Wat Po Chetawan Thai Traditional Massage School (Salaya and Chaeng Wattana campuses)

About the school

These are the Wat Pho network's teaching campuses outside central Bangkok, run under the Chetawan Health Group banner, and they are where the school puts its serious long-form training. Where the Tha Tien branch is optimised for short courses and tourist traffic, Salaya is the large purpose-built campus with residential facilities and is one of only two sites in the network that runs the full professional programmes; Chaeng Wattana serves the northern Bangkok suburbs. The lineage and syllabus are identical to Wat Pho proper - central royal-style Thai massage codified from the temple inscriptions - but the environment is calmer, classes are less crowded than at the temple, and students on multi-week programmes can live on site. This suits anyone doing the 165-hour, 200-hour or 800-hour tracks, or anyone who wants the Wat Pho certificate without the tourist crush. The trade-off is location: Salaya is a long way from central Bangkok and there is little to do outside the campus.