What is the oldest tree in Bangkok?

By the broadest documented range, one of five Thai ironwood trees planted along Khlong Lot behind Wat Ratchabophit during King Rama I's reign (1782-1809), making them over 217 years old. The most precisely dated tree is the Bodhi tree of Wat Saket, planted in 1818.

Are Bangkok's old trees inside temples?

Most of them. Four of the five trees on this list grow on Buddhist temple or university grounds, and all but one (the Grand Palace's Wat Phra Kaew) are free to enter without a ticket.

Is the Bodhi tree at the Grand Palace hard to find?

No. It stands in the open section of Wat Phra Kaew that every visitor already walks through on the way to the Emerald Buddha, beside the Prasat Phra Thep Bidon. It simply gets no attention next to the temple's gilded chedis.

Why does Bangkok have so many old Bodhi trees?

Thai Buddhist tradition treats the Bodhi tree, the species the Buddha reached enlightenment beneath at Bodh Gaya, as a living relic. Thai kings and monks repeatedly sponsored expeditions to Sri Lanka and India to bring back cuttings descended from that original tree, and temples recorded exactly when each one was planted.

Thailand

Ancient Trees in Bangkok

Bangkok's remarkable trees are almost all Bodhi trees, and almost all documented to the exact year they went into the ground, because temples here have kept precise planting records since the city's founding in 1782. That makes this list unusually verifiable for a tropical capital: no dendrochronology, no girth-based guessing, just royal chronicles and temple archives naming which king planted which sapling and when. The oldest specimens tie directly to Bangkok's founding wars and its 1970s fight for democracy, not to raw age alone.

Photo: กสิณธร ราชโอรส, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Ironwoods of Khlong Lot

Thai Ironwood (Hopea odorata) · over 217 years (planted during King Rama I's reign, 1782-1809) · Phra Nakhon, Rattanakosin Island

Five ironwood trees standing over a Bangkok canal are, in effect, a two-century-old weapons reserve nobody ever needed to use again. King Rama I ordered Thai ironwood planted along Khlong Lot shortly after founding Bangkok in 1782, part of a hardwood stockpile meant to build warships for a kingdom still fighting Burma on a near-annual basis. Ironwood's real advantages, dense grain, genuine rot-resistance, and enough buoyancy once cut to float downriver, made it the standard timber for Siamese naval construction, and someone in the new capital planted with fleets in mind rather than gardens. The trees outlasted every war they were grown for and most of what came after: seven remained by 1998, five by 2019, worn down by two centuries of city growth rather than by axes. Thai folk belief holds that timber cut for shipbuilding carries its own protective spirit into the vessel, called Chao Mae Takian, so wood taken from here would once have gone to sea as more than lumber. In December 2021, Bangkok's environmental office joined a heritage-tree foundation, the Ministry of Defence and three professional associations to formally restore what remains, an unusually wide coalition for five trees behind a temple most visitors walk straight past on the way to something older-looking. They still stand exactly where Rama I put them, doing nothing more useful now than being two hundred years old.

Read more and get directions →

The Bodhi Tree of Wat Saket

Bodhi Tree (Ficus religiosa) · planted 1818, about 208 years · Pom Prap Sattru Phai, near the Golden Mount

Two monks left Bangkok on a mission from King Rama II and came back three years later with tree cuttings instead of relics. In 1814, Phra Achan Dee and Phra Achan Thep returned from Sri Lanka after studying at Anuradhapura, the city that has kept an unbroken line of Bodhi trees since a cutting from Bodh Gaya arrived there in the third century BC. Of the three saplings they carried home, the king had one planted at Wat Saket in 1818, at Lan Pho directly in front of the ordination hall, where it has stood ever since below the temple's later, far more famous addition: an 80 metre artificial hill capped in gold that Rama III would not begin building for another decade. The tree predates the Golden Mount that now draws every visitor's eye upward and past it. Two centuries on, it is genuinely struggling. Competing vegetation and fungal pressure have weakened the trunk enough that the temple launched a public restoration campaign timed to Makha Bucha 2026, asking Buddhists to help nurse a 208-year-old living relic back to health rather than simply photograph the hill behind it. Free to see, no ticket required beyond the small fee charged only for the climb up the Mount itself.

Read more and get directions →

The Bodhi Tree of Wat Phra Kaew

Bodhi Tree (Ficus religiosa) · planted 1864, about 162 years · Phra Nakhon, the Grand Palace

Inside the single most photographed temple complex in Thailand grows a tree that gets photographed by almost nobody. King Rama IV had a Bodhi tree planted beside the Prasat Phra Thep Bidon in 1864, grown from a shoot cut from the tree at Bodh Gaya where the historical Buddha reached enlightenment. In 1903, fire tore through the building it shades, destroying the original gilt stupa and part of the structure; the tree, already thirty-nine years old, stood close enough to watch and kept standing while King Rama VI rebuilt what became the Royal Pantheon of the Chakri dynasty. That pantheon now holds statues of the dynasty's kings and opens to the public exactly one day a year, Chakri Memorial Day, April 6th, from eight until noon. The tree faces no such restriction. It grows in the section of Wat Phra Kaew that every visitor to the Grand Palace already walks through on the way to the Emerald Buddha, sharing ground with the complex's gilded chedis and mythological guardian statues, and drawing none of their attention. At 162 years old it is younger than most of the buildings around it, proof that even Thailand's most sacred royal compound has kept adding, burning and rebuilding since 1782, not stood frozen at its founding.

Read more and get directions →

The Bodhi Tree of Wat Benchamabophit

Bodhi Tree (Ficus religiosa) · planted 1900, about 126 years · Dusit

When Thailand received its first-ever direct cutting from the actual Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in 1891, King Chulalongkorn did not plant it right away. He sent it two hundred kilometres to Wat Asdangnimit in Si Racha to be nursed for nine years first, unwilling to risk India's most sacred sapling on an unproven transplant. Only in 1900, once it had grown strong enough to travel again, did he personally plant it at Wat Benchamabophit, on the lawn behind the ordination hall, in the temple he had built as his own before ascending the throne and where his ashes would later be interred beneath the main Buddha image. Every other Bodhi tree in Thailand before this one had arrived at one remove, propagated from Sri Lankan trees that themselves descended from a cutting planted at Anuradhapura more than two thousand years earlier. This was the first to skip that detour and come straight from the source. Unusually for a Thai temple, this Bodhi stands where a chedi would normally rise, treated as the ordination hall's spiritual counterweight rather than a subordinate planting. At 126 years old it remains younger than the marble temple around it, itself finished only in 1911, eleven years after this tree was already established.

Read more and get directions →

Lan Pho, the Bodhi Tree of Thammasat University

Bodhi Tree (Ficus religiosa) · at least 90 years, exact planting date undocumented · Phra Nakhon, Tha Phra Chan

A single tree on a university lawn became the starting point for the protest that ended a Thai dictatorship. On 6 October 1973, students gathered under this Bodhi tree at Thammasat University to demand the release of activists arrested for distributing leaflets calling for a new constitution, a protest that grew within days into the mass uprising of 14 October 1973, which brought down the government of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn. Three years later, the same tree stood over one of the darkest days in modern Thai history, the 6 October 1976 massacre, when paramilitary and police forces killed student protesters occupying the same grounds. The plaza around the tree, still called Lan Pho, the Bodhi Court, has carried that weight ever since, a birthplace of Thai democracy and the site of a massacre within three years of each other, under the same branches. The tree itself predates all of it. Thammasat was founded on this former Front Palace site in 1934, and the tree was already established ground the university simply inherited, mature enough that nobody has ever recorded when it was planted. At well over ninety years old, and probably far older, it is a tree that Thai political history simply happened around rather than the other way round.

Read more and get directions →

Know an ancient tree in Bangkok we missed? Suggest it.

Going there? Download all 5 trees as a map file and open it in Google Maps, Organic Maps or any hiking app. Works offline, no app needed.

Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Bangkok?: By the broadest documented range, one of five Thai ironwood trees planted along Khlong Lot behind Wat Ratchabophit during King Rama I's reign (1782-1809), making them over 217 years old. The most precisely dated tree is the Bodhi tree of Wat Saket, planted in 1818.
Are Bangkok's old trees inside temples?: Most of them. Four of the five trees on this list grow on Buddhist temple or university grounds, and all but one (the Grand Palace's Wat Phra Kaew) are free to enter without a ticket.
Is the Bodhi tree at the Grand Palace hard to find?: No. It stands in the open section of Wat Phra Kaew that every visitor already walks through on the way to the Emerald Buddha, beside the Prasat Phra Thep Bidon. It simply gets no attention next to the temple's gilded chedis.
Why does Bangkok have so many old Bodhi trees?: Thai Buddhist tradition treats the Bodhi tree, the species the Buddha reached enlightenment beneath at Bodh Gaya, as a living relic. Thai kings and monks repeatedly sponsored expeditions to Sri Lanka and India to bring back cuttings descended from that original tree, and temples recorded exactly when each one was planted.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Bangkok? The full answer, with map and directions.
More like this: Browse themed collections of remarkable trees.
Ancient trees in more cities: Amsterdam · Lisbon · London · Paris · Rome · Tokyo · Istanbul · Barcelona · Kyoto · Madrid · New York · Dublin · Edinburgh · Brussels · Antwerp · Vienna · Prague · Berlin · Seville · Porto · Athens · Florence · Milan · Venice · Munich · Nice · Lyon · Valencia · Malaga · Granada · Naples · Bologna · Verona · York · Bath · Oxford · Cambridge · Bristol · Glasgow · Budapest · Krakow · Copenhagen · Stockholm · Dubrovnik · Zurich · Oslo · Helsinki · Geneva · Warsaw · Utrecht · Rotterdam · The Hague · Haarlem · Groningen · Leiden · Maastricht · Nijmegen · Breda · Arnhem · Palermo · Thessaloniki · Gdansk · Ljubljana · Split · Belgrade · Bucharest · Sofia · Reykjavik · Singapore · Cadiz · Sintra

Know a tree that belongs on this list? Send it in. Suggestions feed curation; the list itself stays editorial.

Walk all 5 trees about 5.4 km, 1h 12m on foot