Wat Khiri Wihan

What the official record says

Where Wat Khiri Wihan 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.

Two arms of the Fine Arts Department give founding years a century apart. Its national register says the monastery was built about B.E. 2374; its Trang archives page says the cave belongs to a monastery established about B.E. 2474. The National Office of Buddhism gives B.E. 2374, so two of the three agree and the outlier is the department's own popular page, where the difference is one transposed digit. This guide does not get to choose on that reasoning and states the disagreement instead. Nothing dates the cave's own images or tablets to a year at all.

The history of Wat Khiri Wihan

Trang has one entry in the Thai state's first attempt to count its own heritage that is a working monastery, and this is it. When the Fine Arts Department published its list of ancient monuments for the nation in March 1936, Trang came tenth of forty-six provinces and six sites were named on a single page. Item 1 was วัดวิหาร, in what was then Khao Khao district. The district has since been renamed Huai Yot, the monastery is now Wat Khiri Wihan, and the entry is still the only thing on that page that holds a Sunday service.

What drew attention was never the buildings. It was the cave, and in particular what Prince Naris found in it. On his tour of the Malay Peninsula in 1902 he recorded unbaked clay votive tablets lying in the cave, and those tablets are the reason scholars keep coming back. They sort into three shapes: an oval like an egg, a lotus petal, and a flat slab like a brick. The iconography is where it gets interesting, and where the state contradicts itself. The register describes them as Bodhisattvas in various attitudes, carrying the Ye Dhammā verse in Devanagari script and belonging to the Vajrayana. The description reproduced by the SAC database and by local accounts says something different: a four-armed Narayana in the center of the oval, ringed by eight deities; a single four-armed Narayana on the lotus petal; a two-armed Narayana on the slab, flanked by disciples or deities. Those are not the same object described twice. Villagers simply called them พระผีทำ, the ones the spirits made.

The dating is a range rather than a date. Phiriya Krairiksh examined the tablets and put them at around the fourteenth Buddhist century; the SAC database's own summary widens that to the thirteenth to fifteenth. Either way they belong to a period when this coast sat inside a trading world that ran to Sumatra and Bengal, and when Mahayana and Hindu imagery traveled with it. They are now kept by the abbot rather than in a museum, which is how a great deal of southern Thai material survives and also why so little of it has been catalogued.

The monastery around the cave is harder to date than the objects inside it, and the Fine Arts Department has published two answers a hundred years apart. Its register says about B.E. 2374, which would put the foundation in the 1830s; its Trang archives page says about B.E. 2474, the 1930s. The National Office of Buddhism sides with the earlier year, and its own record of the grant of visungkhamsima in January 1902 makes a 1930s foundation hard to sustain. The page does not pick. What is not in dispute is the status: Wat Khiri Wihan is an ordinary monastery of the Maha Nikaya, not a royal one, which the National Office of Buddhism states directly and which is a confirmation rather than a gap.

What you actually see

The cave itself, which the department's Trang archives describes as holding a reclining Buddha twelve meters long, with a crowd of seated meditation images at the mouth.

The rock shelter beside the monastery courtyard, level with it, where the register counts seven Maravijaya images and one reclining Buddha, with two more alongside: one seated in meditation, one in the attitude of final nirvana with the right hand laid along the bolster level with the face.

The discus mark on that last image, which the Fine Arts Department's register calls a กงจักรนารายณ์, Narayana's wheel — a Hindu attribute on a Buddha image, which fits the Narayana tablets and does not fit the register's own Bodhisattva reading of them.

The clay votive tablets, held by the abbot rather than displayed, in three shapes: oval, lotus petal and flat slab.

The hill the monastery takes its present name from: khiri is the mountain, and the old name, Wat Han, is said to come from two ceramic geese that once stood on it and were destroyed long ago.

The setting the register records in its own words: flat low ground beside Khlong Lam Yuan, with hills, a stream and private orchards all around.

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.

• The founding year, where the Fine Arts Department's register says about B.E. 2374 and the department's own Trang archives page says about B.E. 2474.
• What the clay tablets actually depict. The register says Bodhisattvas with a Devanagari Ye Dhammā inscription; the SAC database and the local descriptions say a four-armed Narayana. No photograph published by a state body settles it.
• The tablets' date, where Phiriya Krairiksh's estimate of the fourteenth Buddhist century and the SAC summary's thirteenth to fifteenth are the only figures in print, and no excavation report exists.
• Whether any of the rock-shelter images can be dated. The SAC summary calls them Ayutthaya and Rattanakosin in period; no source gives a single image a year.
• The length of the reclining Buddha, where twelve meters comes from the department's Trang archives alone and no measured survey is published.
• Visiting hours. The SAC database says the monastery may be visited any day at no charge but publishes no times, and no official source states opening hours.

Wat Khiri Wihan: 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 Trang’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.