodhi trees, Thai, Lankan and Indian, which the tourism agency notes are rarely seen together nowadays.
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 | Open daily. No opening and closing time is stated by any official source: both the Tourism Authority of Thailand and the state tourism development agency say only that the temple may be visited every day. The museum in the ordination hall basement is different — the temple's own site says it opens only during the annual fair, 1 to 10 March. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Thai nationals: free. Foreign visitors: 0 baht. |
| Dress | Not established from an official source. |
| Photography | No source we found states a rule, so we print none. |
| Getting there | At 144 Thanon Wisut Kasat by the Bang Khun Phrom intersection, bounded north by Krung Kasem Road, south by Wisut Kasat Road, east by Thewet Soi 1 and west by Samsen Road. The tourism development agency lists bus routes 3, 30, 32, 33, 49, 53, 64 and 65; no official source names a pier or a metro station. |
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.
The figure everyone quotes is 32 m, and it does come from official sources — the temple's own site states it twice and the state tourism development agency repeats it — but it does not come from a survey. No register or Fine Arts Department measurement gives the image a height at all; the department's height field records it at 2.70 m, which is plainly not a measurement of a colossus, and the same field records the temple's office building at 1.0 m. More important still, no source we opened says what the 32 m is measured from or to. Since the relic sits at the very tip of the crown and the image stands on a raised platform, the difference between sole-to-hairline and ground-to-finial is easily several metres.
No acceptable source says so. The temple's own site gives no width at all. The only width in a government source is peculiar: the state tourism development agency, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand in the same words, give 32 metres high and 10 metres 24 inches wide — a single measurement mixing metres with inches, which no survey would write, and in which 24 inches is not a sensible remainder. The familiar round figure of 10 metres appears to be that number with its incoherent tail removed. This page prints no width.
It was begun in 1867 by Somdet Phra Phutthachan, To Phrommarangsi, whose dates Silpakorn University's repository fixes as 1788 to 1872. He died before it was finished and the work stopped for roughly half a century. The completion belongs to the 1920s, and the sources tangle: the temple's own site gives a Buddhist-era year corresponding to 1924 while attributing it to the reign of Rama VII, who did not accede until 1925, and Silpakorn says the reign of Rama VII and gives no year. The first celebration, three days from 4 to 6 March 1929, is the only unambiguous date in the sequence.
Sri Lanka, according to three sources that agree — the temple's own account, Silpakorn University's library and the state tourism development agency all say that relics of the Buddha presented by Sri Lanka are enshrined in the crown of the image's finial. What none of them gives is a date, a named donating authority or any documentary instrument, so this page treats the Sri Lankan provenance as consistently attested tradition rather than as a documented transfer.
No, and this catches people out. The museum is in the basement of the ordination hall and holds the temple's old objects — Buddha images, gilt-and-black-lacquer manuscript cabinets, and objects excavated during restoration work — but the temple's own site states that it opens for viewing only during the annual fair, from 1 to 10 March. Outside those ten days anyone visiting for the museum will find it shut. The temple's site separately advertises a Luang Pho To worship festival from 1 to 7 April each year, and gives both date ranges without reconciling which is the annual fair.
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.