Thai Lottery Winner in Saffron: A Monk Takes ฿12 Million

By the ThaiLotteryNumbers editorial team · Genext Information Systems
Published: 31 July 2026 · Draw of 16 May 2026 · Waeng Noi, Khon Kaen

The most widely shared Thai lottery winner photograph of the year shows a man who had already given up money. On 17 May 2026 an image spread across Thai social media of Phra Khru Amnuay, a monk at Wat Pa Nong Du Thammaram in Khon Kaen, standing beside a car in his robes and smiling as he held up a matched pair of government lottery tickets. The number was 107387. It had taken the first prize the previous evening — ฿12,000,000 for the two.

The temple at Ban Nong Du

Wat Pa Nong Du Thammaram sits in Moo 15 of Lahan Na subdistrict, in Waeng Noi district at the southern edge of Khon Kaen province. It is a forest temple in rice country — the kind of place that appears in national news roughly never.

Phra Khru Amnuay is a resident monk there. Beyond that, very little about him has been made public, and he has not given the sort of long interview that other Thai lottery jackpot winners tend to give. What exists is the photograph, the number, and what happened next.

That reticence makes him unusual. Most Thai lottery winners of this size end up on regional television within a day or two, talking about debts and plans. This one did not.

Why the sticker says 12, not 6

Look closely at the ticket in his hands and there is a yellow marker on the left: a large “2” above a large “12”. That is a vendor’s set label. It means two tickets carrying identical digits, and a combined first-prize value of twelve million baht.

Thai government lottery tickets are printed and sold in matching pairs for exactly this reason. Each first-prize ticket pays ฿6,000,000, so a pair pays ฿12,000,000. It is the single most common reason Thai government lottery winners appear in the news with twelve million rather than six — and the reason the Kamphaeng Phet vegetable seller who could only afford one of her pair two weeks later took half as much. Our guide to Thai lottery prize tiers sets out the full structure.

First stop: the police station

The detail that says most about how Thailand handles a large win is where he went next. Reports say Phra Khru Amnuay took the tickets to Waeng Noi Police Station and had them entered in the daily record book.

To a foreign reader this looks strange. In Thailand it is close to standard practice, and a step most large Thai lottery winners take within a day of the draw. Filing a bantuek prajam wan creates a dated official note that a named person was holding those specific tickets on that day. Thai lottery tickets are bearer instruments — whoever physically holds the slip can claim it — so a police record is cheap insurance against theft, against a dispute, and against the genre of story where a winning ticket mysteriously vanishes between the draw and the counter.

A Thai lottery ticket belongs to whoever is holding it. That is why so many winners visit a police station before they visit a bank.

If you ever need to do this yourself, our guide on how to claim a Thai lottery prize covers signing the reverse of the ticket, the documents required, the two-year deadline and the stamp duty deducted at the counter.

“Sathu” — how Thailand reacted

The response online was overwhelmingly warm. Comment threads filled with anumothana sathu, the phrase Thai Buddhists use to share in and rejoice at someone else’s merit. Many wrote that if anyone deserved the luck it was a monk. A good number added, cheerfully, that they hoped the next draw would be their turn.

There is an obvious tension in the story, and Thai commenters noticed it without much anxiety. A monk has renounced the pursuit of wealth; monastic rule discourages the handling of money, and in practice temple funds are administered by lay committees rather than by monks personally. A fortune arriving in a set of saffron-sleeved hands is, at minimum, an irony.

What is striking is how little scolding there was. In Thai popular understanding, unexpected fortune is often read as the visible return on merit already made — bun and wasana catching up with a person. Seen that way, a monk winning is not a scandal. It is the system working.

What the 16 May 2026 draw paid

The first prize was 107387, worth ฿6,000,000 per ticket. The adjacent numbers 107386 and 107388 paid ฿100,000 each. The front-three numbers were 091 and 298, the last-three were 602 and 716, and the last-two was 08. The full breakdown for that draw and every other since 2006 is in our results archive, and you can run any number through the Did I Win? checker.

The quietest of this year’s big winners

Set beside the year’s other Thai lottery winner news, this one stands out for what it lacks. There was no cash delivered to a house and livestreamed, as there was for the Chiang Rai interpreter who took ฿60 million on ten tickets in March. There was no crowd of market traders, no giveaway, no long interview about debts and plans.

There was a photograph by the roadside, a trip to the police station, and then silence. Reports at the time did not detail what the money would be used for, and we have not seen a credible follow-up that does. Temple windfalls in Thailand commonly go toward building work — a hall, a roof, a wall — but we are not going to claim that is what happened here, because nobody has reported it.

What can be said is that among the Thai lottery millionaire stories of 2026, this is the one that travelled furthest on a single image. No dream, no system, no lucky-number theory. A man in robes, two identical slips of paper, and a number that came up.

Sources: Daily News / เดลินิวส์ (17 May 2026), Khaosod English (17 May 2026), Khaosod and Naewna (May 2026). Draw figures cross-checked against the official GLO result for 16 May 2026 held in our own archive. Photographs circulated by Thai social media and regional press.

ThaiLotteryNumbers is an independent reference site. We are not affiliated with the Government Lottery Office, we do not sell tickets, and nothing here is a prediction. Please read our Responsible Play guidance.

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