Thailand & Cambodia are awesome!

Cutlass said:

Nice stuff

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Thanks!

Next up is a huge amount of of temple ruins pictures from central and northern Thailand and from Cambodia. They're broken up a bit with other types of pictures and a 3 day long hike, but there really are a lot of them and in some cases I have no idea which temple we're looking at. .. which is too bad. I should have been taking a photo of a plaque with the name of the temple first, for each temple.. because there were such plaques around for the most part, but I didn't have the foresight to photograph many of them.

Ah well, I remember most of the big temples anyway, I guess. And most of them are unique in one way or another so there shouldn't be a temple overload. But we'll see what happens

Arrival in Ayutthaya

My initial thoughts were to maybe head to Cambodia right after my 4 nights at the hotel in Bangkok were up, so that I wouldn't have any excuses to not go there later. That might have very well been a bad plan, because I learned that if you enter Thailand via a land border crossing the visa is only good for 15 days. I was there for double that time. Turns out they sometimes give you a 30 day stamp anyway, but either way I opted to go north first and got a train ticket to Ayutthaya, from where I would head further north and eventually end up in Chiang Mai, in the north-western part of the country.



Ayutthaya is just north of Bangkok so the train ride only lasted an hour or two, but the accommodations were not very good. The Hungarian couple sitting right in front of me for example was so close that our knees were literally touching - I ended up facing sideways and putting my legs down the entire length of my seat. This was my first train ride in the country so I was not impressed, but then again I didn't expect to be as I only paid $2 for my ticket.

Oh and there was a team of I'm guessing high school students filming a movie called "Time Tunnel" during the train ride, for a school project or something. So I might be in that.

The reason I was on a train to Ayutthaya is because it was the 2nd capital of Siam and has a bunch of cool stuff to explore. It was close too, and on the way.



That's the historical centre of town and what I was most interested in. The central island is about 4km (2.5 miles) across east to west, for reference's sake.

After checking into a guest house and doing some intel the plan became clear: Hire a tuk tuk to drive me to key off-island sites for a couple hours, then spend the afternoon exploring the island on foot.

The first temple I ended up at was Wat Yai Chai Mongkol



I don't know about you but this looks like a ladyboy C3P0 to me



Just chillin..



Thai Buddhism reminds me of Catholicism in certain ways that are hard to shake.



The big golden smiling Buddhas help.

Wat Yai Chai Mongkol

Here's a couple more pictures from the first off-island temlpe in Ayutthaya I went to. I am pretty sure that I got the name of this one right, so it's going in the header.







Picture of day 4 candidate?

Wat Chaiwatthanaram

I had a deal with my tuk tuk driver: She would drive me wherever I want for 2 hours for a set price. That meant 3-4 off-island temples in the end, IIRC.

Wat Chaiwatthanaram was next on the list, and no, I'm not sure how to pronounce that.. All I know is that it in English Wat Chaiwatthanaram means Temple of long reign and glorious era and that the guy who had it built it was the first king of the Prasat Thong dynasty and died 26 years later.



It was kind of glorious





Wat Chaiwatthanaram is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the main tourist attractions in the area, but fortunately there weren't really too many people around.

Amazing some of that stuff is still standing.

warpus said:

/wiki/Wat_Chaiwatthanaram"]Wat Chaiwatthanaram[/URL] was next on the list, and no, I'm not sure how to pronounce that.

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Chai-wut-ta-naa-rahm. Chai as in the tea , wut rhymes with but, a short ta, naa with a long a, and rahm as in Rahm Emanuel.

Apparently the King had it built on the site of his mother's house, who was a commoner.

Cutlass said:

Amazing some of that stuff is still standing.

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A lot more would've been standing (Ayutthaya is old but not that old) except the city was sacked and razed by the Burmese in the 18th century.

Siam/Khmer architecture>most other architecture

I also love medieval Indian architecture, along with the usual Byzantine, Ancient Greek (and related high medieval orthodox slavic, like Russian).

Gothic has to be mentioned too, and particularly byzantine-gothic (as in that Marco church in Venice where they took the stolen statues from Constantinople ). Other Gothic: Cathedral of Albi (sorry, this is getting off-topic so i will stop now ).

Cutlass said:

Amazing some of that stuff is still standing.

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Some of it does look very beat up. I'm not sure what the whole policy is on reconstruction and which parts can't be touched for religious or sentimental reasons or whatever... but in Cambodia at least a lot of temple ruins get funding from international organizations and there have been large efforts to reconstruct many of them. I'm sure historical sites in Thailand get a similar treatment, all the large or unique temples or temple ruins are big tourist draws, they are usually kept clean and probably well maintained.

I don't think they really want to touch the look and feel of these ruins though unless there are structural problems or they're so beat up that you can't see the general outline of the temple and what it was supposed to have been those hundreds of years ago... and at that point a major reconstruction is probably in order. Or maybe they'd totally do all that but the funding just isn't there? I'm not really sure.

Exploring half-destroyed temples was a lot of fun, but it was bounds more fun in Siem Reap (Cambodia), because the temples there tended to be more grandiose.. and some of them were in the jungle so I felt a lot more like Indiana Jones while exploring.

taillesskangaru said:

Chai-wut-ta-naa-rahm. Chai as in the tea , wut rhymes with but, a short ta, naa with a long a, and rahm as in Rahm Emanuel.

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Nice, now I can sort of pronounce it

Kyriakos said:

Siam/Khmer architecture>most other architecture

I also love medieval Indian architecture

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I've never studied architecture or architecture history or anything like that, so I'm just going by eye and instinct, but it was interesting to me to see all that Indian influence in the designs and not so much Chinese influence. I guess a lot of the temples used to be Hindu and Thailand as a whole has been influenced a lot more by India than by China, so that makes sense, but for some reason I expected more Chinese influence in everyday life, including architecture.

Wat Chaiwatthanaram continued

I wonder if there wasn't originally a skim coat of mortar or plaster over all those bricks? I seem to recall hearing of that in mesoamerica.

If you ever get into 3d modelling you will be amazed by how exactly the medieval Indian and many of the Khmer shapes are generated with the computer math used. Those forms are usually hybrids of spheres and stuff that divides them in very elegant and intelligent manners. But of course in a computer program that happens with a few calculations and clicks. To have builders create the same shape with actual brick or rock, well, that signifies they were highly familiar with the analogies used and therefore they meant something specifically spiritual to them so as to have them in so many temples

The main shape on the right edge of the above image is very dominant in medieval Indian temples, although in those it does not have the scaling you see in the Khmer version.

Cutlass said:

I wonder if there wasn't originally a skim coat of mortar or plaster over all those bricks? I seem to recall hearing of that in mesoamerica.

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I wish I knew! Any guides I hired to show me around mostly talked about the historical significance of the temple, when it was built, by whom, who destroyed it, etc. Not that I hired too many of those either.

Kyriakos said:

If you ever get into 3d modelling you will be amazed by how exactly the medieval Indian and many of the Khmer shapes are generated with the computer math used. Those forms are usually hybrids of spheres and stuff that divides them in very elegant and intelligent manners. But of course in a computer program that happens with a few calculations and clicks. To have builders create the same shape with actual brick or rock, well, that signifies they were highly familiar with the analogies used and therefore they meant something specifically spiritual to them so as to have them in so many temples

The main shape on the right edge of the above image is very dominant in medieval Indian temples, although in those it does not have the scaling you see in the Khmer version.

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That's very interesting.

The shape you point out was common enough, IIRC I saw even more shapes like that in Cambodia. I think you'll enjoy those pictures once we get there, but it shouldn't be for a while.

Chedi Phukhao Thong

The next place the tuk tuk driver took me was Chedi Phukhao Thong, a 50 metre tall Buddhist tower of sorts. The wikipedia article for chedi redirects to stupa, which I believe is basically a temple with burial mound origins. Some of them are pointy, some are moundy, and there seem to be a lot of different variations.

This particular one was built in 1569 by a Burmese King from the Taungoo dynasty, which ruled the region at the time.

And you know what? I love maps, especially historical ones. So here's a map of the region from 1580:



And here's a map of the region in 1400, when Ayutthaya was still the capital of the Siamese kingdom of the same name:



The first thing I noticed about Chedi Phukhao Thong was that it had slightly bad posture.



I ran into a set of rooster statues. This was the third or fourth of many in Ayuttaya, because apparently legend has it that one of the rulers of the Ayutthaya kingdom had a bet with a Burmese king about a cock fight. Somebody made a movie about it which became quite popular and influenced locals to put up rooster statues by temples associated with people and places from the legend. That sounds silly and crazy enough to be true to me.



Exploring the chedi was fun. There was almost nobody there and not too much of it was off limits. You could walk all the way around unimpeded, which allowed me to screw around with the lighting conditions.



I'm still sort of amazed that shot came out so well. My camera does a bit of postprocessing if there are extreme lighting conditions, but usually what that means is that you can take a picture of the moon without a tripod sometimes.. bright light is almost never a good thing. But here it somehow worked out perfectly.

Here's the tip of the chedi in more normal lighting conditions.

Chedi Phukhao Thong continued

That guy just had to be there, didn't he...







You can climb halfway up the chedi, from where parts of Ayutthuya and rice fields can be seen:



I like this shot because of all the seemingly implied symbolism:

warpus said:

The first thing I noticed about Chedi Phukhao Thong was that it had slightly bad posture.

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It doesn't look like the tip passes the vertical line test either.

warpus said:

And you know what? I love maps, especially historical ones. So here's a map of the region from 1580:

Click to expand...

These maps are terrible.

I ran into a set of rooster statues. This was the third or fourth of many in Ayuttaya, because apparently legend has it that one of the rulers of the Ayutthaya kingdom had a bet with a Burmese king about a cock fight. Somebody made a movie about it which became quite popular and influenced locals to put up rooster statues by temples associated with people and places from the legend. That sounds silly and crazy enough to be true to me.

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Can confirm that yes it is silly and crazy enough to be true. Said Ayutthyan ruler was King Naresuan who overthrew the successor of the Burmese king who built said chedi.

(TK's pronunciation tips: che-di-phu-khao-thong, pronounced like jeh-dee-poo-kao-tong (rhymes with dong), meaning "stupa of the golden mountain")

I can't imagine trying to build those tall spires with the tech they had available at the time.

Thanks for the pics Warpus. What an incredible culture! I wonder how your experience might have been different a hundred or 500 years ago.

Goodfella said:

It doesn't look like the tip passes the vertical line test either.

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Heh, nope. In some pictures it looks like it might be an optical illusion of some sort, but it's just slightly crooked.

taillesskangaru said:

These maps are terrible.

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I got them off wikipedia. Do you mean that they look crappy or aren't accurate? Or both?

taillesskangaru said:

Can confirm that yes it is silly and crazy enough to be true. Said Ayutthyan ruler was King Naresuan who overthrew the successor of the Burmese king who built said chedi.

(TK's pronunciation tips: che-di-phu-khao-thong, pronounced like jeh-dee-poo-kao-tong (rhymes with dong), meaning "stupa of the golden mountain")

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You seem to know stuff about stuff. If you see me get something wrong factually or whatever feel free to point it out! And I wonder if you might be helpful in naming temples once we start getting to the ones that I have no idea about. That'll mostly be in Cambodia when I was templing around like a madman... Although with maps and timestamps I *should* be able to figure a bunch of them out.

Cutlass said:

I can't imagine trying to build those tall spires with the tech they had available at the time.

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Seems way easier to build something like this than say the pyramids or whatever, maybe equivalent to the technology and knowhow required to build a small cathedral? I'm really not sure.

CavLancer said:

Thanks for the pics Warpus. What an incredible culture! I wonder how your experience might have been different a hundred or 500 years ago.

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I found the culture fascinating. The people were very open and friendly - they allowed me to query them about the culture whenever I was curious enough to ask, without being annoyed about it. So that was good.

~500 years ago... Yeah, everything would have been so different. I can't imagine it.

Phra Buddha Nimitr Vichit Maramoli Sisanpeth Boromtrailokanat

The fourth and last stop of the tuk tuk off-island tour was Wat Na Phramen, a temple built in the late Ayutthaya period, one of the only temples not destroyed by the Burmese.

some website said:

Literally the name of this temple means : the temple in front of the royal pyre. Royal prisoners (after being executed) were apparently cremated on the grounds. Wat Na Phra Men was built during the later Ayutthaya period.

Most temple Ubosoths of that period have been destroyed and only the base, with some walls, and supporting pillars remain. Often the ubosoths built during that time were quite large and impressive. The ubosoth of Wat Na Phra Men, though restored during the reign of King Rama III, give a good impression of how Ayutthaya temples and ubosoths of the late Ayutthaya period must have looked like.

The principal Buddha image at Wat Na Phra Men is seated in the 'subduing Mara' position, and wears royal attire. Its full name is Phra Buddha Nimitr Vichit Maramoli Sisanpeth Boromtrailokanat. Buddha images were royal attire like this are typical for the later Ayutthaya period.

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Oh yeah and by the way, wat means temple. Sort of.

wikipedia said:

Strictly speaking a wat is a Buddhist sacred precinct with monks' quarters, the temple proper, an edifice housing a large image of Buddha, and a structure for lessons. A Buddhist site without a minimum of three resident monks cannot correctly be described as a wat, although the term is frequently used more loosely, even for ruins of ancient temples.

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Anyhow, here's Wat Na Phramen



That golden design up by the roof looks like this up close:





A tree-like structure with 20 baht (60 U.S. cents) notes attached for good luck. In the background Phra Buddha Nimitr Vichit Maramoli Sisanpeth Boromtrailokanat can be seen.



There was something sort of.. simpsonesque about this particular Buddha.





I found these statues right at the base of the temple very unique.