The ruined base of a Srivijaya-form sanctuary in Tambon Talat Chaiya, its upper brick carried off to build a wall at the Borommathat during the great restoration. What it gave up instead is an eight-armed bronze Tara, found in a banana grove nearby, now in the National Museum in Bangkok.
วัดหลง · Wat Long
| Official name | วัดหลง — Wat Long |
|---|---|
| Where | Talat Chaiya, 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. 94, part 126, 13 December B.E. 2520 Registered in the national ancient-monuments list of B.E. 2479 and given a land boundary forty-one years later. The boundary order — ประกาศกรมศิลปากร เรื่อง กำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน — was downloaded from the department's mirror and read in this run. It recites the registration as published in the Royal Gazette เล่ม ๕๓ ตอนที่ ๓๕ of ๒๗ กันยายน ๒๔๗๙, which is where the PART number of that 1936 instrument comes from: the department's own structured field gives only the volume and page. It then states หากแต่มิได้กำหนดเขตที่ดินโบราณสถาน — but no monument land boundary was fixed — and sets the area at about 1 rai 1 ngan 16 square wa, matching the department's register exactly. It was signed on ๒๕ ตุลาคม ๒๕๒๐ by เดโช สวนานนท์, Director-General of the Fine Arts Department. One administrative detail should be carried by anyone matching these records: the 1977 order places Wat Long in ตำบลเวียง อำเภอไชยา, where the department's modern register row places it in ตำบลตลาดไชยา. The section number of the Act printed in that order was not legible in optical reading and is deliberately not given here. |
| Coordinates | 9.382207, 99.190407 Fine Arts Department register, monument 0005140 (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.
The stratigraphy of the ceramics found here is explicitly unreliable: the department records that the sherds were scattered generally, with no certain soil layer. Nothing on this page is dated from them.
Wat Long stands in Ban Wat Long, next to Wat Rattanaram, between Wat Wiang and Wat Kaeo, with the Chaiya canal running past it. Only the base of the great building survives, and the reason is recorded rather than guessed: the Fine Arts Department's register states that the brick of the upper structure was pulled down and carried away to build the kamphaeng kaeo — the low enclosing wall — during the restoration of the Borommathat. One monument in this town was rebuilt partly out of another.
Before it was cleared, the site was a mound of earth and brick rubble under dense tree cover. Excavation revealed a cruciform plan closely similar to Wat Kaeo's, and it is that resemblance, rather than any inscription or dated object, that carries the Fine Arts Department's supposition that the two were built at about the same time. A second sanctuary was later raised over the first, and the alteration is legible in the fabric: the whole lower base was reworked, walled in brick and packed with earth to make a broad square circumambulation terrace over the original footing, with new stairs cut to align with the four porches. Above that the builders copied the mouldings of the older base — a plain plinth, a groove left in the brickwork, an inverted lotus and an astragal — as the foot of the cella wall.
The cella has porches on all four sides. The eastern one leads into a central chamber about four metres square that held the principal image; the other three porches, about 1.75 by 2.70 metres each, are understood to have held images too. Every outer wall face carries a pilaster at its centre, and here the detail differs from Wat Kaeo in a way worth noticing on the ground: at Wat Long the pilaster is stepped back in a single order, where at Wat Kaeo it is grooved down the middle from foot to capital. The brick technique is the same at both — laid without mortar, faces rubbed flush.
What came out of the ground around Wat Long is more famous than the building. In a banana grove about thirty metres south of the Chaiya canal, at the house of a resident of Ban Hua Khu, a well-digging turned up a bronze eight-armed Tara whose iconography the Fine Arts Department compares to material from eastern Bengal in the Pala style, dating it to about the fifteenth to sixteenth Buddhist centuries and citing Piriya Krairiksh (B.E. 2523, p. 202). It is now in the National Museum in Bangkok. With it came a fragment of a Song-dynasty bronze mirror, stone ornament fragments, yellow beads, Song Chinese ceramics and Annamese ceramics from Vietnam — the material of a settled trading community on the sand ridge rather than of a temple alone.
From the monument itself the department lists unfired clay votive tablets mixing Dvaravati and Khmer influence — gable-shaped plaques with ten Buddhas in flame-arch niches, a standing preaching Buddha at the centre flanked by disciples with hands joined, two seated Buddhas beside them and five more below in the earth-touching attitude — found around the base. And a great deal of Chinese ware from the Longquan kilns of the Song and Yuan, roughly the eighteenth to nineteenth Buddhist centuries, celadon-glazed and cut under the glaze with lotus and pheasant or Chinese-phoenix designs, on the authority of Nattaphat Chanthawich (B.E. 2525, p. 241). Ming and Qing jars followed, and Sukhothai ones — brown-glazed, brown-spotted or green-glazed. Some of those jars were used to hold cremated bone and buried under the chedi base, which is a fact about how the ruin went on being used long after it stopped being maintained.
The provincial authority has since laid a concrete road around the chedi base as a circle. BAANLYY does not represent the temple and nothing here is religious or legal advice.
The base of the sanctuary on its cruciform plan, standing to the level of the terrace — the upper brick is gone, taken to build the enclosing wall at Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya.
The two building phases in the fabric: the original moulded base, and above and around it the later brick frame packed with earth that turned the footing into a broad square circumambulation terrace, with stairs realigned to the four porches.
The central chamber, about four metres square, entered from the east, with the three smaller porches at roughly 1.75 by 2.70 metres.
The pilasters at the centre of each outer wall face, stepped back in a single order — the detail that distinguishes this building from Wat Kaeo, where the pilaster is grooved down its middle.
The brickwork itself: laid without mortar, faces rubbed flush, the same technique as Wat Kaeo and the Borommathat.
The concrete road laid by the province around the base as a circle.
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 | An open archaeological monument beside a working temple. Shoulders and knees covered. |
| Photography | No source we found states a rule, so we print none. |
| Getting there | Moo 4, Tambon Talat Chaiya, Amphoe Chaiya, Surat Thani 84110, immediately beside Wat Rattanaram and a short walk from Wat Wiang. The Chaiya canal runs past the site. |
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.
Because it was quarried. The Fine Arts Department's register records that the brick of the upper structure was taken down and carried off to build the low enclosing wall at Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya during that temple's restoration. What survives is the base, which was buried under a tree-covered mound of earth and brick until the Archaeology Division excavated and restored the site in B.E. 2524 to 2527.
The Fine Arts Department supposes that the original sanctuary was built at about the same time as Wat Kaeo, around the fourteenth to fifteenth Buddhist centuries, on the strength of the closely similar cruciform plan and nothing else — there is no inscription here and no securely stratified dated object. A second sanctuary was built over the first at some point in the eighteenth to twenty-second Buddhist centuries, which the department reads as Ayutthaya-period work.
The best-known find came from beside the site rather than from it: an eight-armed bronze Tara turned up by a well-digging in a banana grove about thirty metres south of the Chaiya canal, which the Fine Arts Department compares to eastern Bengali material in the Pala style and dates to about the fifteenth to sixteenth Buddhist centuries. It is now in the National Museum in Bangkok. From the monument itself came unfired clay votive tablets showing mixed Dvaravati and Khmer influence, and a large quantity of Longquan celadon of the Song and Yuan periods, later Ming, Qing and Sukhothai jars, some of which had been used to hold cremated bone and buried beneath the chedi base.
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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Every fact on this page is drawn from the sources above. Where they disagree, this page says so rather than choosing silently. Registrations, fees, hours and access change; confirm anything you are relying on with the authority concerned. BAANLYY LLC is a Nevada company and a listing portal, does not represent any temple, and offers no legal or religious advice.