Facing each other across the Chao Phraya River, in Ayuthaya, Thailand, two temples present a stark historical contrast. Wat Tha Ka Rong is a bustling modern complex, something between a strip mall and a church. A stone’s throw away is Wat Chaiwattanarm, a crumbling ruin dating from the early 17th century.
(Top photo: what a devout line up. Actually, these monks are made of plastic.)
(Below: bigger is always better, right? If you want to be impressive, you don’t get a small plastic monk, you get a BIG one.)
Pretty much the whole of Wat Tha Ka Rong is devoted to collecting donations. There are literally hundreds of weird and wacky statues inside the compound, depicting animals, deities, monks, fish, monsters… the thing they all have in common is a coin slot or a begging bowl.
(Above: whats better at getting donations than a monk statuette? A blind monk statuette, of course.)
A large area inside the Wat Tha Ka Rong compound is set up with floating stalls selling food and souvenirs along the river bank. I lashed out and got a $4 fish. Words cannot express the deliciousness. It’s a smart business model. They sell you fish food. You feed the fish. They catch the fish. They sell you the fish.
(Above: this rotund buddha is depicted sitting on top of a pile of gold coins, like a dragon in his horde. Please pop a coin in his navel. Thank you.)
A five minute tuk tuk ride to the other side of the river brings me to the ruins of Ayuthaya’s oldest temples, Wat Chaiwattanarm. These magnificent buildings were once richly crusted with actual gold, but unfortunately an army of avaricious Burmese came over in the late 1700’s and set the whole city ablaze, to melt the gold into lumps they could more easily take home with them.
(Above: I’m glad I made the effort to struggle up the precipitous stairs to the top of the Wat Chaiwattanarm stupa. The view of the temple ruins is amazing.)
The most notable difference between Wat Chaiwattanarm in Ayuthaya, and Angkor Wat (which I visited in Cambodia) is that the main material here is brick, which is less durable than stone. Once they were all rendered in concrete, and topped off with gold, but after the Burmese took the gold, the tropical weather demolished them almost completely.
I guess that’s the reason plastic monks are favoured now. Cheaper to produce, and not as tempting to bandits.
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