Once I move to northern Thailand to escape the rising sea that everyone thinks will turn Bangkok into a fantastic scuba-diving site when the ice caps melt, one of the places I definitely want to see is Wiang Kum Kam.

Dovetailing nicely with my interest in Siamese dinosaurs and other prehistoric signs of movement, Wiang Kum Kam was a good-sized town on the edge of what is now the city of Chiang Mai. It was only rediscovered in 1984, and they’ve scraped away enough dirt and come up with enough theories that it’s now a bona fide tourist attraction.

Not that the Night Safari has to worry about the competition. So far there’s nothing at Wiang Kum Kam to make the rubes go golly, and that appraisal isn’t about to change anytime soon.

But for many generations, Wiang Kum Kam was thought to be a mere legend belonging to the dusky past.

And if you bring your imagination along to the scene today, you find yourself in the middle of a fortified, temple-intensive, millennium-old “city” embraced by the two arms of a river that has since taken its affections elsewhere. In fact, the Ping River flooded the inhabitants out 700 years ago, so you have to wonder what freakish karma they’d accumulated.

And the river, having shifted direction well to the west, isn’t done with Wiang Kum Kam yet: it flooded the site three times in 2005.

Situated in a plain ringed by mountains, the settlement was established in the eighth century by Mon migrants from Nakhon Pathom, U-Thong and Lopburi, likely as a trading outpost for the Haripunchai culture they’d sown in nearby Lamphun. The river ensured that it thrived as a key economic centre for centuries, and then it abruptly took everything away.

In 1288 King Mengrai (1239-1317) relocated the capital of his Lanna kingdom there from Chiang Rai. There are still remnants, at least on the south side, of the wall, and moats to the north and east, that ringed a town 850 by 600 metres in area within a three-square-kilometre community. The mortar and waterways enclosed perhaps two dozen temples. The search continues for Mengrai’s palace.

But within four years the king was asking his fellow northern monarchs, Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai and Ngam Muang of Phayao, to help him find a place that wasn’t so damned wet.

Once he chose a suitable site, he named it Chiang Mai. It was immediately across the river, foreshadowing the Siamese capital’s move 600 years later from Thonburi to Khrung Thep (Bangkok) on the opposite bank of the Chao Phraya River.

Wiang Kum Kam was far from abandoned at this stage, though, and Mengrai remained a regular visitor, ensuring that it survived as a buffer against invaders.

The photo below comes from Jing-reed’s Musings from Thailand.

From Haripunchai, famed as a centre of learning, Mengrai had assimilated Buddhist traditions, which the Mon artisans and those of conquered Ava embellished with splendid art and architecture.

When Mengrai set out to tame the Kingdom of Hongsawaddy in what is now Burma, he pledged to demonstrate his faith, if victorious, by building a viharn — a central gathering sanctuary — for Wat Kan Thom, which is now part of a larger temple, Wat Chang Kham.

Hongsawaddy evidently rolled over in apprehension without a sword being unsheathed, and the monarch’s carpenter-lieutenant Kan Thom got the green light to commence contruction. The viharn, housing five Buddha images, was named for its builder, as was the temple.

This picture and the one of the towering chedi below come from Jessnel’s page at Travelpod.com.

When Ava fell in 1290, Mengrai received two relics of Buddha from visiting monks from Sri Lanka and erected a stupa — Phra Chedi Wat Chang Kham — to contain one of them. A cutting from a sacred bo tree, a banyan, Ficus religiosa, was planted on the grounds and supposedly survives to this day.

This is where votive tablets were discovered in 1984, leading to Wiang Kum Kam’s rebirth.

There are the ruins of a few dozen temples, mostly just the vacant bases of chedis, but visitors invariably speak of a calmness to the place. “What does make the trip worthwhile is the gentle pace and scenery of the countryside,” says Michael Holland on his excellent Thailand for Visitors website.

Holland points out that there are two temples still very much in use around the site “that date from the city’s heyday at the end of the 13th century, Wat Chedi Liam and the more vibrant Wat Khan Tom (also known as Wat Chang Kum), where in fact the spirit of King Mengrai is said to still reside”.

Erected about 1286, Wat Chedi Liam — alternatively called Wat Ku Kham Luang, perhaps its more recently adopted name — has a rare Mon/Lopburi-style chedi, square in shape, much like the genuinely ancient one at Wat Cham Devi in Lamphun, a place I have visited.

There are 60 Buddhas in niches on five tiers, one dedicated, it’s believed, to each of Mengrai’s wives. The viharn has teak beams assembled without nails, as per the esteemed Lanna skill.

Kham means “gold”, significant, if not literal, since Mengrai bestowed the temple to his subjects. In the early 1900s, a Burmese nobleman showed his gratitude for the trade concessions he’d been granted by financing renovations at the temple and the addition of four new Buddhas around the chedi base.

Wat Ku Par Dom’s name is a recent assignation, from ku in the local dialect, meaning “pagoda”, and par, meaning “aunt”, so this is “Aunty Dom’s Pagoda”. (Some sources transliterate the name as Wat Koo Pa Tom.) The archaeologists, who reckon it was likely built while Mengrai was still ensconsed at Wiang Kum Kam, unearthed a square foundation two metres down for the lotus-shaped base of a bell-shaped pagoda.

They think Wat Pu Pia — which I’ve read means “house of an old short man”, curiously enough — was built atop an even older temple very early on, during the reign of one King Tilokarat (1445-1525). It had a Lanna-style pagoda, they say, though I can’t fathom how they know that.

In 2003 the boffins were digging up Wat Nan Chang (mysteriously alternate name Ping Hang) and came across “priceless Ming Dynasty porcelain in a jar”. The temple was evidently built while the Lanna Kingdom was on its last shaky legs, ahead of the invasion of Chiang Mai by Burma’s King Mongthera.

Named for some reason after a monkey, the large and well-situated Wat E-Kang is believed to have been an important temple in Mengrai’s time.

The locals with their colourful contemporary nicknames for temples repaired the main Buddha image found at Wat Phra That Kao in good condition — except for its head.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand has a pretty decent write-up about Wiang Kum Kam here, and ThaiWays magazine has a good visitor’s guide.

Some sort of weird, ancient, northern Thai-Lanna magic goin’ on: I’d no sooner posted this, saying I wish I could go there, than I went there. So now I’ve got to start over again to pay off the voodoo.

I made sure the pay-off sticks — I started a whole new blog for photo-intensive pieces about Thailand. The blog is called Soi Kneecap, and the post there is way, way better than this one.