Wat Suan Dok; Not the Chiang Mai Historical Centre

This was another lazy morning in Chiang Mai. That was the plan, so it was as it should be. However, it was a bit lazier than intended.

I planned to visit Wat Suan Dok, a temple that, based on my guidebook, looked interesting, and the Chiang Mai Historical Centre.

The walk to Wat San Dok from my hotel would have been almost an hour long. The Chiang Mai Historical Centre is about halfway and roughly on the route. So I decided to start there to break up the walk.

Not the Chiang Mai Historical Centre

In previous posts, I told you that my guidebook recommended three museums in Chiang Mai. I visited two of them yesterday, and the third was the Chiang Mai Historical Centre.

My guidebook described the Chiang Mai Historical Centre as follows: “There is a bit of an overlap between the Chiang Mai Arts & Culture Centre, but sometimes an air-conditioned building is all one really needs.”

Chiang Mai Arts & Culture Centre is one of the museums I visited yesterday, but today was another majorly muggy morning and it was almost a half-hour walk to the museum. So the air-conditioned aspect sold me.

Having learned my lesson about trusting my guidebook for museums’ opening days, I checked Google Maps to confirm it was open today. Considering my usual luck, it came as a surprise to me that Google Maps said it was indeed open. So I set off.

Just before reaching the museum, I spied a multi-coloured sign cheerfully announcing the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison. It was all in lowercase, and the “chiang” and “mai” were rammed together as one word with an @ sign in front of it. I don’t know if that’s a handle on some social media platform on the Worldly Web Thingy or if they were trying to be cute in a way that escaped me.

By the way, that reminded me, everything I read before this trip spells it “Chiang Mai,” and most of the English-language signage here does too. But signs on a few buildings, including a sign at a university building I saw today, spell it “Chiangmai.” And, just now, I noticed that my spellchecker didn’t feel the need to correct “Chiangmai.” Autocomplete even suggested it once I typed the “m.” So I guess either spelling is correct. I will stick with the city name as two words rather than one because that’s the only way I’ve seen it spelled until now. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to go back and change all of the instances of it in these pages.

My guidebook mentions the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison as a good place to get a Thai massage. The massages are given by inmates as vocational training. I didn’t partake. Considering how many massage ladies I’ve walked past here in Chiang Mai assertively touting their services (and others just sitting there hoping for business) and not getting any custom from me or anyone else I’ve seen here, I don’t know how lucrative a vocation that is.

Passing the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison, I walked a few more steps to the Chiang Mai Historical Centre.

There, I was greeted by a small sign at the entrance. Thanks to this post’s title and this section’s subtitle, you can probably surmise what it said.

“Chiang Mai Historical Centre will be temporarily closed for partial renovation from now on.”

Because, of course, it was. There was no construction hoarding around the building. And I didn’t see any work going on. The “close stuff when Joel is in town” movement has made it to Chiang Mai, I see.

To dampen my disappointment, I stopped at a small outdoor juice and smoothie stand beside the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison. I slowly sipped a mango and passion fruit smoothie at a shaded table.

Then I trudged on to Wat Suan Dok.

Wat Suan Dok

Wat Suan Dok is different from most of the temples I’ve seen here, and not just because it’s outside of Chiang Mai’s old town and well on the other side of it from my hotel, but that too.

According to my guidebook, the temple was built in 1373 on a former flower garden. As far as I could see, no vestiges of the ancient flower garden remain.

On the Wat Suan Dok grounds, there’s what looked to be a roughly square area. I’m hopeless about judging sizes, and I’m not a football fan, so this may be well off, but I think the sides were roughly equivalent to the width of a football field.

In this square, there are several tall grave markers of sculpted shapes. According to a sign in front of the square, they contain reliquaries of the nine ruling princes of Chiang Mai, a princess (the consort of King Chula Longhorn (RAMA Vth)), and the descendants of the ruling princes.

The main prayer hall of Wat Suan Dok is a fairly large space, with open sides and a roof held up by cylindrical columns. The inner columns have raised gold-coloured leaf-and-branch-shaped decorations fringed with red and shiny diamond-shaped tiles in the middle of the leaf shapes. The backgrounds of these columns are composed of uniformly cobalt-blue shiny tiles. A band around the columns has a red background behind raised gold-coloured shapes with diamond-shaped tiles of different colours.

The columns around the edges of the shrine were similar except that the background tiles were silver-coloured rather than cobalt-blue. And the leaf shapes in the top halves of the columns were bigger. The red fringes around the decorations were also wider.

Of course, there was a big Buddha statue up front. The podium it sat on was decorated with silver-coloured figures on a red background.

According to my guidebook, Wat Suan Dok’s main chedi (stupa/tower structure) is gilded and dome-shaped. From what I could tell through the scaffolding that surrounded it when I was there, it’s probably beautiful when I’m not there and, consequently, they feel no need for the scaffolding.

That’s it. That’s my morning. Like I said, it was a lazy one.