A ruined brick sanctuary of Srivijaya form in Tambon Lamet, standing to about half its original height. The Fine Arts Department calls it the oldest monument still standing in anything like its built form in the old town of Chaiya, and its cruciform plan is the closest thing in Thailand to the Javanese candis.
วัดแก้ว · Wat Kaeo
| Official name | วัดแก้ว — Wat Kaeo |
|---|---|
| Where | Lamet, Chaiya, Surat Thani |
| Royal temple class | Not established from an official register. |
| Monastic order | Not recorded in any register we could read. |
| Ancient monument | Registered national ancient monument Royal Gazette vol. 53, p. 1532, 27 September B.E. 2479; boundary at vol. 142, special part 281 ง, p. 5, 26 August B.E. 2568 Two instruments, both read in this run, and the gap between them is the point. Wat Kaeo was registered in the national ancient-monuments list of B.E. 2479, in the Chaiya block, in ตำบลเลม็ด. Its land boundary was not fixed until 26 August B.E. 2568 — eighty-nine years later, and thirteen months before this page was written. That second order was read by eye from the department's mirrored scan at full resolution, and it corrects two things. First, it says in its own words what it is: it recites the B.E. 2479 registration, ลงวันที่ ๑๑ กันยายน ๒๔๗๙ published at เล่ม ๕๓ หน้า ๑๕๓๒ วันที่ ๒๗ กันยายน ๒๔๗๙, adds แต่มิได้กำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน — but no monument land boundary was fixed — and then fixes one under section 7 of the Ancient Monuments Act B.E. 2504. It is therefore a BOUNDARY order, not a registration, where the department's own structured index field labels it ขึ้นทะเบียนโบราณสถานและกำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน. Second, the area: 2 ngan 82.10 square wa, signed 17 July B.E. 2568 by Phanomboot Chandrachoti, Director-General. Optical character recognition read that figure as 52.10 twice on the same page and was wrong both times; it was settled by looking at the scan. The plan attached to the order lists ten features inside the boundary, the first two being เจดีย์ and ฐานเจดีย์ — the standing sanctuary and a second chedi base. |
| Coordinates | 9.377856, 99.190232 Fine Arts Department register, monument 0005139 (GPS) |
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 monument and none is asserted. The department frames its own dating with สันนิษฐาน — supposition — and the comparanda it reasons from are in Java and Vietnam, not here. It is also explicit that where the ornament resembles that of neighbouring countries it cannot be said which was the giver and which the receiver of the influence.
Wat Kaeo stands on Santinimit Road in Tambon Lamet, at the southern end of the Chaiya sand ridge, about a kilometre from the Borommathat and a few hundred metres from Wat Long. The building that matters is a brick tower on a cruciform plan, laid without mortar with the brick faces rubbed smooth, standing from its base up through the cella wall; everything above that — the roof and the finial — has fallen. Because so much of the Srivijaya-period fabric elsewhere on the peninsula has collapsed entirely, the Fine Arts Department's register says in plain terms that this half-standing building is unusually useful for studying the architecture of the period.
The plan is a square cella about 18 metres to a side with four projecting porches, and the corners are worked in a way the department takes pains to describe correctly: what looks at a glance like the twenty-cornered redenting of a later Thai chedi is not redenting at all. The corners that step out are smaller than the main corners, which makes it an addition of corners rather than a subdivision of them. This is the kind of distinction that separates a description from a caption, and the department makes it because the plan is the evidence for where the building's ideas came from.
Inside, the central chamber is about four metres square and holds a brick Buddha in the earth-touching attitude, ruined, surviving from the lap up to the waist, with a lap nearly four metres wide. Its back is built into the wall. Niches to left and right held further brick images built the same way. The southern porch is the best preserved: a vaulted room with brick pilasters framing the door, a limestone lintel and door frame still in place, and a doorway about 1.60 metres high, which the department reads as the pattern for all four porches. Miniature blind niches on the porch walls repeat the shape of the building itself in reduced form.
The northern porch tells a different story, and it is the one visitors most often miss. It carries traces of later alteration: an Ayutthaya-period red sandstone Buddha was brought in and installed in the niche in place of what stood there before. This building was not abandoned once and left; it was reused, centuries after it was raised.
Above the cella on the south side there are traces of small arched gable niches — kudu — which the department supposes ran on all four faces. The roof above that is gone, but the many red sandstone miniature stupas lying around the base tell you what it looked like: receding storeys, each carrying model stupas, the Mahayana symbol of the cosmic mandala, with one large round stupa understood to have crowned the whole.
The finds from here are now elsewhere. The Akshobhya Buddha — a headless red sandstone image in the earth-touching attitude, found in the niche on the south wall of the eastern porch, with lions carved at the sides of its base and a vajra at the front, which the department dates to about the fifteenth Buddhist century and reads as showing Cham influence — is at the Chaiya National Museum, on the authority of Piriya Krairiksh (B.E. 2532, p. 178). So is a 16.5-centimetre green sandstone fragment of a left hand holding a lotus, possibly from a Padmapani Bodhisattva. So are a stone Shiva linga of the plainest early type, 17 centimetres tall with only its square Brahma section and cylindrical Rudra section, and two small seated red sandstone Ganeshas, 42 and 57 centimetres, found packed in earth and brick inside the central chamber before it was cleared. That a Buddhist sanctuary yielded a linga and two Ganeshas is not an anomaly to be explained away; it is what this site is.
It is a living temple as well as a monument — the department's register records that there are monks in residence — and it is not a ticketed site. BAANLYY does not represent the temple and nothing here is religious or legal advice.
The brick sanctuary itself, standing from the base through the cella wall, roughly 18 metres square with four porches, built without mortar with the brick faces rubbed flush.
The pilasters on the outer walls, each with a groove cut down the middle of the column from foot to capital — the detail the Fine Arts Department compares to Candi Kalasan in Java and, more closely, to Mỹ Sơn A1 in Vietnam.
The central chamber, about four metres square, and the ruined brick Buddha in the earth-touching attitude inside it, surviving to the waist with a lap nearly four metres across.
The southern porch, the best preserved of the four: a vaulted chamber with its limestone lintel and door frame still standing and a doorway about 1.60 metres high.
The blind model niches on the porch walls, which reproduce the whole building in miniature — the clearest surviving evidence of what the vanished roof looked like.
The red sandstone miniature stupas lying around the base, fallen from the roof tiers.
The architectural fragments stored under a monk's kuti to the north-west of the chedi: a complete stone door frame 1.60 metres high, a complete stone threshold 0.50 by 1.70 metres with the two pivot holes that give the door's width of 1.30 metres, and a red sandstone stupa finial 1.50 metres tall, 65 centimetres across the base, rising to an octagonal section 55 centimetres wide — possibly the crowning stupa of the roof.
The Ayutthaya-period red sandstone Buddha installed in the northern porch, a later insertion rather than part of the original scheme.
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.
| Hours | Not established from an official source. |
|---|---|
| Admission | Not established from an official source. |
| Dress | A registered monument on the grounds of a working temple with monks in residence. Shoulders and knees covered; shoes off where a floor is marked for it. |
| Photography | No source we found states a rule, so we print none. |
| Getting there | Moo 2, Santinimit Road, Tambon Lamet, Amphoe Chaiya. About two kilometres south of Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya, on the same sand ridge as Wat Long and Wat Wiang. The B.E. 2568 boundary order gives the monument's position as 09°22'40.92" N, 99°11'24.41" E on map sheet 4827 I of series L7018. |
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.
It is a ruined brick sanctuary of Srivijaya form in Tambon Lamet, standing from its base up through the cella wall with the roof gone. The Fine Arts Department's register calls it the oldest ancient monument found in the old town of Chaiya that still survives in something like its built form, and says that it is therefore unusually valuable for studying the architecture of the period, because most monuments of that period on the peninsula have collapsed entirely.
The Fine Arts Department supposes the fourteenth to fifteenth Buddhist centuries, and is explicit that this is a supposition drawn from comparison rather than from anything dated on the site. Its comparanda are Candi Kalasan in central Java — which an inscription found there dates to B.E. 1321 — and the Cham tower Mỹ Sơn A1 in Vietnam. Nothing found at Wat Kaeo itself carries a date.
It was registered on 27 September B.E. 2479 in the national list of ancient monuments, but without any land boundary. The boundary was fixed eighty-nine years later, by an order of the Fine Arts Department published in the Royal Gazette on 26 August B.E. 2568 under section 7 of the Ancient Monuments Act B.E. 2504, setting the monument area at 2 ngan 82.10 square wa. That order recites the 1936 registration and states in its own words that no boundary had been fixed by it.
At the Chaiya National Museum, in the grounds of Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya. They include the headless red sandstone Akshobhya Buddha found in the eastern porch, with lions on its base and a vajra in front, which the Fine Arts Department dates to about the fifteenth Buddhist century; a green sandstone fragment of a left hand holding a lotus, possibly from a Padmapani Bodhisattva; a plain early stone Shiva linga; and two small seated red sandstone Ganeshas recovered from inside the central chamber.
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 Surat Thani’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.
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