Dynastic History|Wat Ratchaburana, Ayutthaya — The Chronicle Was Written 257 Years Later

Intharacha died in 1424, and two of his sons rode from the cities they governed to claim the throne at Ayutthaya. The Royal Chronicles say the brothers met on elephants at the Pa Than bridge and killed each other, leaving the succession to a third brother, Chao Sam Phraya, who reigned as Borommarachathirat II and raised this monastery on the ground where the two were cremated.

That account reaches us at a distance. The earliest surviving recension of the chronicles, the Luang Prasoet, was compiled in 1681 by the royal astrologer Phra Horathibodi on the order of King Narai, two hundred and fifty-seven years after the event, and what survives of it is an eighteenth-century copy. It is a court's record of its own succession, written by the court that came after.

The brick prang carries evidence the chronicles do not. Its crypt runs down through three chambers. The uppermost is painted with figures on walls that were sealed as soon as the work was finished, so the murals were never meant to be looked at. The middle chamber held gold — regalia, crowns and headdresses, set out on brass tables in wall niches. The lowest, recorded at about 1.40 m square and 80 cm high, held a gold reliquary in four nested casings and gold plates inscribed in Khmer script; the Fine Arts Department resealed it after recording it. Museum Siam's account reads the deposit as a royal funerary rite in the devarāja idiom rather than as a memorial to the duel.

The prang stands restored inside Ayutthaya Historical Park, inscribed by UNESCO in 1991. Steep stairs still run down into the crypt, and the paintings are still on the wall.

📸 Cover: The main prang of Wat Ratchaburana seen from the vihara ruins, Supanut Arunoprayote, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons