Chonburi is the province most readers of this guide already live in or fly into: Sriracha and Laem Chabang, the Amata Nakorn industrial estates, Bang Saen, Pattaya, Sattahip. It is the eastern seaboard, and its reputation is industrial and coastal rather than historical. That reputation is not wrong, but it is incomplete, and the gap is the reason this page exists.
The province has no Khmer sanctuary and no historical park. What it has is older and quieter than either. At Phanat Nikhom, inland from the coast, there is a large moated town of the Dvaravati period surrounded by its own earthwork, registered as a national ancient monument in 1935 and still largely unexcavated. A few kilometres from it is a prehistoric burial mound whose excavation, run jointly by the Fine Arts Department and the University of Otago in the mid-1980s, produced more than a hundred and fifty burials and became one of the most-cited sites in the archaeology of Southeast Asia.
On the coast the record is Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin: a registered temple ruin at Ang Sila whose original ordination hall survives only as its base, and two royal monasteries in the provincial town, one of them holding a mural cycle the Fine Arts Department thinks important enough to publish a study of. South of them, in the middle of the Pattaya conurbation, sits a very large monastery founded within living memory and named for the monk who built it.
Every page here keeps what a register records apart from what is told about a place. The honesty costs something visible on this page in particular: five of these six monuments ship with no map, because no source this run could reach published a coordinate that identifies them. Those sentences are an asset, not a gap, and the note above says exactly which route should close them.
2 of 6 temples in Chonburi are plotted. The others have no confirmed coordinate yet, so they are not shown as pins.
Every page is built from the National Office of Buddhism and Department of Religious Affairs registers, the Fine Arts Department’s national monument register and its published monographs, the Royal Gazette where it could be read, UNESCO, and the temples’ own material — with the Tourism Authority of Thailand used only for visiting practicalities, never for history. Nothing here is taken from a travel blog, a listicle or a review site.
The rule that governs every page is that recorded tradition is not history. Thai temple histories are full of foundation legends, and they are worth telling — but told as tradition, in those words, never flattened into a bare founding date. Where a date is not established, the page says so, and that sentence is the useful part.
Still to come here: Chonburi is a province this guide has only opened, not worked. The first jobs of a second run are not new monuments. FIRST: read api.finearts.go.th/opendata/apiwebservices/SV-001, the Fine Arts Department own monument register published as open data under an Open Data Common licence and documented at data.finearts.go.th/dataset/gis_fad001. It is described as carrying coordinates nationwide. This run could not reach it because the host did not answer a robots.txt request and the fetch tool declined before trying; a run with a rendering browser should test it before anything else, because it would close the five missing coordinates on this page and probably the coordinate backlog across the whole guide. SECOND: open the department own article 26371 on the mural cycle in the ubosot of Wat Yai Intharam. It exists, it is the single best documentary source on the most important painting in the province, and it returned 403 under every office prefix tried here — try further prefixes, because /archae/ and /ratchaburimuseum/ served other ids in the same series when /promotion/ and /chonburilibrary/ did not. THIRD: establish whether Wat Yai Intharam and Wat Khao Bang Sai are registered ancient monuments at all; both are null here, and null means unread. FOURTH: find the instrument that raised Wat Yansangwararam to its royal grade — the name ends วรมหาวิหาร, which is the sub-rank, but no source read here states the class, so royalClass is null and must stay null until an instrument is read. Then the monuments. The obvious six: เขาพระพุทธบาทบางพระ at Sriracha and วัดหนองปรือ, both of which have articles in the same National Library series (ids 26376 and 26382) that this run did not open; ศาลจังหวัดชลบุรี หลังเก่า, the old provincial courthouse (id 26384), which is a registered civil monument rather than a temple and would be the first in this guide; วัดโกมุทรัตนาราม at อ่างศิลา, which ONEP carries at site 5268 with a coordinate and a foundation year of พ.ศ. 2504; วัดใหม่เกตุงาม at ONEP site 5269; and วัดเขาพุทธโคดม at ศรีราชา. A warning for whoever takes เมืองพระรถ further: see the note on that page about the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre record, which is not about this province at all.
Read the guide to Buddhism and temple etiquette in Thailand first — dress, footwear, photography and how to behave around monks. Then the Bangkok city guide and things to do in Bangkok for everything around them.
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