Khu Bua

The site is roughly rectangular, about 800 by 2,000 m, and is enclosed by an earthen wall and a moat. Forty-four archaeological sites have been found within and outside the wall, with the foundations of Wat Khlong Suwankhiri [th] being the largest and best preserved. In Karen Mudar's survey of the moated settlements of the central plain the enclosure measures 160 ha, which makes it the largest site in the Nakhon Pathom region after Nakhon Pathom itself.^[2]: 24 Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit count some forty moated towns of this kind across the plain between the 6th and 12th centuries. They shared religious practice, art styles and the use of Mon for inscriptions, but showed no sign of political integration beyond, perhaps, local confederations.^[3]: 24 At Khok Phrik (โคกพริก), on the Maenam Om canal, a large stoneware jar was found at a place Walailak Songsiri describes as continuous with the moated town.^[4]: 9

Excavations were carried out in 1957, 1960 and 1961. The finds, ceramic figurines, wheels of the law and stone tablets, are now in the national museums at Ratchaburi and Bangkok, as well as in the small museum next to Wat Khlong. The architectural and artistic features are those of the Indian Gupta Dynasty, which promoted Buddhism in the region after it was first introduced during the reign of Ashoka.

Glass beads from Khu Bua were included in a compositional analysis of 186 beads from ten Dvaravati sites of the central plain. They include beads of a Middle Eastern plant-ash soda-lime composition, and the only bead in the sample of a soda-alumina composition, whose source Saritpong Khunsong records as "Pakistan ?".^{[5]: 2535–2536}

More than sixty ancient sites have been recorded in the area, most of them places of Buddhist worship, both Theravada and Mahayana. The objects excavated in the Khu Bua city area include sculpture in stucco and clay used to decorate buildings, such as Buddha images, Bodhisattvas, celestial figures and figures of rank. Tools and fittings were recovered with them, and Khu Bua appears to have prospered through the Dvaravati period, between roughly the 6th and the 11th centuries CE. Most of the finds are held at the national museum in Ratchaburi.

A stucco relief of female musicians, 66 cm high and of about the 7th or 8th century, was excavated at Stūpa no. 10 and is now in the national museum in Bangkok (inv. no. 311/2511).^[6]: 36 Supitchar Jindawattanaphum describes further stucco from the site that she reads as warriors and guards. One group shows two men standing together, each clasping a sword whose hilt ends in a ring. Two others show a prisoner questioned before a figure she takes for an official by his dress, and a guard kicking a prisoner, the second of them from Chedi no. 10, which she reports in the national museum in Bangkok.^{[7]: 1515–1516} Stucco and terracotta figures from the site have also been identified as foreign merchants, on their features and on their tall hats and boots, together with figures from U Thong and Nakhon Pathom.^[5]: 2535 The essays in Defining Dvāravatī place the figures identified as West Asian merchants at site 40.^{[8]: 55–56, 58}

Sculpture from Khu Bua has since acquired a wider significance for the art history of the period. Paul Lavy and Wesley Clarke found that numerous Khu Bua pieces share a facial morphology with the Viṣṇu of Pong Tuek [de], including continuous arching eyebrows, long broad noses with a pronounced ridge, and similarly shaped eyes and lips. They took the resemblance as evidence that the Pong Tuek image was carved in or near western Thailand rather than imported.^[6]: 34 Khu Bua is also counted among the Dvaravati and Dvaravati-related centres that have yielded Brahmanical as well as Buddhist material, alongside U Thong, Nakhon Pathom, Si Thep, Si Mahosot and Chaiya.^[6]: 24

Songsiri places the western Dvaravati centres at the inland end of routes running from the coast and the Tenasserim range by the Mae Klong and the Phachi. They led to the tin of Suan Phueng, Thung Kha and Chom Bueng in Ratchaburi province, and to the lead worked between the Khwae Noi and the Khwae Yai. Lawa highlanders collected aromatic wood, horn, hide, beeswax and stream minerals for the middlemen.^{[4]: 12–13}

The great rectangular platform of Wat Khlong has been compared with the Khao Khlang Nai monument at Si Thep, which is similar in character. Santi Leksukhum has suggested that both were originally chedi-wihan, with stupas at the western end and halls for worship at the eastern.^[9]: 93 Hiram Woodward, who reports the comparison, also raises the possibility that Si Thep exercised some control over Khu Bua in the 8th century, though he offers it as a question rather than a conclusion.^[9]: 93

Walailak Songsiri treats the later town of Ratchaburi as having grown out of Khu Bua, in the same way that she derives Phetchaburi from the coastal site at Khao Chao Lai on the Cha-am shore.^[4]: 9 She notes Chinese ceramics of the Han, Five Dynasties, Tang and Song periods dredged from the Mae Klong in front of Wat Ko Nammathapathawalanchayaram at Ratchaburi.^{[4]: 9–10}

Wat Khlong was registered as a historical site in 1962.^[10]