Walked out of Nakhon Pathom’s train station and it was squarely right front of us. The scale of the chedi is huge compared to the rest of the town is (which after all, is named after the chedi).
I expected it to be even bigger but you start walking towards it and suddenly realise – you haven’t gotten a lot closer. By the way, it’s 120 metres high.
The sheer size of it is hard to tell, even up close like this. If you care to imagine, those irregular specks on top are not dirt but pigeons. (Architects, for scale the tiles are about 150mm x 150mm).
Like all chedis, there’s no “inside” per say. So we walked around the also unassumingly large colonnade. The whole atmosphere is really, urm, ORANGE though it’s not captured on camera (thank you, JPEG algorithms). And the colour really lends itself to the calming serenity, kind of like, a perpetual quiet sunset feeling.
Then you see a statue that looks a little “CHINESE”?
Sure enough, Phra Pathom Chedi also claims to be the oldest temple in Thailand (trans: Pathom means “of the beginning”). So it has a lot of history going for it (apparently since the 4th century) but what you see today is initiated by King Mongkut in 1853.
So the statues are some ballasts of Chinese ships from a few hundred years ago.
What? Well why use boring rectilinear stones when you can carve elaborate statues just for keeping ships bouyant? After we load our ships with much heavier cargo, we’ll just chuck these statues away onshore!
Calling the chinese opulent?? Who dares to be so insolent…
