Rama I's temple across three reigns, built around a Sukhothai bronze brought down from Wat Mahathat in 1808, with the longest ordination hall in Thailand and the Giant Swing outside its gate.
วัดสุทัศนเทพวรารามราชวรมหาวิหาร · Wat Suthat Thepwararam Ratchaworamahawihan
| Official name | วัดสุทัศนเทพวรารามราชวรมหาวิหาร — Wat Suthat Thepwararam Ratchaworamahawihan |
|---|---|
| Where | Wat Ratchabophit, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | First class royal temple, Ratchaworamahawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรมหาวิหาร) The archaeological database of the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre, which states the grade and sub-rank twice in its record for the temple. The National Office of Buddhism register was unreachable throughout 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. 5281 — Fine Arts Department announcement listing ancient monuments. The Giant Swing carries the same 1949 listing and a further land-boundary designation, Royal Gazette vol. 105, part 188, 16 November 1988. These citations come from the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's archaeological database, which sources them to the Fine Arts Department's own geographic register. The Gazette documents were not opened directly — the Gazette site and the department's map service both refused requests. Treat the citation as second-hand from a named research institution rather than as a document somebody read. |
| Coordinates | 13.751118, 100.501074 Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre archaeological database, from Fine Arts Department survey data |
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.
Two corrections worth carrying. Rama II carved the wihan doors, not the ordination hall doors; the ordination hall doors were hung in 1844, under Rama III. And the name Rama III gave was Wat Suthat Thepthararam — the present Thepwararam is Rama IV's. Both are attested in the royal chronicle passages the research centre quotes. There is no single authoritative completion date for the temple as a whole.
Wat Suthat took three reigns and a swamp. Rama I ordered a temple in the middle of his new city that would stand as tall as Wat Phanan Choeng at Ayutthaya, and the ground he chose had to be filled with seven or eight courses of brick and stone before anything could be built on it. He got as far as the platform of the great hall and the pedestal for the image. That image is the point of the whole enterprise: a Sukhothai bronze brought down from the wihan luang of Wat Mahathat in Sukhothai, fetched by an officer the chronicle names, floated to the capital, honoured at the landing for seven days, and set on its pedestal on 9 May 1808. A city gate was demolished to let it through, and the gate is still called Tha Phra for it.
Rama II carved door panels for the great hall with his own hands — but read the chronicle carefully, because it says he did it alongside Krommuen Chitraphakdi, not alone, and it says the wihan doors, not the ordination hall's. His reign ended in 1824 with the hall still lacking its roof finials and its door and window leaves. Rama III finished the job, appointing named officers to the works and drawing three hundred monks from Wat Pho, Wat Mahathat and Wat Ratchaburana to populate it, and he gave it a name: Wat Suthat Thepthararam. Rama IV altered that to the Thepwararam it carries now, and named the three principal images. The name in both forms refers to Sudassana, the city on the summit of Mount Meru where Indra lives.
The image is the largest surviving Sukhothai-period bronze, and the sources are careful about the wording — largest of those for which evidence survives, not largest in Thailand. It measures 6.25 metres across the lap and about 8 metres high, on a throne 3.92 metres above the floor. It is also not quite the object that left Sukhothai. Rama I had it recast, and Rama II thought the head too small for the body and had it removed and enlarged, and had the fingers, which were of uneven length, lengthened to match. That matters if you want to call it a Sukhothai image without qualification.
Outside the gate stands the Giant Swing, put up in 1784, two years after Bangkok was founded. It served the Brahmin ceremony of Triyampavai and Tripawai, brought forward from Ayutthaya, held in the second lunar month at the Brahmin new year to welcome Shiva and Vishnu to the world of men. The Fine Arts Department reads the structure as a solar image — the Rigveda likens the sun to a golden swing in the sky — and says the vermilion of the posts is the red of dawn. It is not on its original site: Rama V moved it from Thanon Dinso to the temple front between 1896 and 1901 when Bamrung Mueang Road was rebuilt.
The swinging stopped, and the reason usually given for it does not survive checking. Sources disagree on the date — the Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall says the ceremony was abolished in 1932, the research centre says only that it ended in Rama VII's reign — and no royal decree or government order ending it turned up anywhere. As for the deaths that supposedly ended it: a Thai history magazine investigating exactly that question reports a researcher who went through the old chronicles and found none, and attributes the discontinuation to war and cost. We are not going to repeat a claim with an active published rebuttal and no record behind it. The posts themselves were replaced in 2006 with golden teak from Phrae province, and the new swing was celebrated in 2007.
The ordination hall is the longest in Thailand, and the measure is overall external length: 72.25 metres by 22.60 metres. Inside it is 10.60 by 40.80 metres — a long, narrow hall of fifteen bays on sixty-eight columns, with porches front and back and a lower circumambulation terrace paved with stone imported from China. Its principal image, Phra Phuttha Trai Lok Chet, was cast under Rama III and named by Rama IV, who added the eighty stucco disciples that stand around it, painted with varied skin tones and each named on the robe.
The great hall is almost square — 23.85 by 26.25 metres outside, 20.55 by 22.60 inside — with three doors front and back, five window bays a side and four pairs of square masonry columns 1.60 metres thick. Its pediments carry Indra on Erawan above and Narayana on Garuda below. This is where Phra Si Sakyamuni sits.
The murals here are on the pillars, not the walls, which is what makes them unusual. A Chulalongkorn University doctoral study describes eight square pillars — four pairs, thirty-two painted faces — carrying the Traiphum, the Buddhist cosmology, so the reader walks through the universe rather than reading it off a flat surface. The ordination hall has its own separate wall paintings by Rama III's painters.
Behind the throne is a gilded stone relief 2.40 metres high and 0.95 wide, showing the Twin Miracle at Savatthi below and the Buddha preaching to his mother in Tavatimsa above. Prince Subhadradis Diskul compared it to the paintings at Ajanta and regretted that it had been so thoroughly gilded. He dated it to the seventh or eighth century; another scholar argues for later, possibly the fifteenth, on the basis of Khmer influence. The dating is genuinely open.
In the courtyard: twenty-eight hexagonal Chinese stone pagodas of six diminishing tiers along the terrace balustrade, eight bronze horses at the corners of the two terraces, carved figures in old Western military dress flanking every gateway, and, in the angled cloister, 156 gilt stucco Buddha images all facing inward toward the great hall — mostly in meditation, with eight in the subduing-Mara posture at the four corners. Scholars read the ranked images as the Buddhas of the past. The cremated ashes of Rama VIII are contained in the draped cloth panel at the front of the throne.
The Giant Swing itself stands 21.15 metres on a round base about 10.50 metres across: two main posts, each flanked at the foot by a pair of subsidiary posts with mandapa-shaped finials, a crossbeam for the swing, and at the top the elephant-eared crown carved with pudtan flowers and foliage, painted vermilion throughout. It now carries a lightning conductor.
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 | A Thai government page gives daily 08:30–16:00. The Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre records the ordination hall as 08:00–17:00 and notes daily chanting, teaching and meditation in the great hall from 19:00 to 21:00. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Thai nationals: free. Foreign visitors: 100 baht. |
| Dress | Respectful dress with shoulders and knees covered. No sleeveless shirts, no shorts. |
| Photography | No source we found states a rule, so we print none. |
| Getting there | MRT Sam Yot exit 3, about 750 metres on foot. Buses 12, 42 and 508; or the river boat to Tha Tien and bus 12 onward. Bamrung Mueang Road, Phra Nakhon. |
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.
From the wihan luang of Wat Mahathat in Sukhothai. Rama I ordered Phra Phirenthorathep to fetch it; the chronicle records that it was floated down to the capital, honoured at the landing for seven days and set on its pedestal on 9 May 1808, and that a city gate had to be demolished to admit it. The surviving pedestal at Wat Mahathat measures 8 by 4.57 metres, which fits. The image is 6.25 metres across the lap and about 8 metres high, and is described as the largest surviving Sukhothai-period bronze.
Sukhothai, but the precise date is a hypothesis rather than a finding. A university study attributes it, via the Wat Pa Mamuang inscription, to King Mahathammaracha Lithai and a casting celebrated in 1397. The research centre that reports the same identification hedges it explicitly as a supposition, on the grounds that it is believed to be the image the inscription names. It is also not unaltered: Rama I had it recast, and Rama II had the head removed and enlarged and the fingers lengthened to even them out.
Not, so far as anyone can show, because people died doing it. That is the usual explanation and a Thai history magazine investigating it reports a researcher who searched the old chronicles and found no such deaths, attributing the end of the ceremony instead to war and cost. The date is also unsettled: the Rattanakosin Exhibition Hall says the ceremony was abolished in 1932, while the archaeological record says only that it ended in Rama VII's reign. No decree or order ending it turned up in any source we consulted.
The structure dates from 1784, two years after Bangkok was founded, but it is neither in its original place nor made of its original timber. Rama V moved it from Thanon Dinso to the front of the temple between 1896 and 1901 when Bamrung Mueang Road was rebuilt. The posts have been renewed repeatedly — comprehensively in 1970 to 1972 after insect and termite damage, and again in 2006, when the Bangkok city administration replaced them with golden teak from Phrae province. The new swing was celebrated in 2007.
That is what the measurement supports and how the sources put it. A university architectural study gives the external dimensions as 72.25 metres by 22.60 and states that this makes it the longest ordination hall in the country; a Thai government page words the same claim more cautiously as one of the largest, over seventy metres long. Inside it is 10.60 by 40.80 metres, fifteen bays on sixty-eight columns. We found no national register of ordination-hall lengths against which the superlative could be tested, so we attribute it rather than assert it.
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.