Rama III's first foundation, built for his favourite daughter, with Chinese-derived roofs that carry no chofa, fifty-two cast bhikkhuni inside the vihara, and the kuti where Sunthorn Phu lived as a monk.
วัดเทพธิดารามวรวิหาร · Wat Thepthidaram Worawihan
| Official name | วัดเทพธิดารามวรวิหาร — Wat Thepthidaram Worawihan |
|---|---|
| Where | Samran Rat, Phra Nakhon, Bangkok |
| Royal temple class | Third class royal temple, Worawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นตรี วรวิหาร) The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's archaeological-site record states เป็นพระอารามหลวงชั้นตรี ชนิดวรวิหาร, and adds the act that conferred it: the temple was appointed a royal monastery of the third class, Worawihan type, under the Proclamation on the Ordering of Royal Monasteries of 30 September 1915. The Thai reads ชั้นตรี, third class; an automated reading of the same page rendered it as first class during research and that reading is wrong. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Carried in the national monument register; gazette announcement unread Royal Gazette vol. 94, part 123, p. 5035, 13 December 1977 The citation is quoted from the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's records, which carry it identically on four separate entries for this temple, and it was not opened at the Gazette. It is unusually well corroborated for a citation nobody read: the Fine Arts Department's own spatial register, an entirely separate system, holds a boundary polygon for this monument carrying the year 2520 and an area of 15 rai and 20 square wa, which matches the area the Sirindhorn record footnotes to that same gazette page, and four boundary markers are mapped on the ground. Two independent government systems agreeing on one gazette page is the strongest confirmation available short of opening it. |
| Coordinates | 13.753483, 100.503939 Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre archaeological-site register, record 759 |
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.
A Silpakorn University thesis states that the temple was completed in 1839 and that Rama III came in person to tie the boundary and grant the wisungkhamasima. The Sirindhorn record reaches the same year but hedges it — it is understood to have been completed in 1839, because that is when the king came to tie the sima. The difference in confidence between the two sources is worth keeping.
Rama III came to the throne in 1824. For twelve years he restored other men's temples and founded none of his own. In 1836 he broke that pattern, and the temple he chose to build first was not for himself, a queen or a mother, but for a daughter.
The daughter was Phra Ong Chao Wilat, born in 1811, his eldest. The register's language about her is unusually warm for a state document: she was a royal daughter of whom he was exceedingly fond, and whom he had serve in close attendance on him throughout. Two years after the temple was begun he raised her to Krommuen Apson Sudathep, which the record says made her the royal daughter granted a rank greater than all other royal daughters, and greatly feared by people. Her brother Phra Ong Chao Ladawan was made construction superintendent — the same prince Rama III had put in charge of building the Reclining Buddha hall at Wat Pho, a connection that matters for what is inside this temple's vihara. The princess contributed her own funds.
The site was a royal garden by the mouth of one canal where it meets the moat that rings the old city, hard against the eastern wall near the Mahakan fort. The Sirindhorn record spends several paragraphs on why that spot: it sat on the junction of three waterways, which made it a route of strategic and practical importance for leaving the city, and a trading node with dense riverside settlement around it. This was not a quiet suburban merit-field; it was built on the city's eastern hinge.
The plan is a near-square walled compound entered from the east through three gates, its wall topped with square merlons like a fortress rampart, matching neighbouring Wat Ratchanatdaram. Inside, the layout is the reign's triad: the ordination hall in the centre, the vihara to its south, the preaching hall to its north, all three facing east. The Sirindhorn record notes that the first two were built as a pair, of equal size, sharing one wall. The style is the reign's signature, the royal preference manner: Thai Buddhist iconography on a Chinese-derived building, which a Silpakorn thesis calls Chino-Thai and records Prince Naris's opinion that Chinese craftsmen must have worked on these monasteries, and that the king favoured the manner for the durability of the buildings. The visible consequence is that the roofs carry no chofa, no bai raka and no hang hong; the gables are stucco panels inlaid with glazed Chinese tile and cowrie shell instead.
In 1839 the king came in person to tie the boundary and grant the wisungkhamasima, and gave the temple its name. Within a few years a disgraced former court poet was living in the monks' quarters on the north side, under the princess's patronage, writing a poem that is now the best contemporary description of the place.
What happened afterwards is documented with unusual density, because the Sirindhorn record lists the restoration campaigns year by year. Between 1901 and 1911 a single figure, Krommuen Sommot Amoraphan, rebuilt the temple piece by piece as its lay superintendent: images brought from Phitsanulok and installed in the four prang niches in 1901; the chedis, the pavilions around the vihara, the walls, the door panels and the stone figures repaired in 1904; the gate doors and hall doors in 1907; the roofs of all three main halls in 1908; the small vihara and the scripture library in 1909; the ordination hall's marble floor laid in 1911. In 2009 an architectural conservation committee excavated under the southern scripture library and found that the building standing today is essentially a rebuild of Rama V's reign, the construction levels filled with sherds of that date and later, matching the paper record. The Crown Property Bureau funded a further restoration in 2013.
Not everything survived. The record states flatly that images were once enshrined in chambers under all four prangs and that three were stolen. One remains, in the northern prang.
The ordination hall is 13.20 m wide by 27.20 m long and 16 m high, brick and stucco on two stacked lion bases, with four stair flights. The roof is two tiers in three laps, the lowest a wraparound skirt on square columns forming a colonnaded gallery, its balustrade panels filled with green Chinese pierced glazed tile — and no chofa and no bai raka. The gable fuses Thai stucco motifs with a Chinese landscape of mountains, trees, flowers and birds, inlaid with Chinese glazed tile and cowrie shells. The outer door leaves are in gilt lacquer showing Sida enthroned in a niche with Ramakien scenes below, and the record notes that those lower scenes are repainted rather than original. Eight sema shrines with tent-form stucco roofs ring the hall, each holding a single boundary slab carved from green stone.
The ordination hall's principal image is small and precisely measured: carved from white stone, in the attitude of subduing Mara, with a face-of-lap of 15 inches, a height of 19 inches, a thickness of 8 inches and a detachable flame ushnisha. King Bhumibol named it Phra Phuttha Thewawilat in 1971. It stands on a carved and gilded throne modelled on Indra's Vejayanta, ringed with celestials and garuda cast in tin and gilded, with a five-tiered white parasol beside it — the busabok and parasol together being the temple's own emblem. Flanking it are two standing crowned bronze Buddhas of the early Rattanakosin period.
The vihara is the same width as the ordination hall and slightly shorter, 13.20 m by 22.20 m and 15 m high. Its gable carries glazed-tile Chinese phoenixes ringed with Thai flower motifs; its interior murals are a Chinese phoenix pattern on a red ground; its inner door leaves are painted on red with lotus bowls and flower vases on stacked tables and a bird chasing an insect above. The principal image here is stucco, in the attitude of subduing Mara, with a lap of 75 inches and a height of 95 inches — and the record gives it no name, no maker, no date and no origin. A low wall inlaid with brown pierced glazed tile encloses fourteen square redented chedis around it.
In front of that image, on a marble platform, stand fifty-two figures of noble female disciples, cast in tin, with a lap of 11 inches and a height of 21 inches each — forty-nine seated and three standing. The Sirindhorn record identifies them explicitly as bhikkhuni and says the arrangement differs from other temples in order to suit a monastery built to honour a royal daughter. Two further images stand with them: a gilt tin figure of Mahapajapati Gotami, the first bhikkhuni, which the record says Rama III ordered made at the founding of the temple, and a brass Maitreya described as original temple property, its right hand shaped to grip an object now lost.
The Chinese stone figures are a separate set, and confusing them with the fifty-two is the standard error about this temple. They stand outdoors in the ordination hall's courtyard, both human and animal, most of them arrived as ship ballast — but the record adds that a subset in Thai dress was commissioned by Rama III at the same time to decorate the monastery, showing a woman sitting side-legged resting on her arm, a mother with a child, and palace women. The register maps seventeen Chinese figures, seven carved Thai-women figures, three carved stone pillars, one stone animal and one lion. Most of the human figures are damaged, and the record notes that some have been repaired wrongly, differing from their original form.
The four prangs stand at the corners of the ordination hall's low wall, about 5 m each, on octagonal terraces, their bases redented on a twenty-cornered plan with every corner equal. Each has four niches holding one of the Four Guardian Kings, a tier of kneeling yaksha above, then five stacked storeys under a metal finial. In front of each is a stone candle carved with a dragon coiled around the shaft; the text says four and the register maps three.
The kuti where Sunthorn Phu lived is a registered ancient monument in its own right — the Fine Arts Department's register names it and records that it is the kuti in which the great poet of the early Rattanakosin period resided while ordained. It is four brick-and-stucco buildings enclosing an open central court on the east side of the seventh section, the front building an open pavilion with no walls, and the temple has withdrawn that side from monastic use to preserve it, leaving only the western half in use as quarters.
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 | Two official sources give slightly different figures. The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's record says open every day at no charge from 07.30 to 18.00, with morning chanting at 08.30 and evening chanting at 19.00. The Tourism Authority of Thailand says daily 8am to 5pm. Both are printed here as they stand. |
|---|---|
| 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 70 Maha Chai Road, Samran Rat, between the Democracy Monument and the Golden Mount. From the Democracy Monument, turn into Maha Chai Road at the Pom Mahakan intersection, pass Wat Ratchanatdaram, cross the canal, and the temple is about 220 m further on the right. |
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 almost everything popularly said about them is wrong. They are inside the vihara, not in the courtyard; they are cast tin, not carved stone; and they are not Chinese. The Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's record describes a marble platform in front of the vihara's principal image bearing sculptures of noble female disciples — bhikkhuni — with a lap of 11 inches and a height of 21 inches each, fifty-two in all, forty-nine seated and three standing, and says the arrangement differs from other temples in order to suit a monastery built to honour a royal daughter. The Chinese stone figures outdoors are a different set entirely, they are lay figures of mothers and palace women, and no source gives them as fifty-two.
No. Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University's library records that he composed Nirat Phukhao Thong in 1828, aged forty-two, while ordained at Wat Ratchaburana — eight years before this temple existed and eleven before he moved into it. The work of this temple is Ramphan Philap, which both the Sirindhorn record and Silpakorn University name as the poem most closely connected with the place. It describes the temple's buildings and ornaments as they stood, and the Sirindhorn record uses it as a dating control: because the poem mentions only the two standing crowned Buddhas beside the principal image, the additional images in front of it must have been installed later.
Between 1839 and 1842 on the better evidence. Silpakorn University's Thapra Palace Library gives those years, and the Sirindhorn museum database gives them independently. One Sirindhorn record gives a range beginning in 1825, which cannot be right as written, since the temple was not begun until 1836 nor completed until 1839 — that figure appears to have compressed his whole monkhood, which did begin at Wat Ratchaburana in 1825, onto this one temple. Throughout his residence he was under the patronage of Krommuen Apson Sudathep, the princess for whom the temple was built.
Because they are, in the sense that matters. The temple is built in what Thai scholarship calls the royal preference manner of Rama III's reign, sometimes translated as the outside-the-pattern style: Thai Buddhist iconography carried on a Chinese-derived building. The visible consequence is that the roofs of the ordination hall, the vihara and the preaching hall carry none of the finials a Thai temple normally has — no chofa, no bai raka, no hang hong. The gables are stucco panels inlaid with glazed Chinese tile and cowrie shell instead, and the balustrades are filled with pierced green Chinese tile. The two scripture libraries are the exception: they keep the traditional finials.
Yes. The kuti is a registered ancient monument in its own right, and the temple has taken the eastern side of the seventh section out of monastic use in order to preserve it, leaving only the western half in use as quarters. Inside it is a museum, which the Sirindhorn museum database records as established in 1964, free of charge and open daily, with display rooms including one furnished as the room he is believed to have used, holding scripture cabinets, an altar table, a charcoal stove and a tea kettle. A 2023 Thai PBS feature gives its hours as 09.00 to 16.00 and notes that the group of quarters won a conservation award from the Association of Siamese Architects in 1994.
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.
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