Things to do in Maha Sarakham.

The province's defining monument, and a rare case of a landmark with a precisely documented origin. In 1979 the Fine Arts Department, excavating a rice field in Na Dun district, recovered a bronze stupa containing nested gold, silver and bronze reliquary caskets from the site of the ancient town of Champasri. In 1982 the government designated a surrounding area — reported at about 365 acres — as a regional Buddhist centre, the Phutthamonthon of Isan. Construction of Phra That Na Dun, a fifty-metre white stupa built to house the relics, began in 1985 and was completed on 27 November 1986. It is the first line of the provincial motto and the thing most visitors to Maha Sarakham come for. It sits about an hour south of the provincial town, so plan it as a half day rather than an afternoon.

The site that produced the relics, and much the more interesting story of the two. Champasri was an ancient town founded in the Dvaravati period around the seventh century and abandoned around the thirteenth as Angkorian power in the region receded — then repopulated by Lao settlers from Roi Et in the nineteenth century, after Maha Sarakham itself was founded in 1865. The province as an administrative entity is therefore about twelve centuries younger than the settlement inside it, which is worth holding in mind when you read that Maha Sarakham 'dates from 1865'. Nearby stands Ku Santarat, a Khmer ruin in the Bayon style associated with the reign of Jayavarman VII, in the subdistrict that takes its name.

On the bank of the Chi River in Kosum Phisai, the province's largest district by population, Bung Ling is home to more than a thousand semi-tame long-tailed macaques and was designated a forest park by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment in 2020, covering roughly 175 rai. It is the province's most-photographed natural attraction and the easiest half-day trip from the town, sitting on the Highway 208 road toward Khon Kaen. Standard monkey-site precautions apply and are not a formality: do not carry visible food or loose bags, and do not feed them by hand.

Kantharawichai — the district north of the town that holds Mahasarakham University's Khamriang campus — keeps the province's most venerated Buddha image: Phra Phuttha Ming Mueang, also known as Phra Phuttha Suwan Mali, a red-sandstone Dvaravati-era figure regarded as the district's guardian. The district also has a temple associated with a standing Buddha beside a sacred Bodhi tree, and local tradition links a paired set of images to the ending of a drought. We keep the detail short here deliberately: the sources describing the temple names and the pairing tradition were not consistent enough for us to publish a firm account of which image is which, and we would rather point you at the district than get the attribution wrong.

Kaeng Loeng Chan is a named subdistrict of Mueang Maha Sarakham with a reservoir and park on the western edge of the town, and it is the capital's main open space — the same reservoir whose capacity was exceeded during the October 2022 Chi River flood. Further out, the Dun Lamphan No-Hunting Area — often described as a forest park, though that is not its official designation — protects deciduous dipterocarp and peat swamp forest and is the habitat of the mealy crab Thaipotamon chulabhorn, an endemic freshwater crab that is also the province's official aquatic symbol. That is a genuinely unusual thing for a province to designate, and the reserve is the reason it can.

Silk is the third line of the provincial motto — ผ้าไหมล้ำเลอค่า, 'valuable silk' — and the tradition here is mudmee, the Thai ikat technique in which the yarn is resist-dyed before weaving. What makes it worth travelling for is that the patterns are district-specific: Na Dun is associated with the Hua Nak pattern, Phayakkhaphum Phisai with Dao Lom Duan, 'star around the moon', and Wapi Pathum with Lai Kho Klong Yao, with weavers also noted around Kut Rang and Borabue. We could not confirm a geographical-indication registration for Maha Sarakham silk and do not claim one — which is a note about the paperwork rather than about the cloth.