Nakhon Sawan province

The word nakhon originates from the Sanskrit word nagara meaning 'city', and the word sawan from Sanskrit svarga meaning 'heaven'. Hence the name of the province literally means 'city of heaven' or 'heavenly city'.

The confluence where the Ping and the Nan meet to form the Chao Phraya is called Pak Nam Pho, and its name has been explained in two ways. Phraya Maha Ammatyathibodi (Seng Wiriyasiri) wrote in 1924 that the Ping was anciently the Mae Nam Pho, after a large bodhi tree at its mouth. Once the tree was gone, he said, the name survived only in Pak Nam Pho.^[5]: 55 Phiset Jiajanphong rejected that account. He took Mae Nam Pho for the Nan, which H. Warington Smyth's survey of 1891 to 1896 names as the Nam Pho in its text and on its map, and derived the river name from the Bang Pho market at Uttaradit on its bank. On his reading the confluence is named from the river rather than the river from the confluence.^{[5]: 55–57}

Nakhon Sawan has held a town since the Dvaravati period. Stephen Murphy and Pimchanok Pongkasetkan group the province's Dvaravati sites as part of the Upper Chao Phraya basin, together with U-Ta Pao in Chai Nat and Khao Kalon in Kamphaeng Phet. Those in Nakhon Sawan are Khok Mai Den, Muang Bon, Thap Chumpon, Chan Sen and Dong Mae Nang Mueang. The group's main waterways are the lower Ping, the lower Yom and Nan, and the Chao Phraya.^[6]: 110

Stucco lions stand at Khok Mai Den in Phayuha Khiri district, in Stupa No. 1 and on the north side of Stupa No. 3. Eng Jin Ooi and Peter Skilling take them as the closest parallels to the pair of lions found with the wheel of the law at Chai Nat.^[6]: 137 Dvaravati sema stones in the province were cut from phyllite and volcanic rock, unlike the sandstone used for them on the Khorat Plateau. Vimoltip Singtuen and Burapha Phajuy reported this in a 2020 survey of the province's geological heritage, as summarised by Singtuen and colleagues.^[7]: 9

Chan Sen, in Takhli district, was the first Dvaravati site to be excavated systematically, by Bennet Bronson in 1968 and 1969, and his five-phase sequence has served since as a reference for other sites of the period. His phase III, of about 200 to 450 or 500 CE, he classified as Funan-related, a label later work has questioned.^{[8]: 383, 385} Supitchar Jindawattanaphum reports pottery sherds from Chan Sen carrying figures she reads as warriors, one on horseback, one on an elephant and one with a shield and a short weapon. She treats decoration set inside a square frame ringed with dots as characteristic of Dvaravati pottery.^{[9]: 1517–1518} The site has also yielded an amulet-type object inscribed on the obverse in Old Mon, which Christian Bauer assigns to the 6th century and calls the earliest vernacular gloss in Mon identifying an illustration.^[10]: 114

The oldest dated inscription found in the province is that of Dong Mae Nang Mueang, K. 766, recovered at a walled and moated site in what is now Banphot Phisai district. It is inscribed in Pali on one face and Old Khmer on the other, and George Cœdès, who published it, judged the Pali face the oldest full inscription in that language found east of Burma. The text records a king styled Kuruñ Śrī Dharmāśoka ordering a local ruler, Kuruñ Sunat, to make over rice fields for the upkeep of a relic. Cœdès read its date as 5 February 1167 and David K. Wyatt as 4 February 1168.^{[11]: 9–13} The text also names a mahāsenāpati, Śrī Bhuvanāditya, and lists the fields, the slaves and the animals given. Wyatt reads the use of Khmer on its second face as evidence that the language served as a lingua franca around the confluence of the Ping and the Chao Phraya. On his reading it is not a mark of a Khmer population.^{[11]: 11–13} Christian Bauer drew the same kind of inference from other inscriptions upstream. He took Nw.7, a terracotta stupa inscribed in Mon from Mueang district, to be the latest Mon inscription of the upper Chao Phraya basin. From the epigraphy he assumed that the area north of the town was Khmer-speaking by the 10th century.^[12]: 535

Michael Vickery rejected a proposal to move the old name Song Khwae, "two-branch city", from Phitsanulok to Nakhon Sawan, since the sources call Naresuan's father lord of Phitsanulok.^{[13]: 9–10} He nonetheless granted that the name fits Nakhon Sawan's geography better, and read the Dong Mae Nang Mueang inscription as indicating that an attempt at a political centre there was probably made.^[13]: 10

While part of the Sukhothai Kingdom, the town was called Mueang Phra Bang and served as the kingdom's southern frontier city. In 1400, Sukhothai under Maha Thammaracha III took the town, then an Ayutthayan frontier centre, an episode recorded in inscription 46. The seizure cut Ayutthaya's carriage of goods between north and south.^[14]: 59 Srisak Vallibhotama counts Nakhon Sawan among the seven modern provinces that covered the core of Sukhothai.^[14]: 41 Later, within the Ayutthaya Kingdom, it was a trade centre because it lay where the two major rivers from the north meet. It was also the usual assembly point for Burmese armies before they attacked Ayutthaya. Under Taksin, Phra Bang became a Siamese military base against further Burmese attacks.

After King Mongkut signed the Bowring Treaty with Britain, the town became the main centre of the rice and teak trade. In 1895, when King Chulalongkorn established the monthon under the Thesaphiban administrative reform, Nakhon Sawan became the capital of Monthon Nakhon Sawan. The opening of the northern railway in 1922, the economic crisis before the 1932 revolution, and the opening of the Dejativongse bridge and the Phahonyothin highway in 1950 each reduced the importance of water transport. Nakhon Sawan declined with it.

The Ping and Nan rivers merge near the city of Nakhon Sawan to form the Chao Phraya River. Mae Wong National Park, on the border with Kamphaeng Phet, was created in 1987 to preserve the woodlands of Mae Wong–Mae Poen. The forested area covers 927 km² (358 sq mi), 9.7 percent of the provincial area.^[1] The park itself covers 894 km² (345 sq mi)^[15]: 54 and had 73,914 visitors in fiscal year 2024. With two other parks it makes up region 12 (Nakhon Sawan) of Thailand's protected areas.

Bueng Boraphet is the largest freshwater wetland in Thailand, covering 212 km² in total. The swamp lies directly east of the town of Nakhon Sawan and extends into the districts of Tha Tako and Chum Saeng. During the winter months many waterfowl migrate there. Parts of the swamp, covering 106 km², are protected as a non-hunting area.^[16]

The provincial seal shows a Wiman, a mythological heavenly castle, in reference to the province's name, 'Heavenly City'.

The provincial tree as well as the flower is Lagerstroemia loudonii (Loudon's crape myrtle). Iridescent shark (Pangasianodon hypophthalmus) is the provincial fish.

Sawanpracharak Hospital is the main hospital of the province.

The 4th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Area Army is based in Nakhon Sawan. It is responsible for defending the northwestern border with Burma, from Mae Hong Son in the north to Kanchanaburi in the south.^[19]

Health	Education	Employment	Income
18	35	59	28
Housing	Family	Transport	Participation
33	71	65	48
Province Nakhon Sawan, with an HAI 2022 value of 0.6288 is "somewhat low", occupies place 57 in the ranking.

Since 2003 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Thailand has tracked progress on human development at sub-national level using the Human achievement index (HAI), a composite index covering eight key areas of human development. The National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) took over the task in 2017.^[3]

Map with provinces and HAI 2022 rankings

• Pak Nam Pho Chinese New Year Festival: Nakhon Sawan has a large population of Thai Chinese descent, and its Chinese New Year festival has been held for more than 100 years. It draws visitors from within Thailand and from abroad.^[20]
• Tak Bat Theworohana Festival: The tradition of offering food to monks during the Buddhist Lent Festival (around late October to early November before Loi Krathong) at Wat Khao Kob, a temple on the highest hilltop in the city of Nakhon Sawan.

• Bueng Boraphet
• Mae Wong National Park
• Wat Koei Chai Nuea (Borommathat)