Wat Phra Kaeo & Grand Palace

Hanging together in a precarious harmony of strangely beautiful colors and shapes, Wat Phra Kaeo is the apogee of Thai religious art and the holiest Buddhist site in the country, housing the most important image, the Emerald Buddha. Built as the private royal temple, Wat Phra Kaeo occupies the northeast corner of the huge Grand Palace, whose official opening in 1785 marked the founding of the new capital and the rebirth of the Thai nation after the Burmese invasion. Successive kings have all left their mark here, and the palace complex now covers 61 acres, though very little apart from the wat is open to tourists.

The only entrance to the complex in 2km of crenellated walls is the Gate of Glorious Victory in the middle of the north side, on Thanon Na Phra Lan. This brings you onto a driveway with a tantalizing view of the temple’s glittering spires on the left and the dowdy buildings of the Offices of the Royal Household on the right: this is the powerhouse of the kingdom’s ceremonial life, providing everything down to chairs and catering, even lending an urn when someone of rank dies. Turn left at the end of the driveway for the ticket office and entrance turnstiles: admission to Wat Phra Kaeo and the palace is B250 (daily 8.30am-3.30pm, palace halls and weapons museum closed Sat & Sun; 2hr personal audio guide B200, with passport or credit card as surety), which includes a free brochure and map, as well as admission (within seven days) to the Vimanmek Palace in the Dusit area. As it’s Thailand’s most sacred site, you have to show respect by dressing in smart clothes – no vests, shorts, sea-through clothes, sarongs, miniskirts or fisherman’s trousers – but if you rucksack won’t stretch that far, head for the office to the right just inside the Gate of Glorious Victory, where suitable garments can be provided (free) as long as you leave some identification (passport or driver’s license) as surety or pay a deposit of B100 per item.

Wat Phra Kaeo

Entering the temple is like stepping onto a lavishly detailed stage set, from the immaculate flagstone right up to the gaudy roofs. Although it receives hundreds of foreign sightseers and at least as many Thai pilgrims every day, the temple, which has no monks in residence, maintains an unnervingly sanitized look, as if it were built only yesterday. Its jigsaw of structures can seem complicated as first, but the basic layout is straightforward: the turnstiles in the west wall open onto the back of the bot, which contains the Emerald Buddha; to the left, the upper terrace runs parallel to the north side of the bot, while the whole temple compound is surrounded by arcaded walls, decorated with extraordinary murals of scenes from the Ramayana.

The approach to the bot

Immediately inside the turnstiles, you are confronted by six-meter tall yaksha, gaudy demons from the Ramayana, who watch over the Emerald Buddha from every gate of the temple and ward off evil spirits. Less threatening is the toothless old codger, a Hindu hermit credited with inventing yoga, and herbal medicine. In front of him is a large grinding stone where, previously, herbal practitioners could come to grind their ingredients – with enhanced powers, of course. Skirting around the bot, you will reach its main entrance on the eastern side, in front of which stands a cluster of grey statues, which have a strong Chinese feel: next to Kuan Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy, are a sturdy pillar topped by a lotus flower, which Bangkok’s Chinese community presented to Rama IV during his 27 years as a monk; and two handsome cows which commemorate Rama I’s birth in the Year of the Cow. Worshippers make their offerings to the Emerald Buddha in among the statues, where they can look at the image through the open doors of the bot without messing up its pristine interior with candle wax and joss-stick ash.

Nearby, in the southeastern corner of the temple precinct, look out for the beautiful country scenes painted in gold and blue on the doors of the Chapel of the Gandhara Buddha, a building which was crucial to the old royal rainmaking ritual and which is still used during the Royal Ploughing Ceremony. Adorning the roof and thousands of nagas (serpents), symbolizing water; inside the locked chapel, among the paraphernalia used in the ritual, is kept the Gandhara Buddha, a bronze image in the gesture of calling down the rain with its right hand, while cupping the left to catch it. In times of drought the king would order a week-long rainmaking ceremony to be conducted, during which he was bathed regularly and kept away from the opposite sex while Buddhist monks and Hindu Brahmins chanted continuously.

The bot and the Emerald Buddha

The bot, the largest building of the temple, is one of the few original structures left at Wat Phra Kaeo, though it has been augmented so often it looks like the work of a wildly inspired child. Eight sema stones mark the boundary of the consecrated area around the bot, each sheltering in a psychedelic fairly castle, joined by a low wall decorated with Chinese porcelain tiles, which depict delicate landscapes. The wall of the bot itself, sparkling with gilt and colored glass, are supported by 112 golden garudas (birdmen) holding nagas, representing the god Indra saving the world by slaying the serpent-cloud that had swallowed up all the water. The symbolism reflects the king’s traditional role as a rain-maker.

Insight the bot, a nine-meter-high pedestal supports the tiny Emerald Buddha, a figure whose mystique draws pilgrims from all over Thailand – as well as politicians accused of corruption, who traditionally comes here to publicly swear their innocence. Here especially you must act with respect, sitting with your feel pointing away from the Buddha. The spiritual power of the sixty-centimeter jadeite image derives from its legendary past. Reputed to have been created in Sri Lanka, it was discovered when lightning cracked open an ancient chedi in Chiang Rai in the early fifteenth century. The image was then moved around the north dispensing miracles wherever it went, before being taken to Laos for two hundred years. As it was believed to bring great fortune to its possessor, the future Rama I snatched it back when he captured Vientiane in 1779, installing it at the hear of his new capital as talisman for the king and country.

The Emerald Buddha has three costumes, one for each season: the crown and ornaments of the Ayutthayan king for the hot season; a gilt monastic robe dotted with blue enamel for the rainy season, when the monks retreat into the temples; and a full-length gold shawl to wrap up in for the cool season. To this day it’s the job of the king himself to ceremonially change the Buddha’s costumes – though in recent years, due to the present king’s age, the Crown Price has conducted proceedings. (The Buddha was granted a new set of these three costumes in 1997: the old set is now in the Wat Phra Kaeo Museum – while the two costumes of the new set that are not in use are put on display among the building glitter of crowns and jewels in the Royal Decorations and Coins Pavilion, which lies between the ticket office and the entrance to Wat Phra Kaeo). Among the paraphernalia in front of the pedestal is the tiny, black Victory Buddha, which Rama I always carried with him into war for luck.

The upper terrace

The eastern end of the upper terrace is taken up with the Prasat Phra Thep Bidorn, known as the Royal Pantheon, a spending hash of styles. The pantheon has its roots in the Khmer concept of devaraja, or the divinity of kings: inside are bronze and gold statues, precisely life-size, of all the kings since Bangkok become the Thai capital. The building is open only on special occasions, such as Chakri Day (April 6), when the dynasty is commemorated.

From here you get the best view of the royal mausoleum, the porcelain viharn and the library to the north (all of which are closed to the public), and running along the east side of the temple, a row of eight bullet-like prangs, each of which has a different nasty ceramic color. Described as “monstrous vegetables” by Somerset Maugham, they represent, from north to south, the Buddha, Buddhist scripture, the monkhood, the nun hood, the Buddhas who attained enlightenment but did not preach, previous emperors, the Bodhisattva and the future of Buddha.

In the middle of the terrace, dressed in deep-green glass mosaics, the Phra Mondop was built by Rama I to house the Tripitaka, or Buddhist scripture. It’s famous for the mother-of-pearl cabinet and solid-silver mats inside, but is never open. Four tiny memorials at each corner of the mondop show the symbols of each of the nine Chakri kings, from the ancient crown representing Rama I to the present king’s sun symbol, while the bronze statues surrounding the memorials portray each king’s lucky white elephant, labeled by name and pedigree. A contribution of Rama IV, on the north side of the mondop, is a scale model of Angkor Wat, the prodigious Cambodian temple, which during his reign was under Thai rule. At the western end of the terrace, you can’t miss the golden dazzle of the Phra Si Ratana Chedi, which Rama IV erected to enshrine a piece of the Buddha’s breastbone.

The murals

Extending for over a kilometer in the arcade that run inside the wat walls, the murals of the Ramayana depict every blow of this ancient story of the triumph of good over evil, using the vibrant buildings of the temple itself as backdrops, and setting them off against the subdued colors of richly detailed landscapes. Because of the damaging humidity, none of the original work of Rama I’s time survives: maintenance is a never-ending process, so you will always find an artist working on one of the scenes. The story is told in 178 panels, labeled and numbered in Thai only, starting in the middle of the northern side: in the first episode, a hermit, while out ploughing, finds the baby Sita, the heroine, floating in a gold urn on a Rama, the hero, kills the ten-headed demon Totsagan (Ravana), and the ladies of procession, and 113 you can see the funeral fair, with acrobats, sword-jugglers and tightrope-walkers. In between, Sita – Rama’s wife – has to walk on fire to prove that she has been faithful during her fourteen years of imprisonment by look at the end of the story, to the left of the first panel, where Rama holds a victory parade and distributes thank-you gifts.

The Palace buildings

The exit in the southwest corner of Wat Phra Kaeo brings you to the palace proper, a vast area of buildings and gardens, of which only the northern edge is on show to the public. Though the king now lives in the Chitrlada Palace in Dusit, the Grand Palace is still used for state reception and official ceremonies, during which there is no public access to any part of the palace; in addition, the weapons museum and the interiors of the Phra Thinang Amarin Winichai and the Dusit Maha Prasat are closed at weekends.

Phra Maha Monthien

Coming out of the temple compound, you’ll first of all see to your right and beautiful Chinese gate covered in innumerable tiny porcelain tiles. Extending in a straight line behind the gate in the Phra Maha Monthien, which was the grand residential complex of earlier kings.

Only the Phra Thinang Amarin Winichai, the main audience hall at the front of the complex is open to the public. The Supreme Court in the era of the absolute monarchy is nowadays serves as the venue for the king’s birthday speech; dominating the hall is the busbok, an open-sided throne with a spire roof, floating on a boat-shaped base. The rear buildings are still used for the most important part of the elaborate coronation ceremony and each new king is supposed to spend a night there to show solidarity with his forefathers.

Chakri Maha Prasat and the Inner Palace

Next door you can admire the façade of the “farang with a Thai hat”, as the Chakri Maha Prasat is nicknamed. Rama IV, whose portrait you can see over its entrance, employed an English architect to design a purely neoclassical residence, but other members of the royal family prevailed on the king to add the three Thai spires. This used to be the site of the elephant stables: the large red tethering posts are still there and the bronze elephants were installed as a reminder. The building displays the emblem of the Chakri dynasty on its gable, which has a trident (ri) coming out of a chak, a discus which a sharpened rim. The only part of the Chakri Maha Prasat open to the public is the weapons museum, which occupies two rooms on the ground floor on either side of the grand main entrance, and houses a forgettable display of hooks, pikes, tridents, guns and cannons.

The Inner Palace (closed to the public), which used to be the king’s harem, lies behind the gate of the left-hand side of the Chakri Maha Prasat. The harem was a town in itself, with shops, law courts, and a police force of the huge all-female population: as well as the current queens, the minor wives and their servants, this was home to the daughters and consorts of former kings, and the daughters of the aristocracy who attended the harem’s finishing school. Today, the Inner Palace houses schools of cooking, fruit-carving and other domestic sciences for well bred young Thais.

Dusit Maha Prasat

One the western side of the country yard, the delicately proportioned Dusit Maha Prasat, an audience hall built by Rama I epitomizes traditional Thai architecture. Outside, the soaring tiers of its red, gold and green roof culminate in a gilded Mongkut, a spire shaped like the king’s crown, which symbolizes the 33 Buddhist levels of perfection. Each tier of the roof bears a typical chofa, a slender, stylized bird’s –head final, and several hang hong (swan’s tails), which represent three-headed nagas. Inside, you can still see the original throne, the Phra Ratcha Banglang Pradap Muk, a masterpiece of mother-of-pearl inlaid work. When a senior member of the royal family dies, the hall is used for the lying-in-state: the body, embalmed and seated in a huge sealed urn, is placed in the west transept, waiting up two years for an auspicious day to be cremated.

To the right and behind the Dusit Maha Prasat rises a strange model mountain, decorated with fabulous animals and topped by a castle and prang. It represents Mount Krailas, a version of Mount Meru, the centre of the Hindu universe, and was built as the site of the royal tonsure ceremony. In former times, Thai children had shaved heads, except for a tuft of the crown, which, between the age of five and eight, was cut in a Hindu initiation rite to welcome adolescence. For the royal children, the rite was an elaborate ceremony that sometimes last five days, culminating with the king’s cutting of the hair knot. The child was then bathed at the model Krailas, in water representing the original river of the universe flowing down the central mountain.

The Wat Phra Kaeo Museum

In the nineteenth-century Royal Mint in front of the Dusit Maha Prasat – next to a small, basic cafe and an incongruous hair salon – the Wat Phra Kaeo Museum houses a mildly interesting collection of artifacts associated with the Emerald Buddha along with architectural elements rescued from the Grand Palace grounds during restoration in the 1980s. Highlights include the bones of various kings white elephants, and upstairs, the Emerald Buddha’s original costumes and two useful scale models of the Grand Palace, one it is now, the other as it was when first built. Also on the first floor stands the grey stone slab of the Manangasila Seat, where Ramkhamhaend, the great thirteenth-ceremony king of Sukhothai, is said to have sat and taught his subjects. It was discovered in 1833 by Rama IV during his monkhood and brought to Bangkok, where Rama VI used it as the throne for his coronation.