Monday 14 January 2008

Erawan Museum, Samut Prakan

Yesterday saw us visiting three museums!

One of them was the Erawan Museum or Chang Erawan. It's a 29 meter high, three headed Elephant or including the building a mere 43.6 meters!

The other being the 'Ancient City' or Muang Boran and at last the Thai Naval Museum, both also located in Samut Prakan.

Chang Erawan and the Ancient city in Samut Prakan are owned by the same people.


It's a massive construction, as can be seen above, about a hundred meters away from the Elephant. It's located at the Sukhumvit Road, coming from Bangkok direction Pattaya, the 'old road' to Pattaya. It's located in Samut Prakan, a province and city by it's own rights, directly located next to Bangkok.

There are only three heads displayed, but it should be 33 heads, just to make things a bit easier, they only make 3 heads, as can be seen above. The weight of the heads alone is 100 tons.

There are three floors inside the Elephant, the lower one being a museum or the Underworld (Naga world), the ground floor one being the belly, as seen here, which is beautifully decorated (Human World) and the top one, the head, is decorated with tempera paintings depicting the solar system (Tavatimsa Heaven).

This hall is a fantastic view with the ceiling having western stained glass featuring the world map and zodiacs.

The main hall is decorated with pieces from broken or complete cups, ranging in price from a couple of Bath to a couple of thousand baht per cup! Here you can clearly see the spoons they used for decoration!


This picture shows the various cups used to decorate the walls.

Have a read through the various links, this place is a definite must, I found it very impressing and it's located within an hour of Bangkok downtown (Sukhumvit area).

Camille

No comments: