Kamphaeng Phet is the third town of a World Heritage property and the one almost nobody visits. Sukhothai, Si Satchanalai and Kamphaeng Phet were inscribed together in December 1991 under criteria (i) and (iii), and UNESCO's own figures show how lopsided the property is: 11,852 hectares in all, of which Sukhothai has 7,000, Si Satchanalai 4,514, and Kamphaeng Phet 338. This was the kingdom's southern frontier fortress, and the name means diamond wall.
The six monuments below are split between three places. Two stand inside the old city wall, where the Fine Arts Department registered 503 rai in B.E. 2511. Three stand in the Aranyik quarter north of the wall, the forest-monastery zone of 1,611 rai, which is where the best of it is — a mondop with a Buddha on each of its four faces, a chedi ringed by 68 stucco elephants, and a vihara roofed on single-piece laterite pillars four to five meters tall. The sixth is across the Ping at Nakhon Chum, outside the park, outside the inscribed property and still a working monastery.
Two things this guide will not do. It will not put a World Heritage badge on the Nakhon Chum monastery, because no state source places it inside the property. And it will not print a founding date for any of them, because none exists: what the record gives is a registration, an excavation report, a stylistic argument and, in one case, a silver-leaf inscription dug out of a chedi. Where the state publishes two answers — and in this province it does, about subdistricts, about areas, and about who was registered in 1935 — both are printed.
6 of 6 temples in Kamphaeng Phet are plotted.
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: The Kamphaeng Phet park service carries 117 monument positions for the old town and Nakhon Chum, so this province is barely begun. The strongest next six: Wat Awat Yai and Wat Awat Noi, both named in the first national list of B.E. 2478 and both large Aranyik monasteries, the first with a laterite-cut well that is among the most photographed things in the zone; Wat Sing and Wat Tuek Phram, the other two Aranyik monasteries on that same 1935 list, which would complete the eight; Wat Phra Si Ariyabot's neighbor Wat Khong Chai, and Wat Nak Chet Sian with its seven-headed naga balustrades. Then the palace ground at Sa Mon, which is a residence rather than a monastery and belongs in a different guide, and the San Phra Isuan shrine, whose pedestal inscription of B.E. 2053 is the single most useful dated document in the province and turns up in the dating of three of the six monuments above. Across the river, the four Nakhon Chum monasteries the B.E. 2511 instrument registered by name — Wat Chedi Klang Thung, Wat Nong Langka, Wat Nong Phikun and Wat Sum Ko — are the obvious second Nakhon Chum run, and unlike Wat Phra Borommathat they carry a boundary instrument of their own. Note before building any of them that the register spells several Kamphaeng Phet monasteries differently from the department's own published history.
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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