The largest monument in Lopburi and the one a visitor meets first, straight across the road from the railway station: a laterite prang some thirty metres high carrying Khmer, early Ayutthaya and late Ayutthaya ornament at once, inside a walled compound of galleries, chedi and a vihara King Narai built with Western windows.
วัดพระศรีรัตนมหาธาตุ · Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat
| Official name | วัดพระศรีรัตนมหาธาตุ — Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat |
|---|---|
| Where | Tha Hin, 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. 53, p. 904, 2 August B.E. 2479 The instrument is a ประกาศกรมศิลปากร เรื่อง กำหนดจำนวนโบราณสถานสำหรับชาติ made under section 6 of the Ancient Monuments Act B.E. 2477, issued on 13 July B.E. 2479 and signed by Wichitwathakan as Director-General. Under the heading for Lopburi province the temple is item 3, and the entry is a bare line: the name, the district and the subdistrict, with no description and no boundary. Two things follow from that and both matter. First, the department's register carries this monument at status 1 — registered, with no monument land fixed — which is why it has no gazetted area while Prang Sam Yot, registered by the same 1936 announcement, acquired one in B.E. 2545. Second, the land it stands on is held on title deed 11037, land number 553, survey sheet 839, at 20 rai 2 ngan 72 square wa, with the Fine Arts Department recorded as custodian. Both figures were read in the department's register in this run. The 1936 sheet itself is mirrored by the department at gis.finearts.go.th and was opened, but it is a scan with no text layer and the entry was read through the register that indexes it rather than off the page. |
| Coordinates | 14.798383, 100.614746 Fine Arts Department heritage GIS register, monument 0000674, 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 Tourism Authority of Thailand's own page opens by saying that no evidence clearly shows when this temple was built, which is the same answer the department gives in more words. Where the two agree on an absence, this page prints the absence.
Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat stands directly opposite Lopburi railway station, which is the first thing to know about it and the reason most people see it at all. The compound is large, walled and roofless, and it is not a working monastery: the Fine Arts Department is recorded in its own register as the custodian, and the current admission-fee regulation lists it among the four ancient monuments in the province that charge for entry. Nothing in the state record says who built it or when.
That silence is worth sitting with, because the temple is plainly old. The department dates it, in its own hedged wording, to the eighteenth or nineteenth Buddhist century — the Lopburi period, when this town was a Khmer provincial centre — and dates the ornament on the great prang across a much wider span, Lopburi through early Ayutthaya to late Ayutthaya. The prang is laterite from its base to the pediment and brick above that to the summit, with an eastern porch and stucco showing Buddha images and scenes from the life of the Buddha. Its height, 30.70 metres, is the single measurement the department publishes for this site.
The oldest dated thing here is not a building. In June B.E. 2467 an official of the National Library, Luang Boribal Buribhand, found a carved limestone base of a standing Buddha at the corner of the outer wall. Its two lines of Sanskrit in post-Pallava script were read and published by George Coedes and are catalogued as ลบ. 5 and K. 577; they record that a chief named Arjava, of the people of Tangura and son of the king of Shambhuka, made the image. The letterforms put it around the thirteenth or fourteenth Buddhist century, which is roughly five hundred years before the temple the department presumes around it. The base is now in the Somdet Phra Narai National Museum a few streets away. It is evidence that something Buddhist was happening on this ground very early, and it is not evidence for a foundation date.
The buildings in front of the prang belong to a different century and a different sensibility. King Narai moved his court to Lopburi in the 1660s, and the vihara luang here has square Thai doorways and Western windows in the same wall — the pointed and rounded arches the department attributes to foreign builders in his service, the same hands at work on his palace a few hundred metres away. Beyond it stands the sala pluang khrueang, the pavilion where a king changed out of his regalia before entering to worship, now reduced to leaning columns. The small ordination hall to the south has French doors and windows throughout.
The department has been working here since at least B.E. 2526, and the record of that work is unusually complete: restoration campaigns in 2526, 2527, 2528 and 2529, a test excavation in 2530, a survey of the fixed sculpture in 2532, emergency mural conservation in 2539 and a full conservation project for the paintings and sculpture in 2549, landscaping in 2556 and new lighting in 2558. What that record does not contain is any statement of which standing masonry is original and which is the department's rebuild. Nobody publishes that, and this page does not guess it.
It is a state-managed monument rather than a place of worship, and the practicalities below come from the Tourism Authority of Thailand and from the ministerial regulation that sets the fee. BAANLYY does not represent the monument and nothing here is religious advice.
The great prang, 30.70 metres to the summit — laterite up to the pediment, brick above, with a projecting eastern porch. The stucco on the pediment carries Buddha images and scenes from the life of the Buddha along with human faces and foliate work, and the Fine Arts Department reads the ornament as mixing Lopburi, early Ayutthaya and late Ayutthaya hands rather than belonging to one campaign. Smaller prang stand to its north and south and a covered gallery, the rabiang khot, runs round the group.
The vihara luang in front of the prang, built in King Narai's reign: a large hall with Thai rectangular doorways and Western windows in the same walls, enclosed by a low kamphaeng kaeo. Its raised platform now holds a sandstone Naga-protected Buddha, 1.5 metres across the lap and 3 metres high, which the Tourism Authority records as having been given the name Phra Phuttha Lawaburarak — the Buddha who guards Lopburi — by the Supreme Patriarch.
The sala pluang khrueang, the disrobing pavilion nearest the entrance, where a king changed out of his regalia before worship. Only its leaning columns survive, and it is the first structure on the path in.
The small ordination hall south of the vihara luang, whose doors and windows are French throughout — the plainest single piece of evidence on the site that the court and its foreign builders were here.
The outer chedi and prang beyond the gallery, which the department reads as early Ayutthaya work, and between the inner and outer galleries chedi of the singha-base type and the redented yo mum mai sip song type of late Ayutthaya.
One small prang with interior wall paintings — distemper figures of the Buddha and his disciples that the department calls early wall painting, in a tower it distinguishes from early Ayutthaya prang because the profile has not yet taken the maize-cob form and its summit is still a lotus rather than a nophasun finial. The register presumes the paintings are of the same generation as the main prang, around the eighteenth Buddhist century, and marks that as a presumption.
A subsidiary prang at the north-west, where every corner of the redented plan is modelled as a thep phanom figure in prayer facing outward, square-faced with joined brows in the U Thong manner, with a triangular crown radiating light.
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 | Open daily 08.00–17.00. This is the line in the body text of the Tourism Authority of Thailand's own attraction page, read in a rendering browser on 7 September 2026. The same page's structured opening-hours block is a live open/closed widget and carries no times at all — reading that block instead of the prose is what left earlier temples in this guide without hours. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Thai nationals: 10 baht. Foreign visitors: 80 baht. |
| Dress | A roofless state-managed monument rather than a working monastery, so no ordination-hall etiquette applies, but it is a Buddhist site and shoulders and knees covered is the ordinary courtesy. No official dress notice was found. |
| Photography | No official restriction was found for this monument. |
| Getting there | Directly opposite Lopburi railway station, Tambon Tha Hin, Amphoe Mueang Lopburi. The Tourism Authority lists parking and gives the enquiry number as 0 3641 2510, which is the Fine Arts Department's fourth regional office at Lopburi on Thanon Phraya Kamchat. |
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.
No, and the confusion is worth heading off because four temples of that name are carried in the Fine Arts Department's national register. This is the Lopburi one, register id 0000674, in Tambon Tha Hin opposite the railway station. The Phitsanulok temple is register id 0004616 and is the only one of the four that holds the Woramahawihan rank and the Phra Phuttha Chinnarat image; the others are at Si Satchanalai in Sukhothai and at Mueang Suphan Buri. Mahathat is a title meaning a temple of the great relic, not a proper name, so nothing about the rank, the history or the status of any one of them carries across to the others.
Yes, there is a dual rate and it is set by law rather than by the site. The ministerial regulation on entry fees for registered ancient monuments and national museums, second issue, B.E. 2568, published in the Royal Gazette on 27 May B.E. 2568, sets 10 baht for Thai nationals and 80 baht for visitors of other nationalities at each of the four charging monuments in Lopburi, or 30 baht and 200 baht for a combined ticket that also covers Prang Sam Yot, Ban Wichayen and Phra Thinang Krai Son Siharat. Older figures of 50 and 150 baht are still printed on the Tourism Authority's page and by Lopburi municipality; those come from the B.E. 2551 regulation, which the 2568 instrument repealed.
It does not, and the gap between the two is the interesting part. The inscribed base of a standing Buddha found at the corner of the outer wall in June B.E. 2467 is catalogued as ลบ. 5 and as K. 577 in George Coedes' corpus; it is Sanskrit in post-Pallava script and is dated by its letterforms to roughly the thirteenth or fourteenth Buddhist century. The Fine Arts Department's presumed date for the temple around it is the eighteenth or nineteenth Buddhist century, four to five hundred years later. The base is evidence of much earlier Buddhist activity on this ground and no state source treats it as a foundation date for the monument.
Because they were built that way, in King Narai's reign, when the court sat at Lopburi and foreign designers were working for it. The Fine Arts Department describes the vihara luang as having square Thai doorways and Western windows in the same walls, and reads the pointed and rounded arches as the work of foreign builders. The same combination appears in the small ordination hall to the south, whose doors and windows are French throughout, and at his palace a few streets away. It is the clearest thing on the site that can be dated from the fabric rather than from a story.
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.
If you are thinking about more than a visit: work out which Thai visa route fits your situation, and see what is available to rent and buy in residences across Thailand.
Every fact on this page is drawn from the sources above. Where they disagree, this page says so rather than choosing silently. Registrations, fees, hours and access change; confirm anything you are relying on with the authority concerned. BAANLYY LLC is a Nevada company and a listing portal, does not represent any temple, and offers no legal or religious advice.