Wat Saket

About

Wat Saket Ratchawora Mahawihan — Wat Saket in common speech — is a Buddhist temple in the Pom Prap Sattru Phai district of Bangkok. Its earliest traces belong to the Ayutthaya era, during which it bore the older name Wat Sakae. After Bangkok became the new capital, King Rama I undertook a renovation and gave the temple its present name, meaning 'to wash the hair', recalling that the king stopped here to bathe upon returning from a military campaign.

The most recognisable feature of the precinct is Phu Khao Thong, the 'Golden Mountain' — a steep, hand-built hill rising within the wat compound. King Rama III had set out to raise an enormous chedi at this place, but the soft Bangkok soil could not bear its weight, and the structure collapsed during construction. Over decades the abandoned earth-and-brick mound was overgrown with plants until locals took it for a true hill and named it phu khao.

A smaller chedi was begun on the hill under King Rama IV, completed early under King Rama V and gilded thereafter. Prince Pritsadang brought a relic of the Buddha from Sri Lanka for its enshrinement. Concrete walls were later added to stop the hill from eroding.

Each November the temple holds an annual festival, in which devotees ascend the Golden Mount in a candlelit procession. A long red robe is wrapped around the chedi, and worshippers write their names and those of their loved ones on the cloth, offering prayers in the hope of their fulfilment.

History

The temple's roots reach into the Ayutthaya era, when the precinct was called Wat Sakae. After the founding of Bangkok in 1782, King Rama I renovated the wat and conferred its present name. The Phu Khao Thong began life as a failed chedi-construction project by King Rama III; the soft soil could not support the structure, which collapsed during building.

A new chedi atop the resulting hill was begun under King Rama IV and completed under King Rama V, who consecrated it by enshrining a relic of the Buddha that Prince Pritsadang had brought from Sri Lanka. The modern temple buildings rose in the early twentieth century with Carrara marble construction. During the cholera outbreaks of the nineteenth century, Wat Saket served as Bangkok's main receiving ground for the dead, a sorrowful chapter remembered in the proverbial phrase 'vultures of Wat Saket'.

Significance

The Golden Mount has become a symbol of Bangkok itself. Devotees climb the steps each year in November, offering candles and inscribed cloth in a procession that links the city's modern devotion to a centuries-old tradition of relic veneration.