Thailand: Wat Pa Fai Ruak, Wiang Thakan, Chiang Mai Province

Wiang Tha Khan, located 16km south of Chiang Mai in rural Sanpatong District, is a small and prosperous Northern Thai village set amid Lamyai plantations and inhabited by Tai Yong resettled from nearby Shan State in Burma at the beginning of the 19th century. As long ago as the 10th century CE it was a fortified city or ‘wiang’ serving as an outlying bastion of the Mon Kingdom of Haripunchai, today’s Lamphun. Today the remains of the city walls and surrounding moat survive amid the Lamyai plantations and rice fields, as well as the remains of 11 separate temples founded during the Mon Period (c. 9th-12th centuries CE), but dating in their present form from the Tai Kingdom of Lan Na (12th -16th centuries CE).

The most important site includes Wat Klang Muang, located in the centre of the village, with a small museum. Other more important temples include Wat Ubosot, Wat Ton Kok and Ku Mai Daeng. The entire complex was surveyed and restored by the Thai Fine Arts Department in the 1980s, and a record of their finding was published (in Thai) in 1991.

Wiang Tha Kan may be seen as a similar Mon outpost to nearby Wiang Kum Kam, located about 6km south of Chiang Mai on the Lamphun Road, a similarly fortified settlement guarding the Mon capital at Haripunchai. Two other fortified Mon settlements remain to be excavated.

Copyright:

CPA Media Co. Ltd.

Photographer:

David Henley

Credit:

Pictures From Asia