Lampang is the province where three different Thailands are standing within a few kilometres of each other. There is the Lanna monastery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, complete and walled, at Ko Kha. There are the Burmese temples the teak merchants built when British timber money came up the Wang river in the 1890s. And there is the central-Thai wihan raised in the 1910s by the last ruling lord of the city under a Bangkok king. Read in that order, the six temples below are a physical account of how the north stopped being its own country.
This province gave this guide its best monument record so far and its worst ecclesiastical one, and both facts are worth stating plainly. Three Royal Gazette references are printed here — for Wat Phra That Lampang Luang, for Wat Phra Kaeo Don Tao and for Wat Lai Hin — which is more than the previous five provinces produced between them, and they come from the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre's archaeological database, the National Office of Buddhism's provincial office and the state cultural-environment register respectively. Against that, two of these six are royal monasteries and no state source reachable in this run gives the grade of either. Nakhon Pathom had a Sangha register with a ประเภทวัด field; the Lampang provincial office publishes prose. So `royalClass` is null twice here, which is the honest value and not a gap in the research.
Two cautions to carry around the province. First, the state sources repeat a formula about Wat Phra That Lampang Luang — that it dates from the time of Queen Chamathewi, around the end of the twentieth Buddhist century — whose two halves are eight hundred years apart, and they repeat it in identical words on two different government sites, which makes it one copied sentence rather than two agreeing sources. Second, the Emerald Buddha is not at the temple named after it: the national palladium is recorded as having stood at Wat Phra Kaeo Don Tao for thirty-two years before moving on, and the jade Phra Kaeo Don Tao itself is at Wat Phra That Lampang Luang.
One more distinction this province forces, and it is the same class of error as confusing Memory of the World with World Heritage. Wat Pongsanuk won a UNESCO Award of Merit in the 2008 Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation — a regional prize for the quality of a conservation project, recorded in UNESCO's own published list of winners, which was read directly in this run. It is not a World Heritage Site, no temple in Lampang is, and `worldHeritage` is null on all six records here. What the award actually recognised is worth more than the confusion it causes: a community keeping its own wooden building instead of replacing it.
The tourism authority's pages rendered again this run, as they first did for Nakhon Pathom, and gave hours for three of the six. The other three have no hours on this page and say so: the tourism authority publishes an attraction page for Wat Si Chum with an empty opening-hours field, and has no page at all for Wat Lai Hin or Wat Bunyawat Wihan. That is now a finding about what the Thai state publishes rather than a failure of tooling, which is the whole point of having fixed the tooling.
3 of 6 temples in Lampang are plotted. The others have no confirmed coordinate yet, so they are not shown as pins.
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 queue named only Wat Phra That Lampang Luang for this province and six shipped: the great monument at Ko Kha, the two royal monasteries in the town, the Burmese temple at Suan Dok, the UNESCO-award temple on its artificial Mount Meru, and the seventeenth-century village wihan at Lai Hin. Lampang is complete as the queue defines it. If a second run is ever wanted, the obvious six are Wat Si Rong Mueang in Tambon Sop Tui — the other great Burmese temple of the teak years, for which no state source in this run gave a registration or a date this guide was prepared to print — Wat Chalermphrakiat Phrachomklao Rachanusorn on its limestone pinnacles at Chae Hom, Wat Phra That Chom Ping in Ko Kha with its own camera-obscura phenomenon, Wat Chedi Sao Lang, Wat Katuek Chiang Man, and the Wat Pong Sanuk Tai side of the Pong Sanuk hill, which would also be the chance to settle the north/south naming question this run could not. Three jobs are left open for whoever takes them. The first is still the Royal Gazette, which has now refused every request across six provinces and seven runs; three citations are printed in this province and none of them was read from the gazette itself. The second is the royal-monastery grades of Wat Phra Kaeo Don Tao Suchadaram and Wat Bunyawat Wihan, which a national ONAB register or the gazette announcement of each elevation would settle in one document. The third is the part-number and date discrepancy between the two Ko Kha boundary announcements in Royal Gazette vol. 97, where the higher part carries the earlier date and one of the two figures as reported must therefore be wrong.
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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