Wat Phra Kao by Esther Singleton — Read

CARL BOCK.

The first glimpse of Siam which the traveller obtains at Paknam is a fair sample of what is to be seen pretty well throughout the country. As Constantinople is called the City of Mosques, so Bangkok may, with even more reason, be termed the City of Temples. And not in Bangkok only and its immediate neighbourhood, but in the remotest parts of the country, wherever a few people live now, or ever have lived, a Wat with its image, or collection of images, of Buddha, is to be found, surrounded by numberless phrachedees, those curious structures which every devout Buddhist -- and all Buddhists are in one sense or another devout -- erects at every turn as a means of gaining favour with the deity, or of making atonement for his sins. On the rich plains, in the recesses of the forests, on the tops of high mountains, in all directions, these monuments of universal allegiance to a faith which, more perhaps than any other, claims a devotee in almost every individual inhabitant of the lands over which it has once obtained sway, are to be found. The labour, the time, and the wealth lavished upon these structures are beyond calculation....