Wat Arun

No one knows who founded the monastery now known as WatBuddhist monastic complex that brings together, within a single enclosure, several religious buildings, monks’ quarters and ancillary buildings; the word does not refer to a single building. Arun. It is thought to have been established in the late sixteenth century, on the banks of the KhlongCanal or waterway, natural or man-made, which long played a major role in transport, irrigation and the organisation of settlements and territories in Thailand. Lat, during the Ayutthaya periodPeriod of Siamese history, from the mid-fourteenth century to 1767, during which the kingdom had Ayutthaya as its capital.. A French map from the reign of King Narai is said to have already shown it, under the name Wat Chaeng.³²

The name Wat Chaeng was in use at the time of the 1820 festival, and Western travellers were still using it in the mid-nineteenth century. The present official name, Wat Arun Ratchawararam, was given by King Mongkut, Rama IV (1804–1868), replacing the earlier name Wat Arun Ratchatharam. According to another chronology, this name would date back to 1820, under Rama II.³²

The link with the dawn belongs to tradition. It is said that Taksin, the future king of Thonburi, arrived at the temple at daybreak in 1767 and renamed it after the dawn. From the outset, this story binds the temple to the figure of Taksin, whose reign opened a new chapter in its history.

In 1768 Taksin established his capital at Thonburi. The walls of his palace, pushed out as far as Khlong Nakhon Ban, then took in the temple, which no longer housed monks. The monastery thus changed in nature: it became a sanctuary enclosed within the king’s residence, with no monastic community. It was in this setting that the episodes of the reign still associated with it took place.¹⁴

The chief of these episodes was the arrival of the Emerald Buddha, a revered statue of the Buddha. After the capture of Vientiane by General Chakri, the future Rama I (1737–1809) and first king of the Chakri dynasty, it was brought to Thonburi and welcomed at Wat Chaeng with lengthy festivities. In Thai usage, such a statue is called an ‘imageIn Thai Buddhism, a devotional representation of the Buddha, most often a statue, venerated as an object of worship.’. It remained on the west bank, in a pavilion built beside the temple, until the reign of Rama I; it then crossed the river to Wat Phra Si Rattanasatsadaram.¹⁵

The temple is also associated with a critical moment of the reign. In 1782, under attack from Phraya SanIn Thailand, a small shrine where worship is offered to a deity, a spirit or a protective figure., Taksin took monastic robes within the consecrated area of the temple. This area, marked out by boundary stones, surrounds the ubosotConsecrated ordination hall of a wat: the ritually central building, marked out by sacred boundary stones, where monastic ordinations take place., the building in which ordinationsCeremony by which a layperson is admitted as a novice or as a monk into the Buddhist community. are held and which houses the temple’s principal Buddha statue. It was thus at the ritual heart of the monastery that the king entered religious life.¹⁵

Taksin’s memory lives on in tradition. Tradition has it that the king meditated in the temple’s royal residence, and that the small viharnAssembly and devotional hall of a wat, used for ceremonies, teaching and the veneration of Buddha images; unlike the ubosot, it does not host monastic ordinations. facing the great prangTower-sanctuary rooted in Khmer architectural tradition, later adopted and transformed in Siamese and Thai architecture; depending on the context, it serves a religious function or acts as a reliquary., the temple’s great central tower, preserves his meditation stool. These stories show how closely the figure of the king of Thonburi remains bound to the place.²⁴

When the palace moved to the east bank, the temple regained its monastic vocation: Rama I provided it with monks’ cells and a community of monks. His successor, Prince Itsarasunthon, the second king of the Chakri dynasty under the name Rama II, in turn took an interest in it. Once king, he ordered the temple to be restored and enlarged in 1813. A great festival was held there in 1820. This was the first of the temple’s great royal building campaigns.³³

Rama II also had the preparatory works and the foundations of the great prang begun; according to some historians, he may have directed its construction itself.

The decisive campaign began under Rama III. On 2 September 1842 the king laid the foundation stone of the great prang, a new masonry structure enveloping the older, more modest prang: the tower seen today therefore encloses, within its mass, the one that preceded it. Royal orders then followed each stage of the work. One royal order announced that Rama III was to come and pour the metal for the casting of the naphasunMetal trident crowning the summit of a prang., the trident intended for the summit of the prang; other orders provided for its gilding and installation. These instructions bear witness to the sovereign’s personal involvement in the project. Yet no festival marked the completion of the works before his death in 1851: the celebration of the monument is thought to have taken place under Rama IV.¹⁹

Under Rama IV, the temple also became a site of dynastic memory. The ashes of Rama II were placed in the base of the principal Buddha statue in the ubosot and offered for public veneration: the king who had restored the temple now rested there. By the end of the century, this site of memory was under threat. In 1895 the ubosot burned; Rama V (1853–1910) had the ashes rescued, and the restoration that followed amounted to a genuine reconstruction.¹³

At the centre of the temple rises the largest prang of the Rattanakosin periodPeriod of Thai history that began with the founding of Bangkok as the capital by King Rama I at the end of the eighteenth century. It takes its name from Rattanakosin Island, the heart of the royal city.. It is surrounded by four corner prangs and by four mondopSmall sacred building or pavilion, often square in plan, which may house a sacred image, a Buddha footprint, relics, scriptures, ashes or another sacred object., small pavilions each sheltering an image turned towards it, so that the central monument forms the heart of a group. Its structure is solid: a mass of brick and mortar with no inner chamber, which cannot be entered. It rises on three terraces on which one can walk around the monument. A plumb-line survey carried out in 1908–1909 gives it a height of about 67 metres.³⁴

Yet the prang occupies only part of the temple. The area of worship comprises three groups set on parallel east–west axes: the prang, the ubosot with its principal Buddha statue, and the viharn. Between the ubosot and the viharn, a square mondop shelters a footprint of the BuddhaObject of worship representing the imprint of the Buddha’s foot, often decorated with symbolic signs, and venerated as an evocation of his presence..³⁰

Seen close up, the prang appears covered in dense decoration. It is clad in coloured glazed ceramics, broken and then assembled into flowers and patterns. This composite material combines shaped plaques, shards and shells, and gives the monument its colourful surface.

The sculpted decoration also makes room for the gods. In the niches of the great prang, IndraDeity of Vedic origin, king of the gods in the Hindu tradition and also present in Buddhist cosmology. In Thai iconography he is often shown riding the celestial elephant Erawan., the green-bodied god, rides ErawanCelestial elephant associated with Indra, known as Airavata in the Indian tradition. In Thai art he is frequently shown with three heads, although the traditions also describe other forms., his three-headed white elephant; in those of the corner prangs, a mounted deity is identified as the wind god, Phra PhaiGod of the wind in Thai religious traditions, related to the Indian god Vayu. His identification in some architectural representations, notably at Wat Arun, is open to differing readings., or, according to other readings, as the Sun or the Moon. The life of the Buddha, for its part, is told only in the four mondop placed at the cardinal points.³¹

This arrangement lends itself to a cosmological reading. The central prang represents Mount MeruCosmic mountain at the centre of the universe in Buddhist and Hindu cosmologies., the cosmic mountain at the centre of the universe in Buddhist cosmologyBuddhist representation of the universe, organised around Mount Meru and made up of continents, oceans, mountain ranges and superimposed worlds.. The corner prangs represent the four continentsIn Buddhist cosmology, the four lands set at the cardinal points around Mount Meru. or, according to others, the Sattaparibhanda mountainsIn Buddhist cosmology, concentric mountain ranges that encircle Mount Meru., ranges that encircle Mount Meru. The group of five prangs thus forms an ordered image of the universe.³⁶

The temple’s rank was fixed in 1915. The regulations on royal temples, published that year in the Royal GazetteOfficial journal of the Kingdom of Thailand, in which laws, decrees and official acts are published, including the listing of protected monuments., the official journal, placed Wat Arun in the first class, in the ratchaworamahawihanCategory of royal temple: a major wat with extensive buildings, built or restored by the sovereign in a personal capacity. category, which denotes a great temple built or restored by the sovereign in a personal capacity. This classification officially sealed the link between the temple and the monarchy.¹⁰

This link is also expressed through rites, foremost among them the royal kathinForm of the kathin in which the offering is made in the name of the sovereign., the annual ceremony of offering robes to monks made in the sovereign’s name, here presided over by the king and associated with a procession of royal barges. The Chakri kings are said to have come here by barge every year to preside over this ceremony. The barge procession was revived at the beginning of the Cold War.²¹

The temple also owes its renown to its setting. Built on the west bank of the Chao Phraya, it reveals itself from the river. Sir John Bowring, head of a mission to Siam lodged at the temple in 1855, described it as the most conspicuous building on the bank. Some ten years later, the photographer John Thomson took views from the top of the temple that encompassed, on the opposite bank, the Grand Palace and Wat Pho. This silhouette has become an image of the country: the prang appears on a series of Bank of Thailand banknotes, and it serves as an element of the logo of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.⁴

The great prang has undergone several restoration campaigns. Concerned about its condition as early as 1895, Rama V had its repair undertaken in 1908, under the direction of Phraya Ratchasongkhram, master builder of the project. The king regarded the monument as a memorial of the nation, which gave the restoration a significance reaching beyond the upkeep of a temple. An instruction drawn up for the works required that all old material still usable be kept, even if tarnished, even at the cost of setting old beside new: conservation took precedence over uniformity of appearance.²⁰

Other campaigns followed. One of them, launched in 1967 for the bicentenary of the birth of Rama II, was marked in 1968 by King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX, placing the great crown on the summit of the prang, then under restoration; the choice of this anniversary linked the restoration to the memory of the king who had restored the temple. After the damage caused by the 2011 flood, including the fall of many decorative elements, the Fine Arts Department conducted a major campaign from 2013 to 2017, carried out by a private company under its supervision.³⁹

This latest campaign sparked controversy. The prang that emerged white in 2017 divides opinion: for the temple and the Fine Arts Department, this shade corresponds to the original colour. Critics, among them the archaeologist Sayan Praicharnjit, former dean of the Faculty of Archaeology, denounce on the contrary an aesthetic loss which they attribute to the subcontracting of the work.²³

These restorations form part of a long-standing framework of protection. Since 1949 all the temple’s monuments have been registered on the list of ancient monuments, and the boundaries of the protected grounds were fixed in 2017. A new phase began in April 2025, when the great prang was inscribed on the World Heritage Tentative List, through a submission by the Thai National Committee for the World Heritage Convention: this is a preliminary step towards a possible nomination.⁹