Wat Phra Phutthabat Ratchaworamahawihan

What the official record says

Where Wat Phra Phutthabat Ratchaworamahawihan 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 dated primary record of the discovery or the foundation was found in the register, the gazette, the department's 63-document archival file series for this monument or its own journal. The department's register and its museum record both assert the B.E. 2167 date and the hunter in their own declarative voice with no attribution and no tradition marker, while the provincial Buddhism office, the less senior of the two bodies, marks the same material as tradition and cites a 1980 commemorative booklet for it. On the point this guide cares about, the heritage authority is the less careful one.

The history of Wat Phra Phutthabat Ratchaworamahawihan

This is the most important pilgrimage site in central Thailand that is not in a capital, and the province wears it: the Saraburi provincial seal is the mondop on this hill, and the provincial motto opens with the footprint. The precinct is divided into two walled zones with a road between them — the พุทธาวาส running up the hillside with the footprint, the ordination hall and the shrines, and the สังฆาวาส on flat ground beside it with the monks' quarters and the sermon hall.

What the record will not give is a founding date. The chronicle account is specific and famous: monks returning from Sumanakuta in Lanka reported that a print of the Buddha's foot existed in Siam, King Song Tham had the provinces searched, the governor of Saraburi learned from a hunter named Bun of a rock hollow whose water healed a wounded deer and the hunter's own skin disease, and the King traveled up to see it, dedicated the forest a yojana around, and ordered a mondop with an ordination hall, a vihara, a sermon hall and monks' cells. The provincial Buddhism office tells that story and says plainly where it got it — a booklet printed by the Office of the Prime Minister's Secretariat for a royal kathina here in B.E. 2523. The Fine Arts Department's register tells the same story as fact, with no source at all. No seventeenth-century instrument, no inscription and no excavation report supports it, and this page does not supply one.

The patronage, by contrast, is documented in detail, and the most useful document in it is unglamorous. A Bureau of the Royal Household program of 1 March B.E. 2495, reproduced in full in the department's own Silpakorn Journal, records that the mondop had fallen into disrepair in B.E. 2487 and that the abbot received royal permission to restore it and to replace the whole เครื่องยอด — the superstructure and finial — in reinforced concrete. So the gilded tower a visitor photographs is, in its upper structure, a mid-twentieth-century concrete rebuild carrying an older crown. The crown itself, the พระจุลมงกุฎ, was made in the reign of King Chulalongkorn and was raised onto the finial in the reign of King Vajiravudh on 23 December B.E. 2456; King Bhumibol repeated the ceremony on 9 March B.E. 2495, opened a memorial to King Song Tham on 6 June B.E. 2503, and the present King, then Crown Prince, performed the raising again on 21 July B.E. 2542 after a further restoration. The mondop cracked in B.E. 2534 and was investigated jointly with the Department of Mineral Resources.

The department's archive for this monument runs to 63 catalogued documents between B.E. 2495 and 2534, and they read like a working file rather than a monument history: permits to restore three structures in B.E. 2496, correspondence on building the present ordination hall in B.E. 2496 and 2497, a ruling in B.E. 2500 that the mondop, the chedi and the prang could be restored but the palace wall could not, and in B.E. 2505 the theft from the temple museum of a gold Buddha image of one baht's weight that had been donated and not yet accessioned. The museum is now housed in the restored พระวิหารหลวง with a five-room display, and the department's own museum record says it opens only on the days of the footprint festival.

What you actually see

The mondop on the hillside, described in the register as a square-based building with a prasat superstructure in the form of an oversized busabok, in good condition — and documented as having had its entire superstructure replaced in reinforced concrete after damage in B.E. 2487.

The พระจุลมงกุฎ on the summit of the finial: a small crown in gilded lacquered metal, tall and tapering, on tiers of เชิงบาตร mouldings with three diminishing tiers of เกี้ยว, each carrying high-relief ดอกประจำยาม, with eight gem-set flowers around it, standing above a พุ่มข้าวบิณฑ์.

The footprint itself, enshrined inside a busabok with a prasat finial — a small mondop within the great one — which the department confirms both by its own library caption and by a restoration work item of B.E. 2560 titled งานบูรณะมณฑปน้อยภายใน. The Ministry of Tourism records it as a left footprint 21 inches wide, 60 inches long and 11 inches deep; no Fine Arts Department source publishes a dimension for it.

The naga staircase up to the mondop, independently attested by the royal program of B.E. 2495, which records the King ascending บันไดนาค, and by department restoration projects on its paved landing between B.E. 2540 and 2542.

A royal cypher of King Chulalongkorn cut into a large boulder, recorded in the department's museum register and placed by the Ministry of Tourism at 160 cm above ground level.

The murals in วิหารคลังบน, surveyed by the department's mural conservation section on all four interior walls: the contemplation of corpses and the daily life of thudong monks, in tempera over a ground, measured at 28.9 square meters.

พระตำหนักท้ายพิกุล, an old palace within the precinct of which nothing survives but the elephant mounting block and the remains of the enclosing wall; it is registered separately in the 1936 list as พระราชวังโบราณ.

The temple museum in the restored พระวิหารหลวง, holding regalia attributed to King Song Tham, Sangkhalok and blue-and-white ware, bronze and gold, old weapons, a replica footprint, the old mondop finial, rank fans and a water pipe attributed to the reign of King Narai.

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.

• Any founding date. No register, gazette entry, inscription or excavation read in this run supplies one, and the only account on offer is a chronicle narrative that one state body labels as tradition and another asserts as fact.
• The sect. The national temple registry that publishes the nikaya per temple answered with an access-denied page, as it has for every run of this guide, and the only state statement found — Maha Nikaya, from the Ministry of Tourism's directory — sits on a page that disclaims its own data.
• The royal grade's primary instrument. Two state bodies state first class, Ratchaworamahawihan, in identical words, and the Ministry of Interior's compendium of royal monasteries indexes this temple at page 371, but that file would not be served and no gazette instrument conferring the grade was found.
• Any dimension of the mondop. Neither the provincial office, the department nor the Ministry of Tourism publishes a height, a plan dimension or a footprint area, and the only measurement any of them gives for anything here is the footprint itself, from the tourism ministry alone.
• Ordinary opening hours, a dress rule and a photography rule. No official source states any of the three. A provincial government page appears in a search index saying the mondop opens at 06.00 during the festivals, but that host refused every engine and the statement is not carried here.
• The mother-of-pearl doors, the woven silver matting and the ranks of bells, all of which the Tourism Authority describes and none of which any Fine Arts Department document read here mentions, dates or attributes.
• Whether the admission figures can both be right: the Ministry of Tourism says there is no charge, while the department's museum register gives no fee for Thai nationals and 30 baht for foreign visitors. They are probably about the temple and the museum respectively, but no state source says so, and the museum figure was last updated in B.E. 2558.

Wat Phra Phutthabat Ratchaworamahawihan: 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 Saraburi’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.