Ubon Ratchathani is a Lao city that became a Thai province, and its temples show the seam. The Fine Arts Department's national register carries 463 sites here: 9 registered ancient monuments, 25 registered with a delimited land boundary, 38 named in a Royal Gazette list without being registered, 86 recorded as ancient monuments without either, and 305 — two-thirds of the total — still awaiting assessment. That last number is the state saying it has not finished looking, and in this province it is unusually large.
The town was constituted in B.E. 2322 and its oldest temples are barely younger. Wat Maha Wanaram, which everyone here calls Wat Pa Yai, began as a monks' dwelling in a forest thirteen years later, and an inscription behind its principal image dates the making of Phra Chao Yai Inthaplaeng to a Sunday afternoon in April B.E. 2350 — the most precisely dated object in this guide's Ubon pages. Half a century after that, King Mongkut ordered a temple built at a landing on the Mun river, and Wat Supattanaram became the first Dhammayuttika monastery in the province. The two are the province's only royal monasteries, one on each side of the Sangha's great nineteenth-century division, a kilometre apart.
What makes the province worth reading closely is the craft. A monk from Vientiane built the scripture library at Wat Thung Si Mueang out over a pond, in a central-Thai timber frame carrying Lao carving; the ordination hall of Wat Chaeng has krachang cut as separate pieces and applied to the gable so they stand proud of it, and won the Association of Siamese Architects' first prize for conservation in B.E. 2530; the preaching throne at Wat Thung Si Wilai is Isan folk work under Lan Xang influence, with its four ridges deliberately left unindented. None of that is central-Thai and none of it is quite Lao either.
And then there is the older layer, which is Khmer and Hindu. Prasat Ban Ben in the south of the province is three brick towers on one laterite platform, built for Shaivite worship — a shivalinga pedestal came out of the excavation, along with a panel of the nine planetary deities and a lintel of Indra on Erawan. It is a prasat and not a wat, it was never Buddhist, and it is the ordinary case that the Nakhon Ratchasima pages in this guide are the exception to.
6 of 6 temples in Ubon Ratchathani are plotted.
Every page is built from the National Office of Buddhism and Department of Religious Affairs registers, the Fine Arts Department’s national monument register and its published monographs, the Royal Gazette where it could be read, UNESCO, and the temples’ own material — with the Tourism Authority of Thailand used only for visiting practicalities, never for history. Nothing here is taken from a travel blog, a listicle or a review site.
The rule that governs every page is that recorded tradition is not history. Thai temple histories are full of foundation legends, and they are worth telling — but told as tradition, in those words, never flattened into a bare founding date. Where a date is not established, the page says so, and that sentence is the useful part.
Still to come here: Six built, and this province could carry two more runs without leaving documented ground. The clearest next six, all of them registered and all with gazette instruments already located in this run: ศาลาธรรมาสน์สิงห์ วัดศรีนวลสว่างอารมณ์ at Chi Thuan (0001942), item 1 of the same 1997 instrument as Wat Thung Si Wilai and bounded at 2 rai 45.25 square wa — the lion preaching pavilion is one of the best-known objects in the province and this guide has not touched it; the sim of วัดบ้านตำแย at Rai Noi (0001906) and วัดแก่งตอย at Tha Mueang (0002086), items 3 and 4 of that same instrument; วัดบูรพาราม in the city (0001911), registered and bounded at 2 ngan 76 square wa by an instrument of 17 December B.E. 2544; วัดใต้เพิง (0001910), item 1 of the 1936 Ubon block and the one city temple from that list this run did not build; and วัดโพธิ์ศรีทุ่งใหญ่ or วัดบ้านขะโหมย at Khueang Nai (0001943), item 19 of the same 1936 list. Outside the temples: หอไตรหนองขุหลุ (0001983), ปราสาทหนองทองหลาง (0001969) — item 20 of the 1936 list, the province's other Khmer sanctuary — and the Pha Taem rock paintings (0001939), which are prehistoric rather than Buddhist and belong to a different kind of page. Two temples were researched here and NOT built because the state has nothing documentary to write from: วัดศรีอุบลรัตนาราม (0009579), which holds Phra Kaeo Butsarakham and is probably the most visited temple in the city, and วัดหนองป่าพง (0013746), the head monastery of the Ajahn Chah forest lineage and by some distance the most searched temple in this province in English. Both sit at register status 2, awaiting assessment, with no history text, no description and no gazette instrument. That is a source-chain problem rather than a research one, and Wat Nong Pa Pong at least has an official monastic source of its own that a later run should test.
Read the guide to Buddhism and temple etiquette in Thailand first — dress, footwear, photography and how to behave around monks. Then the Bangkok city guide and things to do in Bangkok for everything around them.
Staying longer? Work out which Thai visa route fits your situation, read where to live in Bangkok, and browse residences and rentals.