A royal monastery of the first class in the old town of Chaiya, built around a brick chedi that every state source calls the most complete surviving example of Srivijaya-form architecture in Thailand — and that those same state sources date, between them, across five centuries. The Chaiya National Museum stands in its grounds.
วัดพระบรมธาตุไชยาราชวรวิหาร · Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya Ratchaworawihan
| Official name | วัดพระบรมธาตุไชยาราชวรวิหาร — Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya Ratchaworawihan |
|---|---|
| Where | Wiang, Chaiya, Surat Thani |
| Royal temple class | First class royal temple, Ratchaworawihan (พระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรวิหาร) Two state bodies agree on the grade and disagree on how it was reached. The Surat Thani provincial office of the National Office of Buddhism opens its own page for the temple with วัดพระบรมธาตุไชยา เป็นพระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรวิหาร — a royal monastery of the first class, Ratchaworawihan — and the Fine Arts Department's register says the same in its written history. What the two do not agree on is the ladder. The department records two steps: raised from a wat rat to พระอารามหลวงชั้นตรี ชนิดสามัญ on 28 May B.E. 2491 under the name วัดพระธาตุไชยา, then raised again to ชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรวิหาร and renamed วัดพระบรมธาตุไชยา on 6 February B.E. 2500. The provincial Office of Buddhism gives one step and a different year for it: raised to ชั้นตรี ชนิดสามัญ from 28 May B.E. 2500 — which its own opening sentence then contradicts. Both readings are printed here. Neither elevating instrument was opened in this run. |
| Monastic order | Maha Nikaya |
| Ancient monument | Registered national ancient monument Royal Gazette vol. 53, p. 1532, 27 September B.E. 2479 Registered by the ประกาศกรมศิลปากร เรื่อง กำหนดจำนวนโบราณสถานสำหรับชาติ — the national ancient-monuments list made under the Ancient Monuments Act B.E. 2477 — downloaded from the Fine Arts Department's mirror and read in this run. Two things about that entry are worth knowing before matching it to anything. It registers the temple under the name วัดพระมหาธาตุ, not its present name, and it places it in อำเภอเมืองไชยา ตำบลเวียง — a district that no longer exists under that name. It is item 1 of the Surat Thani block; items 2, 4 and 5 of the same block are Wat Wiang, Wat Long and Wat Kaeo, which is what confirms the block is this province's and this town's. The publication reference was independently confirmed from a second document: Wat Kaeo's boundary order of B.E. 2568 recites this same instrument as ลงวันที่ ๑๑ กันยายน ๒๔๗๙ published at เล่ม ๕๓ หน้า ๑๕๓๒ วันที่ ๒๗ กันยายน ๒๔๗๙, read by eye from the scan. No land boundary has ever been fixed for this monument: the department's register carries no boundary row for it, unlike Wat Kaeo, Wat Long and Wat Phatthanaram below. |
| Coordinates | 9.384598, 99.184752 Fine Arts Department register, monument 0005138 (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 for this temple is established. What is established is a chain of dated restorations, and those are on the record side of every sentence below.
Wat Phra Borommathat Chaiya stands at 50 Moo 3, Thanon Rak Norakit, in Tambon Wiang, Amphoe Chaiya, about 50 kilometres north of Surat Thani town and five kilometres inland from the coast. It sits on the Chaiya sand ridge, a raised spine of sand roughly three kilometres long and 500 metres wide that carried the old town, and it is the reason Chaiya is argued about at all. The province uses the image of this chedi in its provincial seal, and a saying the Tourism Authority repeats holds that anyone who has not paid respects here has not really reached Surat Thani.
The chedi is a prasat-form tower on a cruciform plan, about 24 metres from base to summit, built of hard-fired brick laid without mortar and rubbed smooth at the joints. In its first state the ornament was not applied in stucco but cut directly into the brick. That single construction detail is the strongest evidence on the site, because it is a technique, not a style label, and it links this building to the two ruined sanctuaries a kilometre away at Wat Kaeo and Wat Long, which are built the same way.
The dating is where honest accounts have to stop and say so. The provincial Office of Buddhism puts the chedi at about B.E. 1300. The Fine Arts Department's register puts it at the fourteenth to fifteenth Buddhist centuries and compares its plan to Candi Pawon in central Java. The same departmental register then reports a third position, attributed to Srisak Vallibhotama, that the form looks like a development OUT of the Wat Kaeo and Wat Long sanctuaries and therefore belongs to the Grahi period, some five hundred years later. This guide does not choose between them, and a reader should be suspicious of any account that does without saying whose reading it is following.
What is firmly dated is the temple's rescue. By the late nineteenth century the compound had been ruined and abandoned for a length of time nobody records. The restoration was led by Phra Khru Sophon Chetsikaram (Nu Tisso), the ecclesiastical head of Chaiya, based at Wat Photharam in Phumriang, later titled Phra Khru Rattanamuni Si Sangkharacha Langka Kaeo and then Chao Khun Chayaphiwat Suphat Sanghapamok. Here too the two state bodies differ on the years: the Fine Arts Department gives B.E. 2439 to 2453, a campaign of a little over fourteen years, while the provincial Office of Buddhism gives B.E. 2435 to 2444. Both are printed. What survives from it is a document rather than an inference — Phra Khru Rattanamuni's own written report on the restoration, submitted in B.E. 2453 to Phraya Mahiban Borirak, the commissioner of Monthon Chumphon, in which he states plainly that when the chedi was built could not be traced, and describes the mortarless brickwork he found.
The Rama V-era work did not only repair; it added. The summit was extended upward from the bell's lotus collar, and a three-tiered chatra was set on top, its ribs and leaves backed in silver and covered in gold — 82 baht and 3 salueng of it, with the surplus carried down over the lower mouldings. That chatra was later stolen, and the temple made a replacement in B.E. 2481. The kudu — the small horseshoe-arched gable niches — had originally been cut into the brick; the Rama V repair remade them in stucco and added motifs of its own moment, including the state emblem of the fifth reign, a three-headed elephant, a peacock, lions and butterflies. A visitor is therefore looking at two periods of ornament at once, and the newer one is easy to mistake for the older.
The temple's twentieth century has a second thread that matters beyond Chaiya. A temple museum was founded here in B.E. 2478 and used the wihan luang to display the antiquities coming out of the old town; the Fine Arts Department's register names Buddhadasa Bhikkhu — Phra Khru Inthapanyachan, Nguam Indapanno — in connection with that collection, and names him again among the historians and archaeologists, with Prince Subhadradis Diskul, Prince Chand Chirayu Rajani and Manit Vallibhotama, who argued that Chaiya was the Srivijaya of the inscriptions. The collection became the Chaiya National Museum, which stands in the grounds today.
It remains a working royal monastery of the Maha Nikaya with a Phrapariyattidhamma school, on a compound of 42 rai 1 ngan. BAANLYY does not represent the temple and nothing here is religious or legal advice.
The Phra Borommathat chedi: a four-porched tower about 24 metres high on a square lotus-and-astragal base roughly 13 metres east to west and 10 north to south. The department's register notes that the original base was 10 metres and that about 3 metres were added at the front, so the plan you see is not quite the plan that was built.
The moat around the base. The original footing sits below the present ground level, and the temple dug a channel about 2.3 to 2.5 metres wide and a metre deep around the chedi so that the old base can be seen. It holds water all year.
The interior chamber, entered by the stair on the east face — about two metres square, with eight stucco Buddha images on a modern altar platform. The other three porches are solid.
The roof: three receding storeys, each a reduced model of the building below it, carrying miniature stupas at the four porches and at the centre above each gable niche — three to a face per tier, twenty-four in all.
The summit, which is Rama V-period work: a large open lotus at the bell's mouth, an octagonal bell, five octagonal rings, a gilded lotus cluster and gilded spire, and the chatra above it. The register notes the model for this upper section is understood to be the Phra Borommathat at Nakhon Si Thammarat.
The cloister — phra rabiang khot — a square gallery 38 metres to a side and 4 metres high, holding 180 Buddha images that local people call phra wian. Most are restored stucco; the red sandstone images of the Ayutthaya-period Chaiya school are the original fabric among them.
The four corner chedis outside the moat. Three are round Lankan-form stupas on plain plinths with eight rings of astragal moulding. The north-eastern one is different — square-based, with a round bell and a harmika — and the register reads it as Ayutthaya-period, older than the other three. In the niche of the south-eastern one stands a stucco portrait figure holding a mason's trowel in its right hand: Chao Khun Chayaphiwat, who restored the chedi.
The ubosot, west of the chedi, begun in B.E. 2498 and given as completed in B.E. 2501, replacing an older hall too far gone to repair. It faces west rather than east, so that a person bowing to the principal image is also facing the relic chedi behind it. In front of the principal image stand the original paired boundary stones from the old ubosot — the provincial Office of Buddhism reads them as Sukhothai-period; the Fine Arts Department reads double sema as the mark of a re-consecration after Lankavamsa Theravada practice reached the peninsula.
Three large red sandstone Buddha images of the Chaiya school standing in the open north-east of the wihan luang, where a hall once stood over them.
The Chaiya National Museum in the grounds, holding the stone and bronze sculpture recovered from the old town — including a replica of the Grahi Buddha whose original is at the National Museum in Bangkok.
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 working royal monastery. Shoulders and knees covered, shoes off before entering the ordination hall, the wihan and the chamber inside the chedi. |
| Photography | No source we found states a rule, so we print none. |
| Getting there | 50 Moo 3, Thanon Rak Norakit, Tambon Wiang, Amphoe Chaiya, Surat Thani 84110, telephone 077 431 066. About 50 kilometres north of Surat Thani town; Chaiya has its own station on the southern railway. Parking and toilets on 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.
There is no single answer, and the disagreement is between arms of the Thai state. The Surat Thani provincial office of the National Office of Buddhism says about B.E. 1300. The Fine Arts Department's national register says the fourteenth to fifteenth Buddhist centuries. And the same departmental register reports a third view, from Srisak Vallibhotama, that the chedi is a development out of the nearby Wat Kaeo and Wat Long sanctuaries and therefore belongs to the Grahi period at roughly the seventeenth to eighteenth Buddhist centuries — five hundred years later than the department's own estimate. The Fine Arts Department also states plainly that no clear documentary evidence shows when the temple was founded.
In its lower structure, substantially — the mortarless brickwork and the cruciform tower are original fabric. The upper section is not. The summit was extended and rebuilt during the reign of King Chulalongkorn, from the lotus collar at the mouth of the bell upward, and the gilded chatra above it dates from that campaign; the original was later stolen and replaced in B.E. 2481. The gable niches were originally carved into the brick and were remade in stucco in the same nineteenth-century work, with new motifs including the state emblem of the fifth reign. The original finial excavated in the temple grounds is held at the Chaiya National Museum.
No state source read for this page publishes an admission charge for the temple, and the ministerial fee schedule that governs charging monuments does not reach a working royal monastery. The Chaiya National Museum inside the grounds is separate and does charge: the Tourism Authority of Thailand gives 20 baht for Thai nationals and 100 baht for foreign visitors, with the museum open Wednesday to Sunday from 09.00 to 16.00 and closed Mondays, Tuesdays and public holidays.
A royal monastery of the first class, Ratchaworawihan — พระอารามหลวงชั้นเอก ชนิดราชวรวิหาร — of the Maha Nikaya. Both the Surat Thani provincial office of the National Office of Buddhism and the Fine Arts Department state that grade. How it got there is less settled: the department records an elevation to third class, Saman, on 28 May B.E. 2491 under the name Wat Phra That Chaiya and a further elevation to first class with the present name on 6 February B.E. 2500, while the provincial Office of Buddhism dates the third-class step to 28 May B.E. 2500 and then contradicts itself on the resulting grade in its own opening line.
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.
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.
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.