Sa Kosinarai and the Kosinarai town wall

What the official record says

Where Sa Kosinarai lae Naeo Kamphaeng Mueang is

When was it founded — and what actually establishes that?

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.

Note what that identification rests on: an inscription naming twenty-three towns, and a sculpture of the right style found in this one. The department states it as what scholars presume rather than as settled, and so does this page. The register adds, with disarming honesty, how the site came to notice at all — a tractor levelling ground west of the reservoir in about B.E. 2508 turned up broken ancient brick in quantity, people came to dig for old things and found sculpture heads and votive tablets, and two nearby mounds were cut through for a road.

The history of Sa Kosinarai lae Naeo Kamphaeng Mueang

Ban Pong is a railway town, and few people stop there for the twelfth century. They could. Just outside it lies a walled town with a square plan about 960 meters on a side, moat and rampart, and near its center but set a little north, a monument the department calls Chom Prasat — the crown of the palace. Inside the walls are several ponds: Sa Nak and Sa Chorakhe to east and west, Sa Mangkon, Sa Kaeo and another Sa Nak up near the north wall. And outside the north wall, far too big to be domestic, a rectangular reservoir two hundred meters by four hundred, with a high earth bank, once gated to a channel running to the Mae Klong. That is Sa Kosinarai, and it gave the town its modern name.

What the town was called at the time is a question with a good answer and no proof. The Fine Arts Department sets out the case: the Preah Khan inscription lists twenty-three places to which Jayavarman VII sent an image of the Jayabuddhamahanatha, among them a town called Sambukapattana, and scholars identify this site with it. The supporting evidence is a sculpture — a radiating Avalokitesvara with eight arms, cut from sandstone, 155 centimeters high, in the Bayon style of the eighteenth Buddhist century. It is the single most important object from the site and it is not on the site; it is on display at the Ratchaburi National Museum, half an hour away.

The department excavated Chom Prasat in B.E. 2509 and found Khmer architectural members and sculpture. The register describes what the stucco from that dig is like, and the detail is better than the summary: small figures, mostly from the decoration of a prang, and among them demon faces whose round flat features, narrow eyes with the outer corners flicked upward, hair and head ornament resemble those of Chinese officials. That is the sort of observation that only comes from someone holding the fragments.

The registration history is the other reason to come here, and it is a lesson in reading records. In B.E. 2522 the department registered six things: Chom Prasat, four ponds and the line of the town wall, with areas for each and a stated total of 88 rai 63.5 square wa, which reconciles exactly. Eleven years later it revoked two of them. Sa Nak and Sa Khe, the instrument says, had ceased to exist and there was no longer any point in protecting them. The department's regional office page has kept up: it lists four. The national GIS register has not: it still carries all six. If you work from the register alone you will go looking for two ponds that the state itself wrote off in 1990.

What you actually see

The reservoir: a rectangle about 200 by 400 meters outside the north wall, embanked, with the registered area given as 62 rai 74.5 square wa. The register notes that the ground around it has been built on by people moving in.

The line of the town wall and moat, square in plan and about 960 meters on each side, registered as its own parcel of 9 rai 33 square wa.

Chom Prasat, the monument near the middle of the enclosure, excavated by the department in B.E. 2509 and registered at 5 rai 2 ngan 5 square wa.

Sa Kon, the fourth of the registered ponds and the only one besides Sa Kosinarai still on the list after 1990.

Not on site: the eight-armed radiating Avalokitesvara, 155 centimeters of sandstone, now at the Ratchaburi National Museum — which also holds Dvaravati terracotta Bodhisattvas from Khu Bua, so one visit covers two of the monuments in this guide.

Visiting: hours, admission, dress and photography

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.

What we could not establish

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.

• Whether this really is Sambukapattana. The department presents the identification as a scholarly presumption resting on the Preah Khan inscription and the style of one sculpture, and does not claim it as established.
• Why the national register still lists Sa Nak and Sa Khe thirty-six years after their registration was revoked. The regional office page has four items; the register has six.
• What became of Sa Nak and Sa Khe physically. The revoking instrument says only that they had ceased to exist and were no longer worth protecting.
• Opening hours and whether anything is charged at the site itself. No official source consulted publishes either.

Sa Kosinarai lae Naeo Kamphaeng Mueang: common questions

Where to go from here

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 Ratchaburi’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.