Nakhon Sawan is where Thailand's largest river starts. The Ping and the Nan meet at Pak Nam Pho in the middle of the provincial town and leave it as the Chao Phraya, and the town grew on that junction rather than on a route or a resource. Five of the six records on this page stand on or beside that water: two on the limestone hill on the west bank above the confluence, one on the hill facing it across the river to the south, one on the Ping a little upstream, and one on the Nan to the north-east. The sixth stands on the Phahonyothin highway forty-five kilometres north-west, on a limestone group that rises straight out of the paddy.
The province was not called Nakhon Sawan when the oldest of these records were made. It was เมืองพระบาง, and that name is on this page in its own right, because the Fine Arts Department registered it as an ancient monument in 1935 along with the hill beside it. It appears in the Luang Prasoet recension of the chronicle of the old capital, in the Nakhon Chum inscription of Kamphaeng Phet as ปากยมพระบาง, and in the Sukhothai inscription found on that hill in 1921. Those three documents are the entire early written record of this place, and everything else said about its origins is built on top of them.
That matters because of what the guide has to do with the province's best-known claim. Almost every account of the hilltop monastery above the confluence says it was raised in B.E. 1962 by Phaya Ban Mueang in memory of his younger brother. The inscription this rests on says neither. Its surviving text does not name the man who built the chedi and vihara, the top of the stone having broken away, and its date is disputed: Cœdès put it at B.E. 1962 and Prasert na Nagara at B.E. 1900 to 1904, roughly sixty years apart. The record half and the tradition half of that entry are printed separately below, at some length, because collapsing them is exactly the error this guide exists to avoid.
The documentary picture for the other five is straightforward and unusually complete. Every one of the six is a registered ancient monument with a monument number, a departmental coordinate and at least one Royal Gazette instrument behind it, and all three of those instruments were downloaded from the Fine Arts Department's own scan server and read rather than cited second-hand. What the province does not have is ecclesiastical record: the Provincial Office of Buddhism publishes a full entry for one of these six, so the royal grade and the monastic order are stated once and left null five times rather than assumed.
6 of 6 temples in Nakhon Sawan are plotted.
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 Fine Arts Department's register holds 157 catalogued sites in Nakhon Sawan, of which twelve carry the registered status and three more are registered with a determined land boundary, so a second run starts with a shortlist already in hand. Six stand out, all confirmed this run against the department's own register with its own points. วัดกระดีทอง, monument 0003904 at 15.680720, 100.112866 in ตำบลปากน้ำโพ, and วัดช่องลม, monument 0003906 at 15.806108, 100.086726 in ตำบลบ้านมะเกลือ, both registered in the same 1935 instrument as the records on this page. วัดบน, monument 0003909 at 15.815280, 100.103338, which the 1935 list places in อำเภอปากน้ำโพ and the register today places in อำเภอเก้าเลี้ยว — the clearest single case of this province's district trap. ดงแม่นางเมือง, monument 0006844 at 16.016445, 100.007763 in บรรพตพิสัย, which carries no gazette instrument at all despite being the find-place of one of the few securely dated inscriptions of its period in the central plain, and which is the single strongest candidate for a second run. กลุ่มโบราณสถานโคกไม้เดน with its own separate wall-and-moat entry, monuments 0006853 and 0006852 at 15.415797, 100.149827 in พยุหะคีรี, the Dvaravati town known locally as เมืองบน. And the Phaisali group — เมืองประคำ, เมืองอไภยสาวี, โคกเศรษฐี, ตึกอีกา and โคกพระยาเผาเข้า, monuments 0003913 to 0003918 — five registered monuments listed together in 1935 under อำเภอท่าตะโก and sitting today in อำเภอไพศาลี, which should be built as one run so the district change is explained once and properly.
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.
Staying longer? Work out which Thai visa route fits your situation, read where to live in Bangkok, and browse residences and rentals.