Wat Khlong, Khu Bua

What the official record says

Where Wat Khlong 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.

No founding date is established for this building and none is given here. What the record carries is a cultural attribution, an excavation and a measured platform. The department also marks its reading of the function as a presumption rather than a finding: it reasons from the shape of the base that this was a vihara, a hall where people gathered, rather than a reliquary mound.

The history of Wat Khlong

Khu Bua is a walled town with a rounded-rectangular plan, a moat and an earth rampart, lying south of modern Ratchaburi, and it was a real place for centuries before anything we would call Thailand existed. Dozens of monuments are scattered across it, numbered by the Fine Arts Department rather than named. Number 18 is the biggest and tallest of them, and it sits almost at the center of the town. That is a fact about planning rather than about architecture: whoever laid Khu Bua out put this building in the middle on purpose.

The department excavated it in B.E. 2537 and came away with figures. The base is about 22.20 meters wide, 43.50 meters long and 5.5 meters high. On the east side a brick staircase climbs to a circumambulation terrace on the upper level. The platform itself is laterite, and its outer faces are articulated with niches and engaged pilasters; the department's reading is that each niche once held a stucco figure of a Bodhisattva. Just off the northeast corner there is a small square brick building, which the department takes to be a later addition.

Two things follow from those Bodhisattva figures, and the department states both carefully. The first is that this was most likely a Mahayana foundation rather than a Theravada one, which matters because the Dvaravati material elsewhere in Thailand is usually read the other way. The second is about function: the department compares the base with Khao Khlang Nai at the heart of the ancient town of Si Thep in Phetchabun — a monument this guide has already written up, from the other end of the same comparison — and concludes from the resemblance that number 18 was a vihara, a hall where people gathered, not a stupa. It presents that as a presumption, and so does this page.

What confuses visitors is the name. The register calls the monument วัดโขลง and codes it a deserted monastery; the department's regional office calls it Ancient Monument No. 18 and adds Wat Khlong Suwannakhiri in brackets; and the register's own note on present condition says simply that it stands inside Wat Khlong Suwannakhiri. All three are true at once. The ancient platform is the registered monument, the living monastery of almost the same name grew up around it, and you will be walking through the second to reach the first.

What you actually see

A laterite platform about 43.5 meters long and 22.2 meters wide, standing 5.5 meters high. The measurements are the department's own, taken at the B.E. 2537 excavation.

A brick staircase on the east side climbing to the circumambulation terrace on top, which is the route the building was designed to be used by.

Niches and engaged pilasters articulating the laterite facing of the base. The department's reading is that stucco figures of Bodhisattvas once stood in them; what survives is the architecture that held them.

A small square brick building against the northeast corner of the platform, which the department takes to be later than the monument it adjoins.

The line of the Khu Bua town moat and rampart around all of it, and the other numbered monuments of the group scattered through the fields, several of which carry their own registrations and land boundaries.

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.

• When it was built. Neither the register nor the regional office gives a year, and the attribution is to a culture and a span of centuries rather than to a date. This page prints no founding year because none is established.
• Whether it really was an assembly hall. The department says so from the resemblance of its base to Khao Khlang Nai at Si Thep, and labels that a presumption.
• Where the Bodhisattva figures went. The department says the niches once held them and does not say what survives of them, or where it is kept.
• Opening hours and whether anything is charged. No official source consulted publishes either; the monument stands inside a working monastery.

Wat Khlong: 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.