Wat Phra That Si Mueang Pong - lovely, but still not finished
There are a plethora of lovely temples here in Chiang Mai and one of the newer ones has been a work in progress for over 10 years. We visited it yesterday in a large group and while I had seen it from the valley below this was my first time up close and personal.
It is actually quite common in Thailand for the construction of a temple to take a very long time. I'm only speculating here but i think it has something to do with the craftsmanship being more admired if it is actually built by the devotees rather than some construction firm. If you look closely at the picture above you can see some rather dodgy scaffolding work up really high on the main tower there.
I often accuse temples of having what appears to be mass produced statues but upon closer inspection of this temple i realized that each of the statues are slightly different, which leads me to believe that they might have been hand-crafted.
Some of the statues had already been adorned with jewels and are (I think) complete, while others hadn't even been painted yet.
The main purpose of this complex is to house the sacred shrine in the interior and it has various shelves (probably not the exactly correct term) that will eventually hold what i presume will be valuable relics of the Buddhist religion.
The entire bottom level was surrounded with these giant bells and I have seen this feature at several other temples including Doi Suthep, which is probably the most famous temple complex in all of Chiang Mai.
According to my Thai friend, this temple has been being built for over a decade and it appears as though they have quite a ways left to go. At the moment it is illuminated at night and very visible from most of the city below. It is already awe inspiring, it will be interesting to see what it is like once it is finished.
I can guarantee one thing for the future though: It is going to be a bit of a traffic nightmare to get up here if it becomes popular. The drive up was on a very narrow road with some pretty dangerous turns where there was a sheer cliff on one side and mountain rock on the other.
interesting post, good picture taking.
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I think I envy those who practice buddhism. It's the most tolerant spiritual experience ever if you asked me. This comes from someone who has seen what religion (Christianity mostly) can do to a supposedly decolonizing Africa.
A church can be build within 24hrs where I come from. It's a thriving business crippling the marginalised even more. What I mean to say is, temples and other religious places should be respected but I am yet to see.
i have said on many occasions that I am not a religious person but if i was forced to choose one it would be Buddhism. I enjoy the architecture of all religions for sure, but not necessarily their practices. Buddhism doesn't really appear to have any desire to recruit or except in very rare situations, dire enemies that must be destroyed.
It's just....peaceful.
Religion is forced down your throat in Africa and it's oppressive. But there's also no room to say that out loud without having bitter arguments with believers so I have learnt to avoid such. I didn't know they don't recruit. I just find it tolerant than everything else 🤷♀️
I have heard stories like this about Africa. Is it Christianity? There is an influx of churches in my part of Chiang Mai at the moment and I met some "witnesses" at my local coffee shop. They were nice and didn't bring religion into it until they were leaving when they gave me a card. I suspected that they were witnesses though because they were dressed really nice on a tuesday morning, were all foreign, none of them spoke Thai, and they were in a neighborhood on foot that no tourist would have any good reason for being in because there is nothing to see here.
Yes it is Christianity but Islam is used for advocating for patriarchy too. It's a spiral I worked to get myself and thinking out of.
I see them in your words, lol. I also see the in the neighbourhood. To get rid of a group, I usually ask them if it's okay for me to light a blunt as I listen 😂
oh and some of the "churches" that I have seen in the west are embarrassing and just like you said, put up simply to make money off the patrons.
The problem would be pointing that out to any of those patrons. Smh. Brainwashed lot.
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By the time they finish it you will possibly be living somewhere else, so you might have to visit some friends or pop back in to get some shots of it when it is complete. This is probably a dumb question, but are the jewels in the statues real or fake? I would guess fake because of theft reasons, but then again, they might assume no one would be a big enough dick to steal from a temple... These are some great shots and I agree, that scaffolding looks pretty dodgy.
in the more famous temples there are precious metals and even statues that are made of solid gold and adorned with precious stones. In the smaller temples they tend to be fake and I would imagine the things that re kept outdoors are always fake. It seems inconceivable that someone would steal from a temple but it would happen if something that valuable was just kept out in the open.
That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
there is the story of this one statue that was hundreds of years ago covered in ceramic in order to prevent the Burmese from stealing it, many years later it was discovered (and i don't know if this was because of scientific methods or if someone just dropped it) that the interior was a rather gigantic solid gold Buddha. Hiding in plain sight!
Super interesting gooddream. That temple is going to be magnificent.