Dynastic History|Wat Chaiwatthanaram — A Usurper's Foundation, Repaired Over Twelve Years

Prasat Thong built this temple in 1630, the first of his reign, on ground that had belonged to his mother. What it was for has been argued about ever since. Prince Damrong took it as a monument to a victory over Longvek. Pitchaya Soomjinda reads the plan instead: the ordination hall stands east of the central prang, against the convention then established, and she treats it as the first of a series in which the ubosot rather than the prang or chedi carried a temple's meaning — a change she connects to Prasat Thong's claim, recorded in the Eulogy of King Prasat Thong, to have been a bodhisatta in a past life and to be a future buddha. Prathip Phentako accounts for the same arrangement by function, Pierre Pichard by the practice of temporary ordination. A man who took a throne he was not born to had reason to build an argument in brick; the brick does not settle which argument it was.

After 1767 the site was abandoned. Bricks were carried away and sold, and the Buddha figures along the cloister were beheaded. The Fine Arts Department began restoring it in 1987 and opened it to visitors in 1992. In 2011 the floods put the compound under roughly two metres of water and undercut brickwork, stucco, timber and murals.

The repair that followed ran twelve years and about US$1.8 million from the American Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation, with the World Monuments Fund and the Fine Arts Department: four meru chapels and their connecting cloisters, the wall paintings, the Buddha images, and a flood wall. It closed formally on 15 November 2024. The temple lies outside the inscribed World Heritage boundary of the historic city.

📸 Cover: The central prang of Wat Chaiwatthanaram, Supanut Arunoprayote, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons