Ratchaburi is an hour and a half west of Bangkok and most people drive through it to get to the floating market or to Kanchanaburi. The province carries 165 entries in the Fine Arts Department national monument register, twenty-seven of them registered with a determined land boundary, and between them they tell a four-layer story that bigger provinces tell less clearly: Dvaravati at Khu Bua and in the caves of Khao Ngu, the Khmer period at Ban Pong and in the core of the prang at Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya rebuilding on top of both, and then the Mon, who came down the Mae Klong in the eighteenth century and are still here.
The Mon layer is the one that surprises people. Wat Khongkharam in Photharam was set up as the central monastery of the Raman order on this river, its ordination hall was painted by Bangkok craftsmen in the reign of Rama III, and seven Mon chedi stand round it for the seven Mon towns whose governors the Fine Arts Department names on its own page. Three kilometers upstream, Wat Khanon has kept Thai shadow-puppet theater alive — one of only three troupes left in the country — with a set of more than three hundred figures cut in the reign of Rama V.
Two warnings for anyone reading the records rather than the signposts. The first is that the Ratchaburi section of the national monument list of 8 March B.E. 2478 names four monuments, and the third of them, Phong Tuk, is in Kanchanaburi today: two years after that list, the Act Changing Provincial Boundaries moved the whole of Amphoe Tha Maka except one subdistrict out of this province. The list is not wrong. The border moved under it. The second is that the national register is not always current — at Sa Kosinarai it still carries two ponds whose registration was revoked in B.E. 2533, where the department own regional office page has the right four.
On hours: two of the six pages below carry opening times and a fee, and both come from the Fine Arts Department museum register rather than from the tourism authority, whose pages for this province would not yield anything. For the other four, no official source consulted publishes an opening time or an admission figure, and none has been invented to fill the gap.
6 of 6 temples in Ratchaburi 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: Six of a realistic eighteen, and the list for a second run is a list rather than a guess, because the register was read whole. The obvious six next are Wat Si Suriyawongsaram in Mueang Ratchaburi, registered with a boundary of 1 rai 1 ngan 20 square wa by an instrument of B.E. 2544 and built under the patronage of the Regent, Chao Phraya Si Suriyawong; Chedi Hak, which is registered and whose name means simply the broken chedi; Tham Rakhang and Khao Tham Phra, the two other registered cave sites, the second of them the fourth and last of the four monuments in the 1935 Ratchaburi list; Wat Aranyikawat and Wat Khao Luea in Mueang Ratchaburi; and Wat Ko San Phra, Wat Khung Krathin, Wat Tha Suwan, Wat Thep Awat and Wat Yai Pho Hak, all registered with boundaries of their own. Beyond those, the Khu Bua group deserves a run to itself: ancient monuments 1, 8, 24 and 25, 31, 33 and 44 are separately registered and this run covered only number 18. Two further groups are worth naming. Five monasteries in the province — Wat Khok Luang, Wat Don Krabueang, Wat Sai Arirak, Wat Pa Phai, Wat Muang, Wat Yai Nakhon Chum, Wat Yai Ang Thong and Wat Amarintharam — are named in a Royal Gazette list without being registered, which is a distinction most writing about Thai monuments collapses and which this guide already has the vocabulary for. And Wat Yai Pho Hak carries a register coordinate of 100.0255 east, which is well outside this province and should be checked before any page is built on it.
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