The old monastery on the west side of Sanam Luang, older than Bangkok, where Rama I convened the first Rattanakosin revision of the Pali canon in 1788 because it stood between the two palaces.
วัดมหาธาตุยุวราชรังสฤษฎิ์ราชวรมหาวิหาร · Wat Mahathat Yuwaratrangsarit Ratchaworamahawihan
| Official name | วัดมหาธาตุยุวราชรังสฤษฎิ์ราชวรมหาวิหาร — Wat Mahathat Yuwaratrangsarit Ratchaworamahawihan |
|---|---|
| Where | Phra Borom Maha Ratchawang, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | First class royal temple, Ratchaworamahawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ราชวรมหาวิหาร) Silpakorn University's Thapra Palace Library gives เป็นพระอารามหลวงชั้นเอกฝ่ายมหานิกาย, a first-class royal monastery of the Maha Nikaya, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand's Thai-language page gives the same class and order. The sub-rank comes from the Fine Arts Department's register, which writes the name as ราชวรมหาวิหาร, and from a royal command elevating an ecclesiastical title which uses the same form. Note that the Silpakorn page writes the sub-rank as วรมหาวิหาร without the ราช, a different sub-rank of the same class; the two government texts agree on the longer form and it is used here. |
| Monastic order | Maha Nikaya |
| Ancient monument | Carried in the national monument register; gazette announcement unread Royal Gazette vol. 118, special part 29 Ngo, p. 16, 26 March 2001 — Fine Arts Department announcement determining the land boundary of the ancient monument The Fine Arts Department's register carries this site as registered with its land boundary determined, and two of the department's own systems agree on the 2001 act: its published index of announcements gives the citation above, and its spatial register independently carries the year 2001 and a boundary of 33 rai and 43 square wa for the same monument. The Gazette itself was not opened. One thing this citation does not establish is the original registration: the 2001 announcement is titled as a boundary determination only, not as a first registration, so the temple was already on the register before 2001 and we could not find out when. No first-registration year should be printed for it. |
| Coordinates | 13.755300, 100.491600 Fine Arts Department monument register, site 0000062 |
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 Tourism Authority of Thailand's page reports a horoscope stone inscription at the base of the principal image giving 1685, in the reign of King Narai. We did not see that inscription, it is not in the national inscriptions database, and the tourism authority is not a source this guide uses for history — so it is recorded here as a lead worth chasing rather than as the founding date. Silpakorn University, working from the Ministry of Culture's own reference work, gives no year at all.
The temple on the west side of Sanam Luang was not built for the city it now anchors. It was there first. Silpakorn University's Central Library records it as an Ayutthaya-period foundation called Wat Salak, spelled two other ways in older books, and is careful to mark both explanations of that name as conjecture and oral tradition rather than fact. No state register, inscription or excavation report we could reach gives it a founding date. When King Taksin made Thonburi the capital and built on both banks of the river, Wat Salak fell inside the eastern half of the city and was raised to royal-monastery rank as the seat of an ecclesiastical dignitary. That is the pre-Bangkok temple: modest, old, and already senior.
Its transformation was an accident of geometry. When Rama I moved the capital to the east bank in 1782, two existing temples happened to sit against the new royal quarter: Wat Photharam to the south of the Grand Palace, which the king took for himself and renamed Wat Phra Chetuphon, and Wat Salak to the north, hard against the southern wall of the Front Palace. So Wat Salak fell to the king's younger brother, Prince Maha Sura Singhanat, and the two brothers rebuilt their two temples in parallel. The prince renamed his Wat Nibbanaram. The Fine Arts Department's register still credits him with the temple's core: the ordination hall, the vihara, the mondop and the cloister are all recorded as his foundations, the mondop specifically at the time the monastery was established and the cloister as built to enclose the Buddha precinct.
In 1788 the temple's position stopped being a fact of the map and became its purpose. Rama I resolved with his brother to hold a council to revise the Pali canon, much of which had been lost in the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767. He chose this temple for a reason Silpakorn University's record states outright: because it lies between the Grand Palace and the Front Palace. Neutral ground between two courts. Before the council opened he renamed the monastery again, to Wat Phra Si Sanphetdaram. The revised canon was inscribed in Khom script on palm leaf, lacquered and gilded, and on completion in 1788 was enshrined in a mother-of-pearl cabinet in the scripture hall of the Emerald Buddha temple. This — and not Wat Rakhang, as is often written — is where the first Rattanakosin council sat, confirmed independently by two university libraries.
The names kept moving. In 1795 the prince took ordination at his own temple; in 1801 a novice's firework landed on the roofs and burned the mondop, ordination hall and vihara; and in 1803 Rama I, convening the senior clergy here for scriptural examinations, renamed the monastery a fourth time, to Wat Mahathat. The sequence is Salak, then Nibbanaram, then Phra Si Sanphetdaram, then Mahathat.
The last name came from a death. Crown Prince Maha Vajirunhis, the first holder of that title in Siam, died at the beginning of 1895. Rama V assigned the dead prince's personal royal funds to complete the monastery's restoration and added the honorific Yuwaratrangsarit, created by the young prince, to the temple's name. Two Silpakorn University sources disagree on the year — the Central Library says 1896, the Thapra Palace Library says the restoration finished in 1900 and the name was granted then — and neither is asserted here.
Alongside the restoration Rama V planted a school. His Pali college, moved from a pavilion inside the Emerald Buddha temple to this monastery in 1887 and formally opened on 8 November 1889, was renamed by royal command Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya on 13 September 1896. It stayed a scriptural college for half a century until, on 9 January 1947, fifty-seven senior Maha Nikaya elders met in the Supreme Patriarch's residence inside this temple and declared it a university; degree teaching began that July. And then it left. On 1 October 2008, by the university's own account on its own site, it moved its seat from here to Wang Noi in Ayutthaya. Anyone writing that this is the home of the university is eighteen years out of date. What survives at the temple is its fifth section, which hosts the central office of the vipassana division.
The compound divides into a Buddha precinct and a monastic precinct, the first ringed by a cloister with entrances on all four sides, and the temple front faces east toward Sanam Luang. Inside the cloister the ordination hall and the vihara stand parallel to each other, both facing east, with the mondop between them. The gazetted monument area is 33 rai and 43 square wa; the monastery's own land is over 50 rai, and the two figures are not in conflict — one is the protected ground and the other the temple's holding.
The mondop is the Front Palace prince's foundation and the register gives its height as 15 m. Inside it stands a redented twelve-cornered golden chedi on a lion base with a crowned bell, gilded, lacquered and inlaid with glass, containing relics of the Buddha, itself enclosed in an inner gilt canopy over ten wa high. The register records that the mondop roof and the golden chedi within had burned and been rebuilt.
The ordination hall is brick and stucco with a single-tier roof in four tiers of glazed coloured tile; the pediment is carved with Narayana mounted on Garuda seizing nagas, with deities and foliage set in coloured glass and gilded. The floor is marble on a lion base, the door and window leaves are black-painted wood with no design now visible, and the boundary stones carry a Garuda-and-naga design. The Tourism Authority of Thailand describes this as the largest ordination hall in the country and names the principal image Phra Si Sanphet; neither claim is in a register we could read, and the second is easy to confuse with the fact that the monastery itself carried that name between 1788 and 1803.
The cloister holds about 132 identical images, all in the attitude of subduing Mara, cross-legged, in stucco, lacquered and gilded, with a flame ushnisha, on stucco lotus bases — a lap width of 1.50 m and a height of 2 m each.
The small Phothi Langka vihara is the Fine Arts Department's clearest dated attribution here: built in the reign of Rama IV, on the site of his residence when he was a monk. Its pediment carries the Great Crown in stucco amid flame foliage, and its door and window leaves are in gilt lacquer. The Tourism Authority records that the Sukhothai-period image inside it was given by Prince Damrong Rajanubhab.
In front of the temple, facing Sanam Luang, stands the monument to Prince Maha Sura Singhanat, a figure of one and a half life size standing on a mounting block with both hands raising the royal sword. Its base contains earth collected from twenty-eight places where he campaigned. The Silpakorn page giving its date is internally corrupt — it names a chairman who died in 1980 beside a date of 2009 — so no date for the monument is printed here.
Also on the register and rarely written up: the preaching hall, now housing a central library; the Supreme Patriarch's residence at a recorded 11 m, which is the room in which the university was declared in 1947; two drum towers; and monks' quarters grouped in sections, two of which are still called Salak, preserving the temple's original name in the layout itself.
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 07.30 to 18.00, per the Tourism Authority of Thailand. |
|---|---|
| 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 3 Tha Phra Chan Road, between Maharat Road and Na Phra That Road, facing Sanam Luang and next to Thammasat University. Tha Phra Chan and Tha Chang piers are both adjacent. |
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.
Yes, and this corrects a claim often attached to Wat Rakhang instead. Two university libraries independently place the council here: Sukhothai Thammathirat's library records that the council was convened at Wat Nibbanaram, naming this temple, and that the royal canon was completed in 1788; Silpakorn University's Central Library records the same and gives the reason for the choice in the king's own reported reasoning — that the monastery lies between the Grand Palace and the Front Palace. What happened at Wat Rakhang in the same year was the conversion of a house into a scripture library, which is a different thing.
No, and this is one of the most commonly outdated statements about the temple. The university's own history page records that its Pali college moved here in 1887, opened formally on 8 November 1889, was renamed Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya by royal command on 13 September 1896, and was declared a university on 9 January 1947 by fifty-seven elders meeting in the Supreme Patriarch's residence inside this monastery. The same page records that on 1 October 2008 it moved its seat to Wang Noi in Ayutthaya. What remains here is the temple's fifth section, which hosts the central office of the vipassana division.
Not established. Silpakorn University's Central Library records it as an Ayutthaya-period foundation called Wat Salak and explicitly marks both explanations of that older name as conjecture and as an old saying handed down. No state register, inscription or excavation report we could reach gives a founding year. The Tourism Authority of Thailand reports a horoscope stone inscription at the base of the principal image giving 1685 in the reign of King Narai; that inscription is not in the national inscriptions database and we did not see it, so it is recorded here as a lead rather than as the answer.
Four names are documented in sequence. It began as Wat Salak. Prince Maha Sura Singhanat renamed it Wat Nibbanaram when he rebuilt it after 1782. Rama I renamed it Wat Phra Si Sanphetdaram in 1788, immediately before the council on the canon opened. In 1803, convening the senior clergy here for scriptural examinations, he renamed it Wat Mahathat. The honorific Yuwaratrangsarit was added by Rama V after the death of Crown Prince Maha Vajirunhis in 1895, whose personal funds paid for the restoration — though two Silpakorn University sources give different years for the addition, 1896 and 1900.
The temple's fifth section runs the central office of the vipassana division and its own site welcomes visitors in both Thai and English and offers online registration, naming its lineage teachers. What that site does not publish is a daily schedule, a retreat length, a fee or a language of instruction, so this page states none of those. It is worth being precise about one thing: the university's English-medium retreats are documented as taking place at its campus at Wang Noi in Ayutthaya, not here, and should not be assumed to be available at this temple.
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.