Temples of Kanchanaburi

Kanchanaburi is a corridor, and everything old in it sits on a route. The Khmer came furthest west here, to a walled city on the Khwae Noi; the Burmese armies came east through the passes for three centuries; and the province's own old capital was a walled town at Lat Ya before the town moved down to the confluence of the two rivers. Most visitors come for the bridge and the waterfalls and never see any of it. The six monuments below are the ones the Thai state has actually documented, and between them they hold the westernmost Khmer sanctuary in the country, the two temples a Kanchanaburi resident will name first, two ruins inside the old city, and a village ordination hall with Chinese porcelain set into its plaster.

The single most important thing to get right here is what Prasat Mueang Sing is. It is not a wat, and — unlike almost every other Khmer-culture monument in Thailand — it is not Hindu either. Every state source that describes its religion calls it Mahayana Buddhist, and the sculpture excavated from it is Avalokitesvara, a naga-sheltered Buddha and Prajnaparamita. It is a Buddhist religious site of a different tradition and a different century from the rest of this page, and it is included on those terms. Its dating is unsettled and the state does not hide that either: the Fine Arts Department says about the eighteenth Buddhist century, in the Bayon style of Jayavarman VII's reign, and the Tourism Authority of Thailand says the late Lopburi period, about the sixteenth to eighteenth. Both are printed here.

The second thing worth knowing before you read further is that two of these temples were named in the 1920s after characters in a poem, and the Fine Arts Department is the source for it. Its own register records, on villagers' testimony, that about B.E. 2467 a monk called Phra Khru Chuan surveyed the ruins of the old city at Lat Ya and gave them the names Wat Khun Phaen, Wat Nang Phim, Wat Mae Mai and Wat Khun Krai, and supposes he took them from the sepha of Khun Chang Khun Phaen because Kanchanaburi appears in it. Wat Pa Lelai he first called Wat Pha Ok, the split-chest temple, after the broken image in its mondop. The buildings under those names are late Ayutthaya. This is the clearest case in the whole guide of why a name is not evidence, and why a page that reasons from one is reasoning backwards.

Three Royal Gazette instruments were downloaded from the Fine Arts Department's own mirror and read by eye in this run, and they show three different legal states. The national list of 8 March B.E. 2478 — in which Kanchanaburi is the first province and its block runs to six entries — registered Wat Khun Phaen, Wat Pa Lelai, Wat Nang Phim, Mueang Sing, the town wall and Wat Chai Chumphon Chana Songkhram, and fixed no boundary for any of them. A further national list of 19 July B.E. 2503, signed by Dhanit Yupho, gave Mueang Sing a boundary of 718 rai 3 ngan with a plan attached. And a section 7 order of 9 April B.E. 2544 registered Wat Ban Thuan and fixed its boundary at 3 rai 2 ngan 15 square wa in a single act. Wat Thewasangkharam is a fourth state again: carried in the national register with a full record and no gazette instrument of any kind behind it. Registered, listed, bounded and merely recorded are four different things and this province shows all four.

Mueang Sing adds a fifth figure that nobody reconciles. The gazetted boundary is 718 rai 3 ngan. The land title the Land Department subsequently issued, and the Fine Arts Department received on 17 August B.E. 2505, covers 641 rai 1 ngan 65 square wa — about 77 rai less. The department publishes both numbers on its own site, one paragraph apart, and this guide does not choose between them. The same page is the source for the park's own claim to be the first historical park in Thailand, opened on 3 April B.E. 2530 by Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn.

The method rule that came out of the Surat Thani run earned its place again here. Optical character recognition read the boundary in the B.E. 2503 order as 115 rai 3 ngan; the page was cropped and looked at at full resolution and reads 718, which is what the department's structured field and its own park history both say. The same tool read มาตรา ๑ and พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๕ in the B.E. 2544 order where the scan plainly says มาตรา ๗ and พ.ศ. ๒๕๐๔. Optical recognition may find a figure. A figure that goes on a page has to be read by eye.

Two absences shape what is below and both are stated rather than papered over. First, no royal grade appears anywhere on this page. The Kanchanaburi provincial office of the National Office of Buddhism refers to Wat Chai Chumphon Chana Songkhram in its own published notices as a พระอารามหลวง, a royal monastery, which is a state body naming the status directly — but it publishes no class or sub-rank, and the national temple register at binfo.onab.go.th returned a hard access denial to both a research server and a real browser in this run. An invented grade is worse than an omitted one, so every royalClass here is null. Second, only one of the six has publishable visiting information: the Tourism Authority of Thailand gives Mueang Sing Historical Park as open daily 07.30 to 16.30, at 20 baht for Thai nationals and 100 baht for foreign visitors. The other five have no Tourism Authority page at all under their Thai names, and their pages say the hours could not be confirmed rather than borrowing a time from a travel site.

Four of the six are working religious sites and two are ruins with burials in them — the Fine Arts Department records several dozen vessels of cremated human bone found in the chedis at Wat Khun Phaen. All of them should be walked with that in mind. BAANLYY LLC is a Nevada company and a listing portal; it does not represent any temple, and nothing on these pages is legal or religious advice.