Bangkok/Things to do/ culture

Wat Traimit and the Golden Buddha

Researched PickJust turn up

Five and a half tonnes of solid gold Buddha at the Chinatown end of Charoen Krung Road, in a purpose-built hall it moved into in 2010.

Wat Traimit and the Golden Buddha
The Golden Buddha at Wat Traimit, 2011. Photo by McKay Savage, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What we checked

Checked on 21 September 2026. The temple's own web presence could not be reached, so the price and hours are recorded as unconfirmed rather than borrowed from aggregators. The Buddha's weight and its move to the present hall in 2010 are widely documented; the figure given here is the one the Tourism Authority uses. We have not been.

Verified via. OpenStreetMap carries the temple as way 241879483 at 13.7380, 100.5137, in Samphanthawong. The Tourism Authority of Thailand lists it as an attraction. No page we could read states the admission price, which is why none is published here.

Admission

We could not confirm a price. The temple has no working official site we could reach, and no Thai government page we read states a figure. Aggregator sites quote anything from 40 to 100 baht, and several describe two separate tickets, one for the hall with the Buddha and one for the heritage exhibition upstairs. Take cash for both and treat any figure you have read elsewhere, including ours, as unconfirmed.

The statue is the reason to come: a Buddha image of about five and a half tonnes of solid gold, three metres tall, sitting in a hall built for it. For most of its life nobody knew. It spent decades under plaster, treated as an unremarkable stucco Buddha, until it was dropped during a move in the 1950s and the plaster cracked.

It is at the Chinatown end of things. Wat Traimit sits where Charoen Krung Road meets Yaowarat, which makes it the natural start of a walk through Chinatown or a last stop before Hua Lamphong. The hall is small, so a visit is twenty minutes unless you go up to the heritage exhibition.

What it costs, we cannot tell you. No official page we could reach prints a price. The figures circulating range from 40 to 100 baht, and more than one source describes two tickets rather than one. That is exactly the situation where this site prints nothing rather than repeat a number we cannot stand behind. Take a few hundred baht in cash and you will be fine.

The scam to know about. This corner of Bangkok is where the “the temple is closed today” routine gets run on people, usually by a friendly stranger who then produces a tuk-tuk driver and a gem shop. The temple is open daily. Our scams guide has the rest of it.

Shoulders and knees covered, as at any temple.

Best for

A short, genuinely extraordinary stop at the start or end of a Chinatown walk

Skip if

You have already seen several gilded Buddha images and want something different

Where it actually is

661 Charoen Krung Road, Talat Noi, Samphanthawong, Bangkok 10100

Chinatown, Bangkok

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.View larger map

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