Khon Kaen is the largest city in the upper Isan and it has almost no monumental Buddhist architecture, which is the honest starting point for this province rather than an apology for it. The Fine Arts Department's national register carries 494 sites here. Eighteen of them are registered with a delimited land boundary, thirteen are registered without one, one is part-registered, and the remaining 462 are either recorded as ancient monuments without registration or still waiting to be assessed. Among that registered thirty-two there is no great royal stupa, no old capital and no historical park.
What there is instead is two things that are genuinely worth the trip and are badly served in English. The first is the ordination halls. Four of the eighteen fully registered monuments in this province are a sim — a village ordination hall — and they were registered for what is painted on them. Hup taem, the Isan term for wall painting, is a tradition of village craftsmen working in earth colours on the outside of a building as well as the inside, and it carries literature that the central Thai tradition does not: Sinsai, a Lao verse romance, and Phra Lak Phra Ram, the Lao Ramayana, alongside the Vessantara Jataka and scenes of hell. Two of those sims are on these pages and between them they carry both epics.
The second is the Khmer ground in the south and east of the province, and the thing to hold on to about it is that the two monuments in this batch are not the same kind of building. Prasat Pueai Noi the Fine Arts Department calls a Hindu temple outright, and describes through Vishnu on the naga, Gajalakshmi and Uma-Mahesvara; it is the most complete Khmer sanctuary anywhere in the upper Isan. Ku Prapha Chai the department reads as a chapel serving one of the hospitals that Jayavarman VII — a Mahayana Buddhist — ordered built across his empire, and the objects dug out of it are a Vajradhara head and a naga-sheltered Buddha. One province, two Khmer ruins, two religions, and describing either from the other is a factual error.
The province's own emblem is a small stupa in a village twelve kilometres out of town. Phra That Kham Kaen is Lan Xang in form, is very probably the reason the province has its name, and is the clearest case in this guide of two arms of the Thai state failing to agree: the Fine Arts Department and the Tourism Authority of Thailand differ by three centuries on when it was built and by fourteen metres on how tall it is. Both sets of figures are on its page.
One structural point about this province, because it changes what a reader should expect. In four of these six entries the monument is a single BUILDING inside a working temple — three ordination halls and one scripture library — and not the temple itself. The registered plot is the building's footprint, sometimes under a rai; the wat around it is modern and unprotected; and the Fine Arts Department's register names the temple as the monument's owner rather than as the monument. That is why the pages here are titled for a sim or a ho trai rather than for a wat.
6 of 6 temples in Khon Kaen 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: Six built and the province has real registered ground left, which is not true of everywhere this guide has been lately. Twelve of the eighteen monuments registered with a boundary are unbuilt, and the six strongest are: กู่แก้ว (กู่บ้านหัวบึง) (0002291) at Ban Hua Bueng, the third Khmer monument in the province and the one with the best finds — the department records that its excavation of B.E. 2529–2530 recovered the hospital inscription itself, ศิลาจารึกโรงพยาบาล, along with a Vajradhara, a Yama riding a buffalo and a Vajrapani on a garuda, and its two gazette instruments (เล่ม ๗๔ ตอนที่ ๙๖, ๑๒ พฤศจิกายน ๒๕๐๐ and เล่ม ๙๙ ตอนที่ ๑๗๒, ๑๘ พฤศจิกายน ๒๕๒๕) were already downloaded in this run; สิมวัดสนวนวารีพัฒนาราม (0002349) at Ban Hua Nong, Amphoe Ban Phai — the third painted sim of the 2544 instrument, whose hup taem the department attributes to a Vietnamese craftsman, ฝีมือช่างชาวญวณ, which none of the others are, and whose plot of ๑ งาน ๙๑.๑๗ ตารางวา was read from the gazette in this run; สิมวัดสระทอง (0002395) at Ban Bua, Amphoe Mancha Khiri, the fourth painted sim of that same instrument; ปราสาทเปือยน้อย's neighbours in the north — กู่โนนแท่น (0002310) and กู่บ้าน (0002328), both status 5; and วัดมัชฌิมวิทยาราม (วัดบ้านลาน) (0002360) in Amphoe Ban Phai. Beyond those, the thirteen monuments at status 1 include พระยืน (0002312) and the four Kut Khao entries of the 1935 list — หนองสระบ้านโพธิ์ไชย, บ้านเก่าหมักทัน, หนองคู and หินฮาวหนองผือ — which are archaeological sites rather than temples and belong on a different kind of page. TWO TEMPLES WERE RESEARCHED AND NOT BUILT, and both are source-chain problems rather than research ones. วัดหนองแวง (พระมหาธาตุแก่นนคร), the nine-storey stupa in the city, is by a distance the most-searched temple in this province in English; it is a royal monastery and it appears nowhere in the Fine Arts Department's monument register, because the stupa is modern, so the only documentary basis for a page would be a National Office of Buddhism record of its royal grade — and binfo.onab.go.th did not answer in this run. วัดธาตุ พระอารามหลวง in the city is the same case. Whoever takes the second Khon Kaen run should start by testing มติมหาเถรสมาคม at mahathera.onab.go.th for both, which is the route the Udon Thani run found for exactly this problem; a grade read there would unlock the two temples most readers are actually looking for.
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