Bangkok National Museum

The first building you will come to near the ticket office houses an informative overview of the history of Thailand, including a small archeological gem: a black stone inscription, credited to King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai, which became the first capital of the Thai Nation (c.1278-99) under his rule. Discovered in 1833 by the future Rama IV, its oldest extant inscription using the Thai alphabet. This combined with the description it records of prosperity and piety in Sukhothai’s Golden Age, has made the stone a symbol of Thai nationhood.

The main collection: southern buildings

At the back of the compound, two large modern buildings, flanking an old converted place, house the museum’s main collection, kicking off the ground floor of the southern building. Look out here for some historic sculptures from the rest of Asia, including one of the earliest representations of the Buddha, form Gandhara in northwest India. Alexander the Great left a garrison at Gandhara, which explains why the image is in the style of Classical Greek sculpture: for example, the ushnisha, the supernatural bump on the top of the head, which symbolizes the Buddha’s intellectual and spiritual power, in rationalized into a bun of thick, wavy hair.

Upstairs, the prehistory room displays axe heads and spear points from Ban Chiang in the northeast of Thailand, one of the earliest Bronze Age cultures ever discovered. Alongside are many roughly contemporaneous metal artifacts from Kanchanaburi province, as well as some excellent examples of the development of Ban Chiang’s famous pottery. In the adjacent Dvaravati room (S7; sixth to eleventh centuries), the pick of the stone and terracotta Buddhas is a small head in smooth, pick clay, whose downcast eyes and faintly smiling full lips typify the serene look of this era. At the far end of the first floor, you can’t miss a voluptuous Javanese statue of elephant-headed Ganesh, Hindu god of wisdom and the arts, which, being the symbol of the Fine Arts Department, is always freshly garlanded. As Ganesh is known as the clearer of obstacles, Hindus always worship him before the other gods, so by tradition he has grown fat through getting first choice of the offerings – witness his trunk jammed into a bowl of food in this sculpture.

Room S9 next door contains the most famous piece of Srivijaya art (seventh to thirteenth centuries), a bronze Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara found at Chaiya passage into Nirvana to help ordinary believers gain enlightenment). With its pouting face and sinuous torso, this image has become the ubiquitous emblem of southern Thailand. The rough chronological order of the collection continues to fourteenth centuries), the most notably some dynamic bronze statuettes and stone lintels. Look out for an elaborate lintel that depicts Vishnu reclining on a dragon in the sea of eternity, dreaming up a new universe after the old one has been annihilated in the Hindy cycle of creation and destruction. Out of his navel comes a lotus, and out of this emerges four-headed Brahma, who will put the dream into practice.

The main collection: northern building

The second half of the survey, in the northern building, begins upstairs with the Sukhothai collection (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), which features some typically elegant and sinuous Buddha images, as well as chunky bronze of Hindy gods and a wide range of ceramics. The Lanna rooms (roughly thirteenth to sixteenth centuries) include a miniature set of golden regalia, among them tiny umbrellas and a cute pair of filigree flip-flops, which would have been enshrined in a chedi. An ungainly but serene Buddha head, carved from grainy, pink sandstone, represents the Ayutthaya style of sculpture (fourteenth to eighteenth centuries): the faintest incision of a moustache above the lips of betrays the Khmer influences that came to Ayutthaya after its conquest of Angkor. A sumptuous scripture cabinet, showing a cityscape of old Ayutthaya, is a more unusual piece, one of a surviving handful of such carved and painted items of furniture.

Downstairs in the section of Bangkok or Ratanakosin art (eighteenth century onwards), a stiffly realistic standing bronze brings you full circle. In his zeal for Western naturalism, Rama V had the statue made in a Gandhara style of the earliest Buddha image displayed in the first room of the museum.

The funeral chariots

To east of the northern building, beyond the café on the left, stands a large garage where the fantastically elaborate funeral chariots of the royal family are stored. Pre-eminent among these is the Vejayant Rajarot, built by Rama I in 1785 for carrying the urn at his own funeral. The thirteen-meter-high structure symbolizes heaven on Mount Meru, while the dragons and divinities around the side – piled in five golden tiers to suggest the flames of the cremation – represent mythological inhabitants of the mountains forests. Each weighing around forty tones and requiring the pulling power of three hundred men, the teak chariots last had an outing in 1996, for the funeral of the present king’s much-revered mother.

Wang Na (Palace of the Second King)

The sprawling central building of the compound was originally part of the Wang Na, a huge palace stretching across Sanam Luang to Khlong Lod, which housed the “second king”, appointed by the reigning monarch as his heir and deputy. When Rama V did away with the office in 1887, he turned the “Palace of the Second King” into a museum, which now contains a fascinating array of Thai objects d’art. As you enter (room 5), the display of sumptuous rare gold pieces behind heavy iron bars included a well-preserved armlet take from the ruined prang of fifteenth-century Wat Rajburana in Ayutthaya. In adjacent room 6, an intricately carved ivory seat turns out, with gruesome irony, to be a howdah, for use on an elephant’s back. Among the masks worn by khon actors next door (room 7), look out especially for a fierce Hanuman, the white monkey-warrior in the Ramayana epic, gleaming with mother-of-pearl.

The huge varied ceramic collection in room 8 includes some sophisticated pieces from Sukhothai, while the room behind (9) holds a riot of mother-of-pearl items, whose flaming rainbow of colors comes from the shell of the turbo snail from the Gulf of Thailand. It’s also worth seeking out the display of richly decorated musical instruments in room 15.

The Buddhaisawan Chapel

The second holiest image in Thailand, after the Emerald Buddha, is housed in Buddhaisawan Chapel, the vast hall in front of the eastern entrance of the Wang Na. Inside, the fine proportions of the hall, with its ornate coffered ceiling and lacquered window shutters, are enhanced by painted rows of divinities and converted demons, all turned to face the chubby, glowing Phra Sihing Buddha, which according to legend was magically created in Sri Lanka and sent to Sukhothai in the thirteenth century. Like the Emerald Buddha, the image was believed to bring good luck to its owner and was frequently snatched from one northern town to another, until Rama I brought it down from Chiang Main in 1795 and installed it here in the second king’s private chapel. Two other images (in Nakhon Si Thamarat and Chiang Mai) now claim to be the authentic Phra Sihing Buddha, but all three are in fact derived from a lost original – this one is in a fifteenth-century Sukhothai style. It’s still much loved by ordinary people and at Thai New Year is carried out onto Sanam Luang, where worshippers sprinkle it with water as a merit-making gesture.

The careful detail and rich, soothing colors of the surrounding 200-year-old murals are surprisingly well preserved; the bottom row between the windows narrates the life of the Buddha, beginning in the far right-hand corner with his parents’ wedding.

Tamnak Daeng

On the south side of the Buddhaisawan Chapel, the sumptuous Tamnak Daeng (Red House) stands out, a large, airy Ayutthaya-style house made of rare golden teak, surmounted by a multi-tiered roof decorated with carved foliage and swan’s-tail finials. Originally part of the private quarters of Princess Sri Sudarak, elder sister of Rama I, it was moved from the Grand Palace to the old palace in Thonburi for Queen Sri Suriyen, wife of Rama II; when her son become second king to Rama IV, he dismantled the edifice again and shipped in here to the Wang Na compound. Inside, it’s furnished in the style of the early Bangkok period, with some of the beautiful objects that once belonged to Sri Suriyen, a huge, ornately box bed, and the uncommon luxury of an indoor toiled and bathroom.