Northeastern · Thailand
Ubon Ratchathani · อุบลราชธานี
Candle Festival, Pha Taem cliff paintings, Mekong three-colour river.
- Region
- Northeastern
- Population
- 1,869,000
- Area
- 15,744 km²
- Stories filed
- 0
About Ubon Ratchathani
History
Ubon Ratchathani — "Royal Lotus City" — was founded in 1792 by Lao nobles who resettled west of the Mekong after the collapse of the Vientiane kingdom. That Lao heritage runs deep: the provincial dialect, cuisine, and temple architecture all carry strong Lao inflections, and the city's Candle Festival — in which enormous carved beeswax sculptures parade through the streets at the start of Buddhist Lent — shares its origins with Laotian Boun Khao Phansa. The province is also the birthplace of the Dhammayut forest-monastic lineage, whose teachings shaped twentieth-century Theravada Buddhism across Southeast Asia.
Landscape & geography
Ubon Ratchathani occupies the lower southeastern Khorat Plateau, where the Mun River flows east to meet the Mekong at Khong Chiam — the famous "Two Colour River" confluence, where the muddy brown Mun and the darker green Mekong run side by side for several hundred metres. Pha Taem National Park, on the province's eastern Lao border, combines prehistoric rock paintings on vertical sandstone cliffs with vertiginous Mekong viewpoints. The wider landscape is rice and cassava country — flat and green in the rainy season, gold-stubble dry in cool months — edged by forest as it rises toward the Cambodian border.
Why visit
The Candle Festival in July is the province's great annual event — the carved wax floats can reach three metres in height and take communities months to make; combine it with a night on the Mekong promenade for the full spectacle. Outside festival time, Pha Taem's red-ochre rock paintings are 3,000 years old and viewable from a short clifftop walk, with some of the best Mekong panoramas in the country. Sam Pan Boak's rock formations, the Two Colour River at Khong Chiam, and the forest monasteries around Wat Pa Nanachat fill out a comfortable three-night itinerary.
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