Wat Mahathat (Ayutthaya)

Wat Mahathat, the "monastery of the great relic", was once the spiritual centre of the Siamese capital, and even as a field of brick stumps it still reads like a plan of royal ambition. Its founding is usually credited to King Borommaracha I around 1374, though a seventeenth-century Dutch merchant, Jeremias van Vliet, gave the honour to the city's founder, Ramathibodi I. A decade later King Ramesuan, who had stayed here as a monk, enlarged the complex and gave it the name it still bears. At its heart stood a towering Khmer-style prang that was meant to house relics of the Buddha himself.

That tower had a troubled life. It fell in 1631 under King Prasat Thong and was raised again within two years to roughly fifty metres, crowned by a metal spire; by 1637 it was ringed by a roofed cloister and a crowd of smaller chedis. It collapsed for good in 1911 and was never rebuilt, so what the visitor now walks through is the footprint of a sacred city in miniature: the base of the central prang, broken Buddha images along the lines of the old cloister, and chedis whose brick cores show where the stucco has fallen away. When the Thai government cleared the site in 1956, workers found a buried treasure beneath the prang - a relic of the Buddha in a golden urn, small golden Buddha images and other offerings - which now belongs to the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum nearby.

The image everyone comes looking for is small and easy to miss among the ruins: a sandstone Buddha head held fast in the roots of a fig tree, its calm face turned outward as if the tree had grown around it on purpose. How the head came to rest there is not documented; the usual explanation is that it lay among the debris of a broken statue until the roots slowly lifted and enclosed it. It is probably the most photographed object in Ayutthaya. Beyond the root-bound head, it is worth lingering over the rhythm of the ruined galleries in late afternoon, when the low sun turns the bare brick deep orange.

Ayutthaya itself was founded in 1351 on an island ringed by rivers and remained the Siamese capital until Burmese armies took and burned it in 1767; Wat Mahathat itself largely withstood the fires. The old capital is now a modern provincial town threaded through with ruins, and Wat Mahathat sits within the Historic City of Ayutthaya, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.

Getting there

The temple stands on the old island of Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, about 1 km from the town centre. The nearest airport is Bangkok's Don Mueang International Airport (DMK), around 49 km to the south. State Railway of Thailand trains run frequently from Bangkok's Krung Thep Aphiwat Central Terminal to Ayutthaya station, 71 km up the line, in roughly an hour; from the station, a tuk-tuk or a rented bicycle covers the last stretch to the ruins.