Krabi is not a province of old temples, and any guide that implies otherwise is selling you something. There is no Lan Na wihan here, no Ayutthaya-period prang, no chronicle tradition of royal foundation. The oldest thing in this province by a very long way is in the ground and on cave walls: red rock paintings in the limestone of Ao Luek, and at Khlong Thom an early-historic settlement that made glass beads and traded them with India while the Thai kingdoms of the north did not yet exist.
What the province does have, and what people actually come for, is a particular kind of temple that suits the landscape: monasteries built into and around caves, and relic chedis raised on hilltops in living memory. Wat Tham Suea is the most visited Buddhist site in southern Thailand outside Nakhon Si Thammarat and its famous summit is reached by more than twelve hundred steps. Wat Maha That Wachiramongkhon at Ao Luek carries a gilded chedi the provincial office of the National Office of Buddhism gives as roughly ninety-five metres tall, raised in the 1990s and 2000s. Neither is ancient. Both are worth the trip, and the honest reason is not age.
The pages below separate what a state register records from what is told about a place, as every page in this guide does. In Krabi that separation does more work than usual, because the popular English accounts of these temples are unusually confident about dates that no official source read for this guide states at all.
0 of 6 temples in Krabi are plotted — none of the temples on this page yet have a confirmed coordinate, so there is no map rather than an approximate one.
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: A second Krabi run has the province's genuinely archaeological ground, which this run reached only through the Khlong Thom page: ถ้ำผีหัวโต (Tham Phi Hua To) and the Ao Luek rock-painting group, เขาขาว (the Khao Khao cluster at Ban Klang, Ao Luek — registered as a national ancient monument under an announcement published in the Royal Gazette vol. 133, special part 79ง, 4 April B.E. 2559 (2016), per the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre), เขาหน้าวังหมี, and the Khuan Luk Pat mound itself as a site page rather than as part of the Wat Khlong Thom entry. On the temple side: วัดราษฎร์รังสรรค์ at Ao Luek and วัดเฉลิมพนมเขต at Khao Phanom, both of which the provincial office of the National Office of Buddhism writes about but for which no history page was reachable this run. BEFORE ANY OF IT: re-run every entry in this file against the Fine Arts Department register at gis.finearts.go.th, which was unreachable when this file was built, and fill in the ancientMonument fields that are null here for that reason alone.
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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