Temples of Nakhon Pathom

Nakhon Pathom is an hour west of Bangkok and holds the tallest stupa in Thailand, the largest surviving Dvaravati structures anywhere in the country, and the temple that most Thai people in the central plain actually go to when they want to make merit. It is also the province where this guide's central distinction is easiest to see, because here the administrative record is unusually full and the foundation record is almost entirely empty.

The Sangha's own register gives, for most of these six temples, a year the monastery was constituted, a year it received its wisungkhamsima, an exact date of elevation to royal rank, a land area to the square wa and a monastic affiliation. What it does not give — for Phra Pathom Chedi, for Phra Prathon Chedi, for Wat Phra Ngam — is a founding date, because those are Dvaravati monuments a thousand years older than any document about them. The state's own institutions say so plainly. Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University's exhibition on the ancient city states that the year of Phra Pathom Chedi's construction is hard to credit for want of documents and archaeology, and quotes the Fine Arts Department's published edition of the temple chronicle admitting that even the chronicle does not know who built it. The famous attribution to the missionaries of the emperor Ashoka is King Mongkut's own reasoning, and every state page that carries it ends the sentence with the Thai for it may be so.

One gap closed in this run and it is worth recording. The Tourism Authority of Thailand's attraction pages render in the browser and return nothing to a plain fetch, which is why earlier runs of this guide shipped without visiting hours. Read through a rendering browser, those pages yielded hours for four of the six temples here and the only admission figure any official source publishes anywhere in this province: 60 baht for foreign visitors at Phra Pathom Chedi, with no Thai rate stated beside it. Where a page below says the hours could not be confirmed, that is now a finding about the sources rather than a failure of the tooling.

Two cautions to carry around the province. First, the Sangha register writes ปี 500 where a date is missing — it appears on Wat Phra Pathom Chedi's founding field and on both of Wat Rai Khing's — and it is a null value, not a first-century date. Second, Wat Rai Khing has four different state accounts of when it began, sixty years apart at the extremes, and this guide prints all four and chooses none. The only ancient-monument registration cited in this province is Wat Phra Ngam's, because the Fine Arts Department publishes the volume, part and date of it in its own material and that material was read directly. The Royal Gazette's own site refused every request in this run, as it has in every previous run of this guide.