Nonthaburi local museum

So far the best local museum I have visited in Thailand has been the one in Nonthaburi. Not only it seems it has better funding than those local museums in the Bangkok district, the location in the historic province hall complex right in the center of Nonthaburi, right at the Nonthaburi pier on the Chao Phraya river. The only major drawback - photography is not allowed inside, so I sadly cannot show the exhibits in here. However, the webmaster of Tour Bangkok had been allowed to photograph, so in his long review of the museum one can find both outside and inside views. In fact, it was that site which made me aware of this museum.

The museum only covers few rooms on two floors, other parts of the complex are still used as a kindergarten or seem to be empty. However, from a map placed near the entrance there are plans to enlarge the museum a lot and cover many more parts of the building. This building did not just contain the province hall, but also had the district office of Mueang Nonthaburi district and the provincial court - not that different from the current governmental center of Nonthaburi. One of the exhibitions rooms is thus on the history of the building, too bad I could not photograph the map which office was in which part of the complex.

The most beautiful rooms are on the top floor, one explaining the traditional main occupation in the province - pottery. It has figurines explaining the way the mud was turned into bowls and pots, and these figurines are of course also made by pottery. There are also two videos to be seen, and most fascinating for our daughter the magic screen showing a scene of pottery loaded into boats. Most interesting for me was the room focusing on the symbols of the province, featuring a large provincial seal in center. Inside the cabinet were the coins with the seal, the stamps, and also an antiquarian booklet compiled by the province administration with history and data on the province. I would love to have a facsimile reprint of that booklet - maybe in the later development of the museum a gift shop will be added, and that would be a great special item to sell there then.

As I could not photograph the inside, I tried to catch many views of the wooden structures of the building, beautifully carved. Too bad all the modern administrative offices have a much more boring and plain building style, this old building has much more charm - but obviously much harder to maintain.

While visitors of the museums are allowed to park their car inside the complex, maybe the best way to go the museum is to take the Express boat - when disembarking from the boat at the final stop upriver one is directly at the museum already, and though it may take longer than by car the boat travel is the cheapest and also most scenic way to travel there. Maybe I will try out this way for a return visit, when the phase one in the master plan is finished there'll be many more rooms with interesting exhibits - only area A was finished in early 2010.

Wat Boromratcha Kanchanaphisek

Wat Boromratcha Kanchanaphik (วัดบรมราชากาญจนาภิเษกอนุสรณ์) is a newly built Chinese temple in Bang Bua Thong district, Nonthaburi, northwest of Bangkok. It is also commonly named Wat Mangkhon 2 (วัดมังกร 2), as it is related to the Wat Mangkhon (Dragon temple) in Chinatown.

It is a huge temple complex, which merges together elements from Chinese, Buddhist and also Hindu temples. It is the most lavishly decorated temple I've visited in Thailand. When entering the temple, one first sees the Chinese parts - lions next to the stairway, several statues which look like monks but unlike the normal ones seen in Buddhist temples. Next come the pavilions with several statues of Chinese gods, and all the wall and even the roof painted with many religious symbols.

The next building is the main hall, in which it has the three Buddha statues, and when we went there also had monks chanting their sermons.And of course all the things it has in every other Buddhist temple, people lighting incense stick or donating flowers, rubbing gold leaves and placing coins on stone balls spread around this main hall.

In the behind it has a two-stored building, with a small part of it closed since it is used by the monks themselves, probably as their living quarters. But the two main rooms offer even more interesting views. On the ground floor it has some small Buddha statues in middle, but the real attraction is the wall, which is completely covered with thousands of small Buddha statues. In the second floor it has the already mentioned Hindu parts, a multi-handed statue - but I don't know which of the many Hindu gods it shows.

Altogether I strolled around there for one hour, and took lots of photos of the many details within the temple - even simple things like the balconies of the walkways have ornaments, and without repeating each is different from the next. Or small figures on the roofs, simply heaven for a photographer, only sometimes needed more zoom to catch the best views. I have uploaded an album of my photos to flickr because there are simply too many to show them all in this posting.