The chapel royal of the Grand Palace, built with Bangkok itself in 1782, housing the Emerald Buddha and the only major temple in the country with no resident monks.
วัดพระศรีรัตนศาสดาราม · Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram
| Official name | วัดพระศรีรัตนศาสดาราม — Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram |
|---|---|
| Where | Phra Borom Maha Ratchawang, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | Special class royal temple (พระอารามหลวงชั้นพิเศษ) Fine Arts Department national monument register, site 0005574, which records the temple as a special-class royal monastery with no resident monks — a category outside the ordinary first/second/third-class ladder, and therefore carrying no sub-rank. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Carried in the national monument register; no gazette registration recorded The Grand Palace and Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram are held jointly in the Fine Arts Department register as site 0005574, under the department's own status code 0, which its code table translates as ancient monument — not code 1, registered ancient monument, and not code 6, announced in the Royal Gazette. The register's gazette sub-tables for this site are empty, and the Royal Gazette's own search refused every request during research, so no gazette citation is claimed here. The site is treated and protected as an ancient monument; a formal gazette registration entry is a different thing, and we do not assert one. |
| Coordinates | 13.751586, 100.492656 Fine Arts Department national monument register, site 0005574 |
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.
No dated record of the image's making has been found, and no gemmological analysis of it was located. The palace calls the stone jasper; the Fine Arts Department declines to name a mineral and says only a single green gem throughout. It is not emerald, and neither official source calls it jade or nephrite. The palace states plainly that the name comes from the colour, not the stone.
Wat Phra Kaew is not a monastery and never was. When Rama I laid out his new capital on the east bank in 1782 he followed the Ayutthaya pattern of a royal chapel inside the palace walls — Wat Phra Si Sanphet was the model — and the Bureau of the Royal Household is explicit that it was built with no living quarters, because monks do not reside here. That single fact reorganises everything else about the place. There is no abbot, no sangha, no sect. What there is instead is a state function: this is where royal ordinations were held and where officials assembled to drink the water of allegiance.
The building took two years. The Fine Arts Department register names the officials Rama I put in charge of the palace works and records the completion in 1784, and then gives the date the whole enterprise was for: 27 March 1784, when the Emerald Buddha was carried across from Thonburi and enshrined. The image had been in Siamese hands only five years by then, brought from Vientiane; the palace describes it as believed to be fifteenth-century northern Thai work and goes no further, which is the correct level of confidence and a useful corrective to the guidebooks.
The temple has been rebuilt about as often as it has been repaired. The Fine Arts Department records a major restoration roughly every fifty years, naming four reigns: Rama III, Rama V for the Bangkok centenary of 1882, Rama VII for the 150th in 1932, and Rama IX for the bicentenary of 1982. Rama IV is deliberately not in that list — his contribution was new construction rather than a cyclical restoration, and it was substantial: the Phra Si Rattana Chedi in 1855, the Prasat Phra Thep Bidon, and the concrete model of Angkor Wat that he commissioned in place of the alternative he had considered, which was moving an actual Khmer stone temple to Bangkok.
Three times a year the King changes the Emerald Buddha's robes in person, on the first waning day of the fourth, eighth and twelfth lunar months, turning the image from the hot season to the rainy and then to the cold. Rama I made the hot-season and rainy-season sets; Rama III added the third. The regalia now in use are replicas: after the 1982 conservation the originals were judged too fragile and too fine to repair, and new sets were presented for the Golden Jubilee — cold season in November 1996, hot season in March 1997, rainy season in July 1997. In the present reign the King also sprinkles lustral water on the crowd outside the ordination hall, which earlier reigns did only for nobles within it.
The image itself is small and set very high, which surprises most first-time visitors. Both official sources give the same measurements: 66 cm tall including the base, 48.3 cm knee to knee, seated in the meditation attitude. It stands on a gilded wooden busabok representing an aerial chariot, raised further by a three-tiered gold-clad benja that Rama III added. Flanking it are two three-metre gilt Buddhas in the attitude of calming the ocean, cast by Rama III in 1848 for his father and grandfather.
The ordination hall carries eight double boundary stones — doubled sema signify a temple built by a king — and 112 gilt-bronze Garuda seizing nagas run round its base. Twelve bronze lions guard the stairs; one pair came from a Khmer model and the other ten were cast to match it. Inside, the west wall above the doors shows Buddhist cosmology, the east wall the temptation and the enlightenment, and the long walls below the windows two royal processions, one by river and one by land.
The cloister is the reason to allow time. Its walls carry 178 painted bays of the Ramakien, running clockwise from the north door opposite Phra Wihan Yot, with 224 verses beneath. The Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre notes that the paintings are said to date from Rama I's reign at the temple's foundation — said, because no dated record survives — and that they were repainted at each jubilee: 1882, 1932 and 1982.
Around the terraces: the Phra Si Rattana Chedi, built in 1855, whitewashed at first and clad in gold mosaic imported from Italy for the 1882 centenary, re-tiled again in 1982; the Phra Mondop, Rama I's Tripitaka library under a seven-tiered spire, holding a mother-of-pearl cabinet of palm-leaf scripture; the Prasat Phra Thep Bidon, begun by Rama IV, gutted by an electrical fire in 1903, and now the royal pantheon of bronzes of Rama I to Rama IX, open only on a short list of named days; and twelve stucco yaksha in six pairs, built in Rama III's reign, standing with their backs to the gates and their faces to the ordination hall in deference to the image inside.
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, including public holidays, 08:30–16:30, with ticket sales closing at 15:30. Admission is suspended entirely on days carrying a royal ceremony or official function. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Thai nationals: free. Foreign visitors: 500 baht. |
| Dress | The Royal Household regulation is specific and it is enforced at the gate. Not permitted: sleeveless tops, tight tops, crop tops, sheer fabric, short skirts, tight stretch trousers, shorts, fashionably ripped trousers, flared trousers, three-quarter trousers. A ready-made wrap skirt must fall well below the knee, and a one-shoulder sabai must be worn over a long-sleeved top. |
| Photography | You may go inside the ordination hall and you may not photograph inside it — the regulation permits photography around the temple, expressly excepting the interior of the ubosot. Ordinary cameras and live streaming to social media are fine elsewhere; lighting rigs, cranes, wheeled rigs, wireless camera microphones and drones are not. Pre-wedding shoots are prohibited outright. |
| Getting there | Entry has been through Mani Noppharat Gate rather than Wiset Chaisri Gate since 10 January 2024. MRT Sanam Chai exit 1, or the Chao Phraya express boat to Tha Chang (N9) or Tha Tien (N8). Wheelchairs are lent free from the cloakrooms, though the palace has posted a suspension of that service without a date on it — check before relying on it. |
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.
No. It is a chapel royal inside the Grand Palace, and the Bureau of the Royal Household states that it was built with no living quarters because monks do not reside there. The Fine Arts Department register says the same, and puts the phrase in the field where a temple's monastic order would normally go. It has no abbot and no sect. This is also why it is graded a special-class royal monastery rather than being placed on the ordinary first, second and third class ladder.
No. The Bureau of the Royal Household describes it as carved from a block of jasper and says explicitly that the name comes from its colour. The Fine Arts Department goes no further than a single green gem throughout the image. No published gemmological analysis was found during research, so descriptions of it as jade, jadeite or nephrite go beyond what either official source will say. It measures 66 cm high including the base and 48.3 cm knee to knee.
Its age is not established. The palace says it is believed to be of northern Thai workmanship of the fifteenth century, and believed is the palace's own hedge. The Fine Arts Department register records that it came to Bangkok from Thonburi on 27 March 1784, and separately that it had reached Siam from Vientiane. The traditional account — discovery at Chiang Rai in 1434 when lightning cracked the plaster off it, then Lampang, Chiang Mai and Vientiane — is chronicle material, worth telling as such, and not a dated record.
It admits a foreign visitor to the Grand Palace, Wat Phra Kaew, the Wat Phra Kaew Museum and the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, all inside the same compound. Thai nationals are not charged. Monks and novices with a certificate from the National Office of Buddhism, foreign students enrolled at Thai state institutions in institutional dress, and foreign children not over 120 cm also enter free. An audio guide in eight languages is 200 baht against a passport or card deposit.
No. The Royal Household regulation of 2024 lists the interior of the ubosot among the places you may enter, and then excepts it by name from the areas where photography is permitted. Everywhere else in the temple compound, ordinary cameras and phone video are allowed, live streaming included. Lighting equipment, cranes, wheeled rigs, wireless camera microphones and drones are banned throughout, and professional shoots need an application to the Royal Household Secretary at least sixty days ahead.
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.