Mueang Sing (, ) is a historical park in Sai Yok District, Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand. It protects the remains of two Khmer temples dating to the 13th and 14th centuries. It was declared a historical park in 1987.

History The history of the site goes back to the period between 857 and 1157, a period when the Khmer Kingdom was flourishing. Records show that the town was abandoned until the reign of King Rama I. The name Mueang Sing first showed in the chronicles of the reign of King Rama I (1782–1809), when it was a fortified town protecting the town Kanchanaburi. In the reform of provincial administration at the end of the 19th century its status was reduced from Mueang to Tambon (commune).

The site was first designated as an archaeological monument in 1935 (Royal Gazette, Book 52, S. 75, 8 March 1935) and defined in its extension following survey work between 1960 and 1962 (Royal Gazette, Book 77, S. 60, 29 June 1960). After excavation and conservation work starting in 1974, the site was opened to the public as a historical park on 3 April 1997.

Site The site of the entire, not fully excavated city covers a rectangular are of East-to-West by North-to-South extending in the south along the course of the Khwae Noi river. It is enclosed by a high laterite wall and four parallel moats and ramparts with a gate in the center of each section.

Four monuments are located along the center North-South axis. Monument 1, a prasat temple is in the center of the area. Northwest of this are the foundations of a second temple building (Monument 2). Monuments 3 and 4 towards the South, West of the main North-South road are foundations of buildings, whose purpose is not clear.

Architecture Built in the Bayon style, the temples date to the Khmer kingdom in the reign of King Jayavarman VII (1180–1219). A stone inscription of Prince Vira Kumara praising his father names 23 cities. One of these was Srichaiya Singhapura, which some scholars identify with Mueang Sing. David K. Wyatt gives the ground for that reading: taking the list to run in rough geographical order, Śrī Jayasiṃhapurī must be the Mueang Sing of Kanchanaburi rather than the Singburi north-west of Ayutthaya. The count itself is not fixed in the inscription. The list of sanctuaries names twenty-three, while a later verse gives twenty-five, a discrepancy Cœdès noted without resolving. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit read the same list, of twenty-five cities to which Jayavarman VII sent the image Jayabuddhamahanatha, and give Jaya-Simhapuri as Mueang Sing. The reading goes back to Cœdès, who in publishing the inscription named the recipients in present-day Thailand as Lopburi, Suphan Buri, Ratchaburi, Phetchaburi and Mueang Sing, and took the distribution of the images to confirm the king's political as well as his religious authority. They also place Mueang Sing among the Angkor-influenced settlements that appeared in frontier areas around the Chao Phraya plain in this period, on the Three Pagodas Pass route to the west, alongside Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai on the river systems running north, and caution that the spread of Angkorian styles has sometimes been read as waves of conquest without corroborating evidence of military or administrative power.

An inscription in Tai, written in Khom script of the Chao Phraya type, is cut on the pedestal of the principal image of the prasat and names Phraya Chaikon (); reads him as a high official governing the town, and takes the inscription as evidence of Tai-speaking leaders in a town whose formal script was Khom. Walailak Songsiri places the arrival of Angkorian religious forms in the western basin in the second half of the 13th century, after Jayavarman VII's reign, and takes the radiating Avalokiteshvara images from Mueang Sing, Mueang Kosinarai and Lopburi to be Angkorian work or the work of court-trained craftsmen rather than the local bronze casting of the Suphan Buri sites.

Prehistoric burials At the South-Eastern edge outside the city wall on the river bank, remains of four individual have been excavated, which were dated to the late Metal age, . The individuals were buried with clay pots and jewelry made from shells and stone- and glass beads.

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References

km:ប្រាសាទមឿងសិង្ហ