Si Thep

I chose the nearby city of Lam Narai based on various factors including Thomas' review with transportation options as a base to explore Si Thep. It has a "Grand Hotel" (600 THB per night), a train station that is a 2 hour direct ride away from Ayutthaya and some other city advantages like restaurants, transport etc.. It turned out that a car rental with taxi driver would only work our at 2500 THB for a full day which was too much for us as we paid the same for the two national park visits in the west of Thailand which involved much more driving (around 200 km vs. 60 km to Si Thep and back). However our hotel reception arranged us a Tuk Tuk for 1000 THB for 5 hours for the next day which worked perfectly fine.  
 
We arrived as only tourists around 9 a.m. at the Khao Klang Nok site which however had many vendors waiting for tourist customers. A friendly guard of the site provided us with chairs and turned on a TV which presented us the English video about the WHS and the inscription criteria etc.. That was a good introduction. Otherwise on site one can only see the pyramid kind of builduing which was recovered from plants and soil around 20 years ago. After around 45 minutes we moved on with the Tuk Tuk to the main site- the ancient village.  
 
There we needed to pay 100 THB entrance per person and jumped …

I visited Si Thep 2 weeks after its inscription, and it is a telling illustration of the power of the World Heritage tag. Prior to being inscribed, the management shared that Si Thep was lucky to see 50 visitors a day. Almost immediately after its inscription, however, visitor number grew to as much as 10,000 a day! It is a bit too much and the management was caught off guard with the sudden surge, but this clearly speaks a lot of how the tag is an effective tourism magnet overall. Interestingly, the shuttle services already bear the WHS logo too! They still had no clear rule about ICOMOS member's entry, and they had to discuss if they would honor my card for a free pass, which they eventually did. What I further observed is that many visitors just congregate around the two Khmer period prangs (towers) in the inner town, when in fact they are neither unique nor the actual highlights. One can see better examples of Khmer prangs in Ayutthaya, Sukhothai or even nearby Lopburi. What these visitors fail to realize, and I discussed this with the site workers and they acknowledged this occurrence, is that the ancient town's most important attributes are the 7th century(?) Dvaravati stuccoworks in Khao Klang Nai that are said to have no equal elsewhere. The "carrying dwarves" definitely need to be highlighted more as when there were hundreds of visitors around, I found myself being the only one seemingly interested enough to check …

As I recently in my review already called Koh Ker a ‘Tier 3’ Khmer site, Si Thep can only be Tier 4! The nomination, up for discussion at the WHC later this year, will undoubtedly focus more on the remains of the Buddhist Dvaravati culture which share the same area as the unremarkable Khmer structures of a later date.

I visited Si Thep (sometimes also transcribed as Sri Thep) by rental car from Bangkok, a car that also gave me access to the more remote Huai Kha Khaeng WHS further to the northwest. When I arrived at the main location, the outside temperature was 37 degrees, so I was pleased to see an electric cart waiting to ferry me around. We first stopped at what the driver called ‘three temples’. Two of them are quite plain Khmer-style stupas, the third is a lower rectangular structure where up close you can see that it has a beam all around decorated with funny carvings of crouching men and animals. These ‘stucco dwarfs’ stem from the Dvaravati culture. A protective roof now protects them from the elements.

After that, we went to see the excavation site where they found five human skeletons and one of an elephant, which probably date from before the Dvaravati period. And that was it – after half an hour or so I was brought back to the parking lot. Nothing visible at the site refers to “the long-distance maritime trade and exchange network with people in …

Si Thep is about 250 kilometers (3.30h) northeast of Bangkok, and a bit tricky to reach with public transportation. From the Mochit BTS Northern Bus Terminal there are regular express buses to the province of Phetchabun, taking Highway 21 where I got off the bus shortly before the intersection in Si Thep village. After just a few minutes I made a deal with a Tuk-Tuk driver who spoke no English, but with the help of some photos, he understood what I was looking for. It was a leisurely 15 minutes drive. There is an entrance fee of 100 Baht for foreigners (about 3 USD) and that includes the ride in an electro train from the small museum at the entrance to the main site. You need about 40 minutes to have a look around. Khao Khlang Nai, the central stupa was a Buddhist monastery decorated with stucco figures (dwarfs and various animals), in the Dvaravati style of art of the 9th century. Prang Si Thep is the most impressive monument in Khmer style, built with brick stones. Smaller stupas have collapsed and only their platforms remain. 
The return trip to Bangkok was even more challenging. The long distance buses did not stop in Si Thep, and I had the take the Tuk-Tuk to the next bigger town, about 30km away, Chai Badan, where they have a bus stand, located at Sura Narai 14 Alley, with hourly departures to the capital. However, it turned out to be a slow minibus, taking …

I was fortunate to join ICOMOS international experts two weeks field trip to Cambodia and Thailand exploring pre-Angkorian and Dvaravati arts and this trip took me to Dvaravati Si Thep, an upcoming UNESCO nomination of Thailand. Si Thep is one of the four contemporary ancient kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia mentioned by Xuanzang in his record to India, Sri Ksetra (Myanmar’s Pyu), Chenla (Cambodia’s Sambor Prei Kuk), Cham (My Son in Vietnam) and Dvaravati, so to fill the gap, no surprised why Thailand push this site to be listed as World Heritage Site.

The first thing I saw at Si Thep was the city moat, the layout of Si Thep is quite unique. Originally the city was built in round shape, in accordance with experts’ explanation, a typical style of Dvaravati cities, then there was an expansion with rectangular form in the east, so the city looks like a mushroom, or some expert said a big lingam! Then we saw small museum with some artifacts and historical explanation. After museum there were sightseeing cars directly took us to the main temples area. The main temple or Prang Si Thep, since it was built when Dvaravati Si Thep was a part of Khmer Empire, it was clearly like what I saw in Cambodia, it was nothing interesting or unique. Not far from Prang Si Thep is Khao Klang Nai Temple, this one is better as it was built as Dvaravati Mahayana Buddhist temple, the ruined stupa is almost like …