A ruined and roofless compound north of Lopburi station where a departmental test pit in the 1980s found three periods of building stacked on one stupa base — Dvaravati at the bottom, a Lopburi-period prang beside it, and an Ayutthaya vihara built physically over the earlier work.
วัดนครโกษา (ร้าง) · Wat Nakhon Kosa
| Official name | วัดนครโกษา (ร้าง) — Wat Nakhon Kosa |
|---|---|
| Where | Thale Chup Son, Mueang Lopburi, Lopburi |
| Royal temple class | Not established from an official register. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Registered national ancient monument Royal Gazette vol. 98, part 63, p. 1213, 28 April B.E. 2524 Two instruments. The monument was registered as item 6 under Lopburi in the ประกาศกรมศิลปากร กำหนดจำนวนโบราณสถานสำหรับชาติ at vol. 53 p. 904 of 2 August B.E. 2479 — a bare line naming the temple, the district and the subdistrict, with no boundary. The monument land was fixed forty-five years later by a ประกาศกรมศิลปากร เรื่อง กำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน under section 7 of the Ancient Monuments Act B.E. 2504, at vol. 98 part 63 p. 1213 of 28 April B.E. 2524, issued 4 January B.E. 2524 and signed by Techo Sawananon as Director-General, setting the monument at about 4 rai 32 square wa. The register's own sub-area record carries the same 4-0-32 figure. Note the registered name: วัดนครโกษา (ร้าง), with the word for a deserted monastery inside the name rather than beside it. The register still records the custodian as the Department of Religious Affairs, which lost responsibility for abandoned-monastery land to the National Office of Buddhism in B.E. 2545; the entry has not been updated. |
| Coordinates | 14.801064, 100.615203 Fine Arts Department heritage GIS register, monument 0000696, recorded by GPS |
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 excavation dates fabric and finds. It does not date a foundation, and the department never states one.
Wat Nakhon Kosa sits on the east side of Thanon Narai Maharat a short walk north of Lopburi railway station, near San Phra Kan, and it is the least visited of the monuments in the old town. It is also, on the documents, the most instructive. Its registered name is วัดนครโกษา (ร้าง) — the parenthesis is part of the name in the Fine Arts Department's register, and it means a deserted monastery. There is no sangha here, no royal grade and no sect, and none of those absences is a gap in the research: they are what the record says.
The interesting thing about this site is that its dating was arrived at by digging rather than by looking. In the first half of B.E. 2529 the department's Lopburi unit put a test pit into the base of the great stupa. It found masonry running down about three and a half metres, stucco still stuck to parts of the base, and a brick apron round two sides — and it found that an Ayutthaya-period vihara had been built directly on top of earlier structure. The following season the department reported the conclusion in its own words: evidence of construction superimposed in three periods, Dvaravati, Lopburi and Ayutthaya. That is why the register spans the twelfth to sixteenth Buddhist centuries here while its entries for the town's other monuments sit in a narrower band.
The material bears the same reading out. The lower part of the great stupa base is Dvaravati in form; the finds from the excavation include a small dharmachakra, stucco figures of dwarfs or atlantes bearing weight, bodhisattvas and devas, and terracotta votive tablets in quantity — all of them Dvaravati in ornament. The prang is Lopburi work of about the seventeenth Buddhist century. And the change of use is legible in the fabric: U Thong-period stucco Buddha images were added onto the Khmer prang, and two large Lopburi-period deity images were re-carved into Buddhas. The finds went to the Somdet Phra Narai National Museum.
The department itself has never settled what the biggest structure on the site is. One field of its register calls it the great chedi, another calls it the base of the great prang and speculates that it may be a chedi of the kind at Wat Phra Kaeo in Lopburi, a B.E. 2529 project title calls it the base of the great chedi and a B.E. 2541 project calls it a prang-form chedi. In September B.E. 2532 the departmental unit reported that the great stupa contained building of several superimposed periods and asked headquarters to decide which period to restore it to. A meeting was convened for the following month. The register does not record what was decided.
There are wall paintings here, which almost nothing about the place mentions. An emergency conservation survey of June B.E. 2533 recorded 25.42 square metres of distemper painting of past Buddhas and the chief disciples, painted not on a plaster ground but straight onto a burnished raw-earth surface — a technique the surveying officers said they had otherwise met in the Ayutthaya period at only one place, Wat Mahathat in Ratchaburi. Their condition report was blunt: damp along the lower wall, plaster coming away in sheets, termite runs throughout.
The monument is open ground with no ticket office and no fee. What can and cannot be said about visiting it is set out below.
The base of the great stupa or prang — the department's own records call it four different things — with the Dvaravati-form lower base that the B.E. 2529 test pit reached about 350 centimetres down. Its upper part carries the weeds the register complains about; the excavation was completed and the structure left as found.
The small prang to the east, brick-built with its base collapsed. The department compares it closely to prang 16c at Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat across the railway: the same interior plan, the same pediment form and the same construction technique, differing in the ornament and in a taller choeng bat level of three upward lotus courses and two rak roi rows divided by a deep waist. Its kleep khanun show Khmer character, modelled as door guardians holding clubs standing in niches — and the Buddha images in the arches are U Thong work, while the naga at the ends of the pediments have already loosened away from the Khmer naga type, with flying devas tucked under the corners.
The vihara east of that, rectangular, of which two side walls survive, carrying a pointed-arch doorway.
A rectangular ordination-hall base east of the great prang with its image platform, where fragments of Buddha images were found.
Wall paintings inside the prang: 25.42 square metres of distemper on a raw-earth ground, of past Buddhas and the chief disciples, in red, lime white and black. The 1990 survey called the technique rare enough that it named the only Ayutthaya-period parallel the officers knew.
Modern material you can see if you look for it: the B.E. 2541 restoration replaced decayed brick individually to follow the existing courses and the old bonding pattern, with the mortar recessed about a centimetre, tied the stone lintel with stainless steel, and poured a reinforced concrete beam over it.
What is not here any more: the stone image of Kaccayana that stood at this temple was moved to Wat Sao Thong Thong across town, where the Fine Arts Department's register for that temple records that it came from วัดโกษา (ร้าง) in Lopburi.
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.
| Hours | Not established from an official source. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Not established from an official source. |
| Dress | An unenclosed ruin rather than a working temple. Ordinary courtesy at a Buddhist site applies; there is no ordination hall in use and no dress notice. |
| Photography | No official restriction was found. |
| Getting there | Thanon Narai Maharat, Tambon Thale Chup Son, Amphoe Mueang Lopburi, on the east side of the road a short way north of the railway station near San Phra Kan. The Tourism Authority gives the enquiry numbers as 0 3641 2510 and 0 3641 3779. No street number is published by the Fine Arts Department. |
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.
Because that is the registered name. The Fine Arts Department's national monument register carries this site as วัดนครโกษา (ร้าง), and it romanises it in its own English field as Wat Nakhorn Khosa (Abandoned). The parenthesis is not an editorial note added by the department's web team; it is part of the entry, and it is consistent with the rest of the record, which shows no resident sangha, no royal monastery grade and no sect, and which recorded the custodian as the Department of Religious Affairs rather than a monastery. It is a state-protected ruin, not a working temple.
From a test pit, which is why this monument's dating is better founded than most in the province. Between February and July B.E. 2529 the first Fine Arts unit at Lopburi excavated at the base of the great stupa and reached brick-and-mortar structure about 350 centimetres down, with stucco still adhering and a brick apron round two sides, and recorded that an Ayutthaya-period vihara had been built physically over the earlier work. In the following season the department reported that the pit had found construction superimposed in three periods, Dvaravati, Lopburi and Ayutthaya, and cleared about thirty metres more on the north side. That stratigraphy, not a chronicle, is what the register's twelfth-to-sixteenth-Buddhist-century span rests on.
No source establishes it. The Fine Arts Department's register writes สันนิษฐานกันว่า — it is presumed — that Chao Phraya Kosathibodi, called Lek, a minister of King Narai, ran the works and that the temple is named after him. The departmental file cites no document naming him as builder or restorer, and the presumption is offered as the origin of the name rather than as a construction record. The site itself is centuries older than his lifetime on the department's own excavated evidence, so at most the story would concern a late campaign of work on a much older place.
Yes, and they are unusual enough that the department's own conservators said so. An emergency conservation survey of 9 June B.E. 2533 by the mural and fixed-sculpture conservation section recorded 25.42 square metres of distemper painting of past Buddhas and the chief disciples, in red, lime white and black, painted directly onto a burnished raw-earth ground rather than onto lime plaster. The surveying officers noted that they knew of only one other Ayutthaya-period example of the technique, at Wat Mahathat in Ratchaburi. Their condition report at the time recorded damp along the lower wall, plaster spalling in sheets and termite runs throughout.
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 Lopburi’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.
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