Wat Traimit - The Golden Buddha

The Golden Buddha is thought to have been brought from Ayutthaya to Bangkok to protect it during the Burmese seige and destruction of the ancient capital. In fact, the Burmese did set fire to some of the gold artifacts they found at Ayutthaya in order to melt down the gold. Before being moved the Buddha was also covered in plaster to further hide its true value. Once in Bangkok it was housed in a small and relatively insignificant pagoda (like hundreds of others in Bangkok) on the Chao Phraya river near Chinatown where it stayed until the 1930s when renovation work along the river required that the abandoned temple it was in be destroyed. Despite its size and weight and with no apparent reason to think it was of any particular value, no statue of the Buddha would ever be destroyed. It was decided that it would be moved to Wat Traimit since that would also keep it in Chinatown. Wat Traimit however didn't have a building big enough to house the statue so it was left outside under a simple tin roof for almost 20 years. In 1955 a new building was constructed at Wat Traimit and the monks decided to install the Buddha in the new structure. A crane was hired to move it but during the move one of the crane's cables broke and the statue fell into the mud. The workers, feeling this was a very bad omen, ran away leaving the statue where it had fallen in the mud overnight. To make matters worse this was the rainy season in Bangkok and there was a terrible rain storm that lasted the entire night. In the morning the abbot went to inspect the damage to the Buddha and observing cracks in the plaster uncovered the secret that had been hidden for 200 years under the plaster. What he discovered was a statue nearly 10 feet tall, weighing 5.5 tons and made of solid gold. The Golden Buddha at Wat Traimit is in fact the largest solid gold statue in the world. We went to the temple on Chinese New Year and it was packed with people. Quite a sight.