Wat Phra Borommathat

What the official record says

Where Wat Phra Borommathat is

When was it founded — and what actually establishes that?

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 inscription is a dated primary document, so the B.E. 1900 date is firm for the event it records — a king raising a relic monument in the middle of Nakhon Chum. What is not established is that the monument he raised is the one standing on this ground. The identification and the three-chedi reconstruction are both stated as assumptions by the bodies that publish them, and are not treated here as anything more.

The history of Wat Phra Borommathat

Across the Ping from the ruins, Nakhon Chum is the older settlement and Wat Phra Borommathat sits in the middle of it, inside the line of the old moat, about 495 meters back from the river. It is the only one of the six monuments in this guide that is still a working monastery with monks in residence. Everything else here is held by the Fine Arts Department and empty. That difference is worth keeping in mind at the gate: this is a place of worship with a congregation, not an archaeological site with a ticket office.

Its claim rests on an inscription. Sukhothai Inscription 3, the Nakhon Chum inscription, records that in B.E. 1900 King Maha Thammaracha Lithai came here to raise a Phra Si Maha That and to plant a Sri Maha Bodhi tree that had been brought from Lanka, in the middle of the city of Nakhon Chum. That is a dated document saying a specific thing. What it does not say is that the monument he raised is the chedi now standing on this ground, and the department and the research database both write the identification as an assumption rather than a finding. It is the strongest claim in the province and it is still an assumption.

The chedi you actually look at is Burmese, and recently so by the standards of everything else in this guide. In the reign of King Chulalongkorn a Burmese timber merchant known as Sae Pho, or by his Thai title Phraya Taka, was given permission to repair the relic monument and instead built it afresh in the Mon-Burmese manner — the tapering, ringed, gilded form that stands there now, which looks nothing like anything across the river. The teak trade on the Ping brought Burmese money and Burmese craftsmen into this stretch of the north in the late nineteenth century, and this chedi is the most conspicuous thing they left in Kamphaeng Phet.

What was replaced is a reconstruction rather than a record. The chedi is held to have been three lotus-bud chedis, the Sukhothai phum khao bin form, standing together on one base before the rebuilding. That is an assumption too, and it is the kind of assumption that is very hard to test once the thing it describes has been encased in a new building. The register's dating for the site spans the 20th to the 25th Buddhist century, which is a way of saying that the ground has been in religious use from the Sukhothai period more or less continuously to the present — which, for a monastery that still has monks in it, is the plainest fact on the page.

What you actually see

The principal chedi in its present Mon-Burmese form: tapering, ringed and gilded, built anew rather than repaired by the Burmese timber merchant Sae Pho, or Phraya Taka, in the reign of King Chulalongkorn.

A working monastery rather than a ruin — monks in residence, and the ordinary daily use of a village temple around the monument.

The setting inside the moat of the old city of Nakhon Chum, about 495 meters south of the Ping, with the modern town built up around it.

The contrast with the east bank: nothing in the historical park across the river looks remotely like this chedi, which is the point of coming over.

Visiting: hours, admission, dress and photography

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.

What we could not establish

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.

• Whether the relic monument of Inscription 3 is this one. Both the department and the research database state the identification as an assumption and neither establishes it.
• What the chedi looked like before the fifth-reign rebuilding. The three-lotus-bud reconstruction is an assumption and the evidence for it was not found in this run.
• Which Royal Gazette list names this monastery. The register codes it as gazette-listed, and the instrument was not identified from any source read.
• What became of the Sri Maha Bodhi the inscription says was planted from Lanka, and whether any tree on the ground is identified with it.
• Whether anything was recorded of the earlier structure before Phraya Taka encased or replaced it.
• The royal grade and the sect of the monastery. The National Office of Buddhism's sites, onab.go.th and binfo.onab.go.th, were unreachable from this sandbox as they have been throughout this project.

Wat Phra Borommathat: common questions

Where to go from here

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 Kamphaeng Phet’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.