Rama I's temple and the reign's own, rebuilt from an older Ayutthaya-era monastery, holding a 46-metre reclining Buddha and a stone library of 1,431 inscriptions on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.
วัดพระเชตุพนวิมลมังคลาราม ราชวรมหาวิหาร · Wat Phra Chetuphon Wimon Mangkhalaram Ratchaworamahawihan
| Official name | วัดพระเชตุพนวิมลมังคลาราม ราชวรมหาวิหาร — Wat Phra Chetuphon Wimon Mangkhalaram Ratchaworamahawihan |
|---|---|
| Where | Phra Borom Maha Ratchawang, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | First class royal temple, Ratchaworamahawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรมหาวิหาร) The temple's own official site, and a Thai government publication of the Directorate of Chaplaincy which sets out the classes and names this temple as the type example of the highest sub-rank. Not cross-checked against the National Office of Buddhism register, which refused every request during research. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Registered national ancient monument Royal Gazette vol. 66, part 64, 22 November 1949, p. 5270 — Fine Arts Department announcement listing ancient monuments, in which Wat Pho is item 1 for Phra Nakhon province. Land boundaries were separately demarcated by Royal Gazette vol. 118, special part 127 ง, 21 December 2001. Both gazette announcements were read as scans hosted in the Fine Arts Department's own monument file for site 0000071, not on the Gazette's own server, which was unreachable. The 2001 announcement notes that the 1949 registration had not fixed a land boundary, and demarcates two plots of about 31 rai 3 ngan 35 sq wa and 16 rai 2 ngan 15 sq wa, signed by the Director-General on 15 September 2001. Note that the registered monument zone and the temple's own stated landholding of 51 rai 2 ngan 98 sq wa are not the same thing. |
| UNESCO | Epigraphic Archives of Wat Pho — UNESCO Memory of the World International Register, 2011. This is the documentary-heritage register, not the World Heritage List. |
| Coordinates | 13.746441, 100.493032 Fine Arts Department national monument register, site 0000071 (GPS) |
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.
Any specific founding year for Wat Photharam should be treated as unverified. The Fine Arts Department dates the registered monument to 1789 and to the first three reigns, not earlier.
Wat Pho is the best-documented temple in Bangkok because its founder left an itemised account of building it. The 1788 inscription is not a pious summary; it is a construction record. Twenty thousand-odd labourers brought earth to fill the low waterlogged ground; within a year or two the fill had subsided and more had to be bought, at a cost the inscription states to the tamlueng; the whole foundation was then relevelled. It gives the total royal expenditure on construction and donated labour, and again with the celebration added. Seven years, five months, twenty-eight days.
What that money bought was not only a monastery. The inscription records that seventeen roadside pavilions were painted with the 550 Jataka together with medical texts and the hermit exercise figures, and it says why: to be given as a public gift. The knowledge-repository idea begins here, under Rama I, not with Rama III as it is usually told. Rama III's contribution was to make it permanent and enormous — the medical texts cut into slate and framed on the cloister pillars and the pavilions under a named royal physician, and a hundred plates of verse and prosody on the pillars themselves.
That programme is what UNESCO inscribed. The Epigraphic Archives of Wat Pho entered the Memory of the World International Register in 2011 — 1,431 stone inscriptions in Thai, made between 1831 and 1841, set into the walls, windows, posts and beams of twenty-five buildings. UNESCO's nomination file calls the temple an open university where anyone can be in touch with the cherished wisdom, and that phrasing matters: the claim is that knowledge was put in public view, not that degrees were awarded. The temple's own survey counts 1,440 plates extant in six categories, the largest being 608 on medicine. Neither source explains the difference between the two figures, and neither do we.
The other thing Rama I did was collect. The inscription names the sources and gives the number: 1,248 damaged bronze images brought down from Phitsanulok, Sawankhalok, Sukhothai, Lopburi and Ayutthaya, repaired — heads, hands and feet recast, faces remodelled — and redistributed. Of those, 689 restored images went into the cloisters and the angled wihan alongside 183 brick-and-stucco images that already belonged to the old temple, and 872 in all were lacquered and gilded. The surplus went to other monasteries. Today the cloisters hold 394: 150 in the inner ring and 244 in the outer, in Sukhothai, Chiang Saen, Lopburi, U-Thong and Ayutthaya styles.
The massage school is younger than most visitors assume. A group of traditional physicians obtained approval from the Ministry of Public Health on 30 May 1962 to found a school here, and it has taught in two of the eastern pavilions ever since, in two traditions — the hermit-exercise manner and herbal compress. Its present accreditation status is not something we could document, so we do not describe it.
The Reclining Buddha is 46 metres long and 15 metres high from base to topknot, in brick and stucco, lacquered and gilded. The face measures 5 metres from hairline to chin and 2.5 metres across; each foot is 5 metres long and 3 metres high. The temple gives it as the largest reclining Buddha in Bangkok and the third largest in Thailand, and records the reason Rama III commissioned it: the major postures were already represented at this temple, and only the reclining one was missing.
The soles of both feet are inlaid in mother-of-pearl with the 108 auspicious symbols, a scheme the temple traces to the Sinhalese scriptural tradition and groups in three classes — emblems of fortune and prosperity, attributes of a king or emperor, and elements of Buddhist cosmology including Mount Sumeru, the four continents and the seven surrounding ranges.
Four great chedis stand behind a white wall with Chinese gate arches, each 42 metres high and redented twelve. Green is Rama I's, built to enclose the Phra Si Sanphet, a 16-metre standing Buddha brought down from the palace at Ayutthaya. White is Rama II's, raised by his son. Yellow is Rama III's own. Dark blue is Rama IV's, modelled on the Si Suriyothai chedi at Ayutthaya. There is no fifth, and the temple records why: Rama IV instructed his successor that the four kings who had known one another should have their chedis together, and that no further reign should build one.
The pavilions repay slow looking. There are sixteen sala rai around the temple, each painted with thirty-six Jataka; the northern one of the pair in front of the great chedis is the masseurs' pavilion, carrying thirty-two plates of the massage treatise with line drawings marking the pressure points, and on their reverse the Suphasit Phra Ruang. Among the artificial hills stand the hermit exercise figures: eighty postures originally, modelled in clay under Rama I and recast in metal under Rama III, of which twenty-four survive.
The Chinese stone figures came in as ballast. The temple's own account is that Thai crews brought back the stone used to steady junks returning empty from the China trade and then arranged it as ornament — military officers in opera armour, civil officials, scholars, labourers with hoe or net, women, and lions carved in two sexes, the female with a cub at the breast and the male with a paw on a ball. Four pairs are identified as Marco Polo. The ordination hall terrace carries 152 carved stone Ramakien panels derived from shadow-puppet figures, each with an explanatory verse, and the ashes of Rama I lie under the principal image.
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 08:00–19:30, per the temple's own visit-planning page. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Thai nationals: no rate is published. Foreign visitors: 300 baht. |
| Dress | Polite dress. The temple's own wording is that shorts above the knee are not permitted for women, and that shoes come off and go on the shelf before entering religious buildings. Women should not enter areas set aside for monks, and should not make physical contact with a monk or novice. |
| Photography | Photography is permitted. The one restriction the temple states is that nobody may climb onto the image — only staff going up to clean it or to place offerings. |
| Getting there | On Sanam Chai Road and Maharat Road, immediately south of the Grand Palace, bounded by Thai Wang Road to the north and Setthakan Road to the south. No source we found addresses wheelchair or step-free access. |
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.
It is 46 metres long and 15 metres high from the base to the topknot, built in brick and stucco and then lacquered and gilded. The face measures 5 metres from hairline to chin and 2.5 metres across, and each foot is 5 metres long and 3 metres high. The temple describes it as the largest reclining Buddha in Bangkok and the third largest in Thailand. Rama III commissioned it during the great expansion that began in 1832, because the other major postures were already represented at the temple and this one was not.
The Epigraphic Archives of Wat Pho — the temple's stone inscriptions — entered the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register in 2011. This is the documentary-heritage programme, not World Heritage; Wat Pho is not a World Heritage site. UNESCO describes 1,431 inscriptions in Thai made between 1831 and 1841 and set into the walls, windows, posts and beams of twenty-five buildings. The temple's own survey counts 1,440 plates still extant, of which 608 are medical. The two figures differ and neither source explains why.
What is documented is narrower and more interesting than that claim. Rama I's founding inscription of 1788 records medical texts and the hermit exercise figures painted in the roadside pavilions and given as a public gift, and Rama III had traditional medical knowledge cut into slate and framed on the cloister pillars under a royal physician. The teaching school is modern: a group of traditional physicians obtained Ministry of Public Health approval on 30 May 1962 to found it, and it has taught in two eastern pavilions since. We could not document its present accreditation.
The temple as it stands is Rama I's, rebuilt from 1788 and celebrated in 1801, then hugely enlarged by Rama III from 1832. An older temple, Wat Photharam, stood on the site before that — the 1788 inscription itself calls it the old Wat Photharam and describes it as already ruinous, which is good contemporary evidence. But no source gives a founding date for it, only the period attribution to the Ayutthaya era. The present sermon hall is described as that older temple's ordination hall, still holding its original image.
The temple's dedicated visit-planning page gives 300 baht and hours of 08:00 to 19:30, with children under 120 cm free. Be aware that the temple's own website carries two other prices and two other closing times on its history pages — 100 baht and 200 baht, 18:30 and 18:00 — so confirm at the gate. The Thai text words the charge as applying to foreign visitors and does not state a price for Thai nationals. Thai massage inside the grounds runs 340, 520 and 1,040 baht for 30, 60 and 120 minutes.
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.