Changwat Prachin Buri, Thailand — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Changwat Prachin Buri known for?

In the north the province climbs into Khao Yai National Park, the oldest reserve in the country and the core of a forest that carries a UNESCO World Heritage listing. Thap Lan spreads east from it. On the plains below sit the moated ruins of Si Mahosot, a Dvaravati and later Khmer town whose laterite shrines and Buddha footprints go back more than a thousand years.

The province is also the country's centre of herbal medicine, built around the Chaophraya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital and its museum of Thai traditional cures.

Where is Changwat Prachin Buri?

Prachin Buri lies in eastern Thailand, on the plains east of Bangkok. The province splits cleanly in two. Its southern half is low, wet valley country drained by the Prachin Buri River, the name the upper Bang Pakong takes as it crosses these fields toward the Gulf of Thailand.

North of the valley the land lifts. It climbs into the Sankamphaeng Range, the southern wall of the Dong Phaya Yen Mountains, where roughly a quarter of the province stays under forest. Four provinces ring it. Nakhon Ratchasima rises to the north across the mountains, Sa Kaeo lies east, Chachoengsao closes the south, and Nakhon Nayok borders the west.

Bangkok sits a couple of hours west by road. The two national parks guard the high northern ground. Khao Yai covers the north-west, Thap Lan the north-east, and together they hold some of the largest unbroken forest left in this part of Thailand.

Kabin Buri anchors the eastern lowlands, the province's second centre after the capital at Prachin Buri town. Rice and sugar cane fill the flats between. Bamboo shoots come down from the hills.

What is Changwat Prachin Buri like?

Life here keeps a slow rural rhythm. The province is the heartland of Thai traditional medicine, and the Chaophraya Abhaibhubejhr Hospital has spent generations turning local herbs into remedies, teas and balms. Its first ward, a stucco building in colonial Baroque style, keeps a museum of Thai traditional medicine, its old dispensary shelves lined with dried roots and bark.

Faith is old ground here. The provincial emblem is a sacred fig, the Bodhi tree, after an ancient specimen long venerated near the old city of Si Mahosot, where Buddhism took root early in this land. Bamboo is the other local crop.

Groves of it climb the hills toward Khao Yai, cut for shoots, scaffolding and paper, and woven into the baskets sold in every market town. Thai is the language of the markets and the fields.

What is the history of Changwat Prachin Buri?

History here is stacked in layers. The plains held Mon city-states of the Dvaravati culture, and the moated town at Si Mahosot was trading and casting Buddha images by the seventh century. Then the Khmer Empire pushed west.

Angkor ran the district as a frontier outpost, and a stone arogyasala, one of Jayavarman VII's chapel-hospitals, still stands among the ruins at Sra Morakot. Under the Ayutthaya Kingdom it became a province of trade and defence, guarding the eastern approaches to the capital.

What is the climate of Changwat Prachin Buri?

Three seasons take turns here. A hot, dry spell builds from March, when the plains bake and the Prachin Buri River draws down between its banks. The south-west monsoon breaks around May and pours most of the year's rain onto the Sankamphaeng Range and the forests of Khao Yai until October.

Its uplands take the heaviest of it. Cool, drier air settles from November into February, the clear stretch worth planning a trip around.

How do you get to Changwat Prachin Buri?

No airport serves the province. Most visitors drive out from Bangkok, two or three hours east on the highways that thread the eastern plains. The eastern railway helps too.

Trains from Bangkok stop at Prachin Buri and carry on to Kabin Buri, the junction where the line splits toward the border provinces. Many travellers fold the trip into a longer loop through Khao Yai, dropping down from the park's southern edge into the plains.