Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat Ratchaworawihan () is a first-class royal temple in Si Satchanalai, Sukhothai, Thailand. The modern temple buildings are located next to the ruins of an ancient temple complex known as Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat Chaliang (). The area is part of Si Satchanalai Historical Park. Its standing prang is of Ayutthaya date, and whether an earlier Angkorian building lies beneath it is disputed.
History The complex stands at the centre of Chaliang, the older of the two settlements of the district. Chusak Satienpattanodom notes that its remains run from about the 13th century upward, while the walled city about 2 km upstream has none earlier than that, and takes Chaliang for the earlier centre of the two. Around the complex, on the neck of the river bend, Paul Bishop and colleagues found 4 to 5 m of flood deposits interbedded with occupation layers. The lowest layer, with inhumation burials, earthenware and ash, rests on sterile river gravel and gives a pooled radiocarbon age of 1259 ± 28 years BP, uncalibrated. Early earthenware marks the deeper levels and stoneware the shallower. River-bank sections also show earthenware bonfiring sites, with a metre or more of mixed ash, charcoal and sherds.
The enclosure is a wall of large laterite blocks, and its gateway carries four faces, which Chusak compares with the gates of Angkor Thom. Roof tiles from the site bear apsara figures and are dated to about the 13th century. Michael Vickery grouped the megalithic enclosure wall with those of Wat Bot and Wat Yai, some 20 km to the south, and of Wat Avas Yai at Kamphaeng Phet. He took the four as a regional style to be studied together, not a unique work as Betty Gosling had described it. The standing prang is of early Ayutthaya date and may have been raised over an earlier Angkorian structure. Vickery took the temple for an Ayutthayan building, probably of the reign of Trailokanat, with 18th-century work, and held its Khmer first phase to be only theoretical, an idea he traced to Damrong. For him only the four-faced head over the east gate, imitating the Bayon style, suggested an earlier building. The monuments stand on a former ground level about 1.7 to 2.8 m below the present surface, dated by radiocarbon to the 13th to 15th centuries. Flood sediment has since partly buried them, both the older Angkor-style buildings and those of the Sukhothai period, and the enclosure wall now stands inset into the ground. Lunet de la Jonquière, reporting in 1904 that he had been told fully harnessed elephants once passed easily through the eastern gate, put the burial down to the walls settling under their own weight. Bishop and colleagues reject this because the same burial is found throughout the old city. Laterite-lined wells exposed by bank erosion relate to a later ground surface about 0.5 m down, since covered by a further 50 cm of flood sediment.
The Wat Si Chum Inscription credits Pho Khun Ram Ratcha with building the Phra Si Rattana Mahathat. Chusak sets that beside the Jinakalamali account of a stupa raised at Sachanalai after the Sihala image was brought from Nakhon Si Thammarat, though the alignment of the two is his own. A figure named Chao Phan built a vihara of eight bays and a forest dwelling here in 1404.
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