Wat Chaiwatthanaram

Why go

Wat Chaiwatthanaram stands on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River, outside Ayutthaya's city island, in Ban Pom subdistrict. The province's tourism pages say it was built in the reign of King Prasat Thong, in 1630 (BE 2173), on the site of the residence of his late mother, possibly also to mark a victory over the Khmer, and that it was used for royal cremation ceremonies. They describe a principal prang with four smaller prangs at its corners and a gallery lined with 120 Buddha images, almost all without heads, and say the temple was abandoned after the fall of Ayutthaya and later restored. TAT's 2016 feature describes the temple as Khmer in style, with a central prang 35 metres high representing Mount Meru. The same TAT feature places it in the Ayutthaya Historical Park; no Fine Arts Department page read here says whether the park manages it. This record is the temple ruin.