Rama V's own monastery, orthodox Thai on the outside and a Gothic hall within, wrapped in five-colour glazed tile and ringed by a royal cemetery of gold-mosaic stupas.
วัดราชบพิธสถิตมหาสีมารามราชวรวิหาร · Wat Ratchabophit Sathit Maha Simaram Ratchaworawihan
| Official name | วัดราชบพิธสถิตมหาสีมารามราชวรวิหาร — Wat Ratchabophit Sathit Maha Simaram Ratchaworawihan |
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| Where | Wat Ratchabophit, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | First class royal temple, Ratchaworawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ราชวรวิหาร) The Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre archaeological-site register states เป็นพระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรวิหาร, and the Government Public Relations Department repeats the same wording from a Fine Arts Department survey. Note that the three-class system with these sub-ranks was created in the reign of Rama VI in 1914, so the grade is a later designation applied to an 1869 foundation rather than a rank conferred at the start. |
| Monastic order | Dhammayuttika Nikaya |
| Ancient monument | Carried in the national monument register; gazette announcement unread Royal Gazette vol. 66, part 64, p. 5272, 22 November 1949 — the announcement determining the schedule of antiquities and monuments in Wat Ratchabophit Two Fine Arts Department systems agree that this is a registered ancient monument with its land boundary determined: the department's own registration-status service returns โบราณสถานขึ้นทะเบียนและกำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน for site 0000007, and its national monument layer carries the same value as status code 5. The gazette citation above is quoted from the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's record and was not opened at the Gazette itself, whose site refused every request during research. One inconsistency is worth stating: although the department's attribute data says a land boundary was determined, its two boundary layers hold no polygon and no boundary markers for this site, so no registered area in rai and ngan can be given. |
| Coordinates | 13.749106, 100.497359 Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre archaeological-site register, record 704, cross-checked against the Fine Arts Department monument point for site 0000007 |
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 register also records, as a finding of absence, that no evidence has been found that Rama VI proclaimed any temple his reign temple; he founded schools instead. That makes this arguably the last monastery founded under the custom, but the claim rests on a negative.
Rama V came to the throne at the end of 1868, a boy of fifteen under a regent. Within a year he had bought a compound inside the outer ring of Rattanakosin Island — his uncle's palace, plus the houses of officials and commoners along the canal — and begun a monastery on it. He called it Ratchabophit, built by the king. The dates that follow are unusually firm for a Thai temple, because the man who became its third abbot and later Supreme Patriarch wrote the sequence down and published it in 1923: stakes in the ground on 30 December 1869, the foundation rite on 22 January 1870, a royal proclamation granting the monastic boundary on 4 May, and the boundary itself bound on the evening of 19 May 1870.
That last act is the key to the place. The sima was not drawn around the ordination hall, as at an ordinary temple, but around the entire monastery, marked by eight carved stone pillars at the eight points of the wall. A mahasima of that kind means the whole compound is consecrated ground and every formal act of the Sangha performed anywhere inside it is valid. The Fine Arts Department's register still carries eight structures typed มหาสีมา in a ring around the site, so the paperwork agrees with the ritual claim. The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre draws out the consequence with a scholar's dryness: strictly, the building everyone calls the ubosot might be reckoned merely as the northern vihara, and ubosot is a courtesy name for whichever hall happens to be used for daily observance.
The plan was not invented for him. The immediate model was Wat Ratchapradit, his father's Dhammayut monastery, from which Ratchabophit takes its raised marble platform with a round chedi as the principal element. But the circular arrangement — four buildings at the cardinal points around a central stupa — had appeared earlier at Phra Pathom Chedi, which Rama IV had raised on the belief that it shared the ground plan of the Thuparama at Anuradhapura. The difference is worth noting rather than smoothing over: at Phra Pathom Chedi all four cardinal buildings are viharas and the ordination hall stands apart, while here the four are an ubosot to the north, a vihara to the south and two directional viharas east and west, stitched into a closed ring by a curving cloister.
Then comes the thing nobody expects. Outside, the ubosot is orthodox Thai: tiered roofs in coloured glazed tile, chofa and bai raka, a gable carrying Rama V's crown radiant on a two-tier tray borne on the heads of seven elephants. Step through the door and you are in a Gothic hall — pointed arches and pilasters, gilded stucco foliage on a shimmering ground, elephant-head corbels where each pilaster rises from the cornice, and shafts subdivided so that a single pillar reads as a cluster of slender ones, which the Silpakorn University thesis on the subject identifies as Rayonnant manner. The designer was Mom Chao Prawit Chumsai, who also drew the royal arms modelled over the central door.
The interior did not stay as built, and the reason is the most human document in the file. The bays between the pilasters originally carried murals of the Buddha's life by Prawit himself, painted with true perspective and Western buildings; they are gone, and survive only in photographs. In November 1927 Rama VII wrote to Prince Naris asking him to replace them with mosaics of Rama V's life, saying that the only person who could do it to his satisfaction was Naris. Naris declined that part. Siam owned only four such pictures, he wrote, and of the fourth everyone who saw it said it was bad and some said it should be thrown in the river; he could not draw figures and would not commission what he could not direct. Prince Damrong proposed ten allegorical panels instead. Then came 1932, the change of government, Damrong's exile, and the scheme died. The murals were erased anyway in 1929 and replaced with scattered gold flowers. The blank stone panels above the windows, cut from spoiled marble salvaged from the Ananta Samakhom Throne Hall, are the frames of a picture cycle that was never made.
The five-colour glazed tile is the first thing you notice and the thing the temple is named for in the literature. The outer wall surfaces are clad in it across the whole building — walls, the columns carrying the porch, the balustrades — and so is every other structure on the platform: the vihara, the chedi, the eight wayside pavilions alike. The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre gives the pattern precisely: on the cloister's outer face a kruay choeng border at the base and a field of phum khao bin and thepphanom on a yellow ground, the same design as the ubosot walls, with the inner face left plain. Each pavilion's tiles were painted for the position they occupy. The register dates the purchases from China for later repair work: glazed tile ordered in 1921 for the low wall, the drum tower base and the vihara walls, and coloured tile in 1928 and 1929 for the decayed parts of the chedi.
The great chedi is a round bell on a terraced base, both faced in tile. The Sirindhorn record gives the terrace circumference as 56.96 m and the chedi's base circumference as 45.85 m, and its height as about 41.40 m above general ground level — but a Silpakorn thesis citing the same underlying study prints 14.40 m, a transposition somewhere that we cannot resolve, so both figures are set down here rather than one. Sixteen arched recesses ring it above the lower moulding. North and south are pierced through to a hollow interior holding stone naga-protected Buddha images in Lopburi style, the count given variously as two or four. East and west are projecting niches with portrait images of two abbots who became Supreme Patriarch. Under the crowning finial is a casket of 6,018 relics, deposited in May 1949.
The mother-of-pearl doors are the finest object in the temple and their story corrects a common assumption. The ubosot has ten door leaves and twenty-eight window leaves; the outer faces carry inlay reproducing five royal orders of Siam, all of them first class, read from the top down: the Nine Gems, the Royal House of Chakri, Chula Chom Klao, the White Elephant and the Crown of Thailand. Each order is encircled by its sash with a collar laid over it and the badge hanging on a bow, and the tiny inlay pieces form the interlaced royal monogram exactly as it appears on the real insignia. The work is by Prince Kasemsri Suphayok, who directed the royal mother-of-pearl workshop between 1878 and 1891 — but before 1922 there were only three inlaid doors, six leaves, on the front alone. In that year his unfinished panels were brought to the abbot, who obtained Rama VI's permission to have craftsmen complete them, and the carved wooden window leaves they replaced were moved to the vihara, which is why the vihara's painted wooden doors carry the same five orders with their sash colours rendered true.
Inside the ubosot: one open hall with no interior columns, five square ceiling panels each with a lamp hung from the centre of a stucco flower, panels of brown and white stone below the windows, and oval stucco frames between them enclosing Rama I's cypher alternating with the letter for Rama V. Above the central door, modelled free-standing, are Rama V's royal arms with a Pali motto meaning that the concord of all who are gathered as a community brings about growth and accomplishment. The principal image, Phra Buddha Angkhirot, was cast in Rama IV's reign for Phra Pathom Chedi and never sent; it is gilded with 180 baht weight of gold that Rama V had worn as ornament as a child, and stands under the white nine-tier umbrella that had stood over his funeral urn.
The strangest object in the building is what the image stands on. The sanctuary base is Italian marble: a raised platform, square with re-entrant corners, in three receding tiers used to set urns, vases and candlesticks. The Silpakorn thesis calls it the one element that abandons Thai convention outright and compares it directly to a Christian high altar. Inside that marble lie the ashes of Rama VII, brought from England on 30 June 1949, of Queen Rambhai Barni on 15 April 1985, and of Rama IX, deposited in person by King Vajiralongkorn on 29 October 2017.
West of the temple, outside the boundary wall along the old city moat, is the royal cemetery — thirty-four monuments in a garden of frangipani, on land Rama V granted as the allowable precinct of the monastery. What lies here is ashes and relics, not bodies. The four principal monuments are Lankan-form stupas faced in gold mosaic: Sunanthanusawari for Queen Sunandha Kumariratana, who drowned in the Chao Phraya in 1880, and her daughter; Rangsi Wadhana, the largest, for Queen Savang Vadhana and her descendants including Prince Mahidol Adulyadej and Princess Galyani Vadhana; Saowabha Praditsathan for Queen Saovabha Phongsri's line; and Sukhumal Naruemit for Princess Sukhumala Marasri and the Paribatra line. Beside them stand a three-towered Khmer prang deliberately modelled on Phra Prang Sam Yot at Lopburi, because the prince it commemorates held the Lopburi title, and three Gothic monuments in whitewashed brick — the earliest of them from about 1888. One monument is cut entirely from marble, a tall square shaft draped in a carved marble cloth hung with a carved marble garland, the cloth cut to look genuinely in motion.
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 | The Tourism Authority of Thailand gives the temple as open daily from 9am to 5pm. The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's record is narrower and concerns the ordination hall specifically: on ordinary days it is open for morning and evening chanting only, 09.00–10.00 and 17.00–18.00, and on wan phra and over the New Year period 08.00–13.30, while the vihara opens only for major ceremonies. The two are not necessarily in conflict — one describes the compound and the other a single building — but we have not confirmed that reading and both are printed as they stand. |
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| 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 | On Fueang Nakhon Road, bounded north by Ratchabophit Road, west by Atsadang Road along the old city moat, and south by the Wat Ratchabophit canal. The royal cemetery is outside the wall on the western side, along Atsadang Road. |
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 V had it bound that way. The sima was set at the perimeter of the entire monastery, marked by eight carved stone pillars at the eight compass points of the wall, and the temple's name records the decision: Sathit Maha Simaram means the monastery in which the great sima stands. A mahasima of that kind consecrates the whole compound, so a formal act of the Sangha performed anywhere inside the walls is as valid as one performed in the ordination hall. The Fine Arts Department's register still lists eight structures typed as mahasima in a ring around the site, which is the paperwork agreeing with the ritual claim.
Yes, and a Silpakorn University thesis written specifically on the question sets out what it consists of: pointed arches and pilasters imitating Western Gothic, gilded painted stucco foliage, construction materials and interior fittings imported from Europe, pilaster capitals shaped like a wine cup, and shafts subdivided so that one large pillar reads as a cluster of slender ones, which the author identifies as Rayonnant manner. Where each pilaster rises from the heavy cornice above the windows there is a corbel carved as an elephant's head. The designer was Mom Chao Prawit Chumsai, and the contrast with the orthodox Thai exterior is deliberate rather than accidental.
Yes, and this is recorded rather than merely said. The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's record of the ordination hall lists three dated depositions inside the Italian marble sanctuary base: the ashes of Rama VII on 30 June 1949, brought from England; those of Queen Rambhai Barni on 15 April 1985; and those of Rama IX on 29 October 2017, deposited in person by King Vajiralongkorn. Thai PBS reported the same event on the same date and named both this temple and Wat Bowonniwet. What is not established is a Royal Gazette entry for the depositions, which we could not reach.
It is a garden of thirty-four monuments outside the western wall, on land Rama V granted as the allowable precinct of the monastery, and what it holds is ashes and relics rather than bodies. The four principal monuments are gold-mosaic Lankan stupas for four queens and consorts and their descendants, including Prince Mahidol Adulyadej and Princess Galyani Vadhana. The stated purpose, preserved in the temple's own account, was that those who had loved and cared for one another closely should be together after death, and the rule that follows is that a monument is normally built for the mother so that her children may lie with her. The styles range from Thai and Khmer to Gothic, and the area was reduced from over four rai to about two and a half when Atsadang Road was cut through part of it after 1932.
It is described that way, and the description is a convention rather than a legal designation. The Sirindhorn record, updated after 2017, gives three reigns: Rama V, Rama VII and Rama IX. A Silpakorn thesis written before 2017 gives two, Rama V and Rama VII, and says the reason Rama VII counts is that he restored the whole temple; it also states plainly that by common understanding any temple a king was attached to is reckoned his reign temple. The ashes are a record. The title built on them is an attribution, and the page keeps the two apart.
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.
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