The Ancient City or Muang Boran, Samut Prakan.

The Ancient City or Muang Boran, Samut Prakan.

Yesterday saw us visiting three museums! One of them was the 'Ancient City' or Muang Boran!The other being the Erawan Museum or Chang Erawan. It's a 29 meter high, three headed Elephant or including the building a mere 43.6 meters and at last the Thai Naval Museum, both also located in Samut Prakan.

The Ancient City is located within 10 Kilometres of the Chang Erawan and is laid out over 800 Rai or 320 acres.
It's shaped in the form of Thailand and it has currently 116 downscaled monuments from all over Thailand on it's premises and more to come.
The monuments are about a third or quarter of the original size of the monuments. They're also located within the park in the direct vicinity where they would be located in Thailand itself.

You can enter the park by car or rent bicycles or golf carts. All over the place are restaurants conveniently located and shops to buy local products.

There are too many nice places to look at but one of them is a small 'Floating Market' as the original can be found in the North of Bangkok.

Here's a scaled version of a temple located in the North of Thailand, Wat Chong Kahm in Lampang.

My wife loved the place and wants to come back and spend more time here. She thought that people who live in Bangkok went to the 'local restaurants' on the premises to feel at home and stay in touch with the home city/province.

It's a very relaxed park and again, well worthwhile visiting.

Camille

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