Nakhon Pathom

This article is about the city. For the province where it is located, see Nakhon Pathom province.

Nakhon Pathom นครปฐม
City Municipality
City of Nakhon Pathom เทศบาลนครนครปฐม
Phra Pathommachedi
Seal
Nakhon Pathom Location in Bangkok Metropolitan Region Nakhon Pathom Location in Thailand
Coordinates: 13°49′14″N 100°03′45″E
Country	Thailand
Province	Nakhon Pathom
District	Mueang Nakhon Pathom
Government
• Type	City Municipality
• Mayor	Ekaphan Kuptawat
Area
• Total	19.85 km2 (7.66 sq mi)
Population  (2000)
• Total	120,657
Time zone	UTC+7 (ICT)
Area code	(+66) 34
Website	nakhonpathomcity.go.th

Nakhon Pathom (Thai: นครปฐม, pronounced [náʔkʰɔ̄ːn pā.tʰǒm]) is a city (thesaban nakhon) in central Thailand, the capital of Nakhon Pathom province. One of the most important landmarks is the giant Phra Pathommachedi. The city is also home to Thailand's only Bhikkhuni temple Wat Song Thammakanlayani (วัดทรงธรรมกัลยาณี), which is also open to women from abroad.

Nakhon Pathom houses a campus of Silpakorn University within the former Sanam Chandra Palace.

The city is 57 km west of Bangkok.

According to Charles Higham, "Two silver medallions from beneath a sanctuary at Nakhon Pathom, the largest of the moated sites, proclaim that it was 'the meritorious work of the King of Sri Dvaravati', the Sanskrit term Dvaravati meaning 'that which has gates'. The script is in south Indian characters of the seventh century." Nakhon Pathom was the largest Dvaravati center.

History

Nakhon Pathom is often said to have stood on the Gulf of Thailand two thousand years ago, the coast having since moved south through sedimentation. How far inland the sea reached is disputed. Phōngsi Wanasin and Thiwa Supcanya found the ancient towns of the plain arranged in two rows above the 3.5-metre contour, which David K. Wyatt reads as the fringes of a plain then largely under water rather than as a shoreline; on his account Nakhon Chai Si stands considerably higher than the ground to its east. Trongjai Hutangkura's reconsideration of the old shoreline, as Stephen A. Murphy reports it, finds that the survey it rests on overestimated the height of the mean sea level, and that what was mapped as coast was a floodplain. Nakhon Pathom, with Ratchaburi and Sing Buri, is often counted among the oldest towns in Thailand, on a foundation date given as early as 40 BC. It was for a long time one of the principal centres of Dvaravati. David K. Wyatt cautions against treating Dvaravati as the kingdom of a single people: an inscription in Old Mon indicates a westward cultural orientation rather than a Mon population, and the Central Plain was in his account multiethnic. The Indian King Ashoka sent monks to Siam at this time to popularize Theravada Buddhism. They arrived in Nakhon Pathom and from there toured the country. Hence the city's self-image of having spread Buddhism throughout Siam.

The moated city encloses 602 ha, the largest of the Dvaravati settlements of the central plain. Phasook Indrawooth gives the extent of the ancient town as about 3,700 by 2,000 m, some 740 ha. Excavation at Hor-Ek, about 500 m northwest of the Phra Pathommachedi, found occupation from the 3rd to the 11th centuries, and its excavators propose pre- or proto-Dvaravati for the earliest phase, of the 3rd to 6th centuries.

In Karen Mudar's locational analysis of 63 of them it is the only site at the top of a four-level administrative hierarchy, standing above seven regional centres, and the best provided with public buildings; the region assigned to it holds eight moated settlements. The enclosure reached that size in two stages, a second moat taking it from about 300 ha to 602. Before that expansion it was the size of Suphanburi and of Phraek Si Racha after its own enlargement, and Mudar suggested that if the three stood at that size at the same time they may have been the capitals of competing polities, with Nakhon Pathom's doubling marking the outcome; the expansions have not been dated against one another, which the argument requires. The rank-size distribution of the settlements falls close to a straight line, which she read as a single integrated economic system by the end of the period rather than one centre suppressing the growth of the rest.

Walailak Songsiri counts Wat Na Phra Men in the ancient city among the places holding crowned bronze Buddhas of a group current in the western basin between the 11th and 13th centuries, most often recovered buried in Chinese jars. The images sit in rueankaeo arches of Bagan type under Pala influence, some wearing the Pala feathered crown and some in the U Thong manner.

The first of the inscribed silver medallions that carry the name Dvāravatī were found here during the Second World War. They lay in a small earthen jar beneath a ruined chedi at Noen Hin, near the Chedi Chula Prathon complex, and were not published until the 1960s. Their legends are in a late southern Brāhmī script datable on palaeography to the seventh century. Jan Boeles held in 1964 that they established a Buddhist king of Śrī Dvāravatī reigning in the Nakhon Pathom area in that century. Hiram Woodward has proposed that the town was Dvāravatī itself, reading Sukhothai inscription 2, which places a cetiya in the middle of the city of Lord Kṛṣṇa, as a reference to it.

Supitchar Jindawattanaphum describes five stucco figures from the Chedi Chula Prathon, seated with the knees raised, bare above the waist and each clasping a sword. She reads them as warriors and reports them in the Phra Pathommachedi National Museum.

Hindu remains have been recorded here as well. Lucien Fournereau reported a liṅga and a large pre-Angkorian water channel at the Phra Pathommachedi in the late nineteenth century. An excavation by the Fine Arts Department at Wat Thammasala found a quadrangular yoni-like base in a corner shrine of a monument until then read as wholly Buddhist. Nicolas Revire, who has not seen the excavation report, cautions that some of the Hindu material from the town may belong to the later Angkorian period.

In April 1842, trouble broke out between three groups of Chinese who had formed secret societies, each with about 1,000 men. The leaders of these groups were named Khim, Ia and Phiao (Piaw). The Siamese government sent soldiers under the command of Phra Sombat Wanit to arrest the leaders. In fact, Khim and Phiao were the first to be thrown into the dungeon, but Ia managed to escape. He then robbed the houses in the Samut Sakhon and Nakhon Pathom area along with his people. They could only be overpowered after a large police operation.

In the 1930s, Nakhon Pathom was a nest of 300 houses and about 12. Buddhist temples. There was also the famous monks' retreat at Bang Thammasala.

Geography

Nakhon Pathom is located about 50 kilometers west of Thailand's capital, Bangkok, in the middle of a wide plain, crossed by watercourses, such as the Mae Nam Tha Chin (Tha Chin River). Sugar cane has been grown here since the late 18th century. Old travel reports describe that near Nakhon Pathom on the Tha Chin, there were sugar factories every four to five kilometers, surrounded by some ten to fifteen houses and firmly in Chinese hands.

Places of interest

• Phra Pathom Chedi (พระปฐมเจดีย,) - considered the tallest Buddhist structure in the world, it is about 127 meters high, rediscovered by King Mongkut (Rama IV) during his time as a wandering monk in the jungle (restored since 1853) and covered with fine Chinese tiles at the behest of his son Chulalongkorn (Rama V).

• Phra Ruang Rochanarit - Standing Buddha about eight meters high in the north chapel.

• New museum at the south entrance of the temple complex, displaying mainly Dvaravati period artifacts found during construction work on the chedi and in the surrounding excavations, as well as Mon-style Buddha statues.

• Wat Phra Praton Praton Chedi (พระประโทณเจดีย์): small, quiet temple with an ancient Khmer prang and a small but popular shrine to the heroes of a legend Phya Khong and his foster mother Yai Hom.

• Wat Songdhammakalyani- (วัดทรงธรรมกัลยาณี) - Thailand's only Bhikkhuni temple, open also to interested Western women.

• Sanam Chandra Palace - King Vajiravudh's palace complex in the west of the city. The complex now houses the Sanam Chan Palace Campus of Silpakorn University.

Gallery

• 
  Phra Pathommachedi
• 
  Sanam Chandra Palace
• 
  Sanam Chandra Palace
• 
  Phra Pathommachedi

See also

• Phra Pathommachedi
• Samphran Elephant Ground & Zoo

External links

• Nakhon Pathom travel guide from Wikivoyage