Museum Day!

Today was Red Song Tao Adventure Day!  By the time I leave Chiang Mai, I will have ridden song taos of ALL COLOURS!

Actually, that’s a stupid goal.  Forget I said that.

Anyway, I’ve been having a relatively lazy weekend overall, after my first full week of work.  Yesterday was Domesticity, Thailand Style:  did my laundry and hung it out on the tiny private balcony to dry; went to the market to buy pork and boiled eggs in broth and a pouch of red rice for dinner; walked down the road to refill all my empty water bottles at the drinking water kiosk; pried open a bottle of crappy lemon margarita with the aid of a kitchen knife and a key (I’d forgotten to buy a bottle opener), after the instructions on how to open it with a coin that I got from some old Aussie dude on YouTube proved useless – y’know, stuff.

Today, though, I got a red song tao (piloted, weirdly enough, by an elderly Thai man and a young Australian guy and no, I have no idea, either) to the Chiang Mai National Museum.

The National Museum is a pretty white-and-red building with elaborately carved eaves and sharply sloping roofs, set in a garden with a meditation pool out front.  It’s not huge, but it takes a good couple of hours to see it properly, and it provides a very interesting political and economic history of the city.  The lower floor starts with prehistory (and we’re talking extremely pre-; there are diagrams showing during which age, exactly, the surrounding area began to emerge from the ocean), including loads of Neolithic relics and even a couple of grave sites.  (One of the handaxes was amazing – I don’t know whether it was the stone they used or what, but it looked like it was machine-cut.)  There’s a cool showcase on the culture of one of the local tribes, the Lua, because apparently their culture is very close to that of the civilisation that founded Chiang Mai, the Lanna. 

And then there’s an in-depth history of Chiang Mai itself, starting with the city that predated it, Hariphunchai.  Apparently, Hariphunchai was founded by a holy man who then looked around and went, “Aww, crap, I don’t have anybody to run this place.”  So he invited the daughter of a local king to come rule, and she turned up with, basically, a create-your-own-civilisation starter pack:  monks, scribes, metalworkers, artisans, merchants, and “labour gang leaders”, plus a grow-your-own-royal-heir (given that she was pregnant at the time).  Awesome.  Hariphunchai was heavily influenced by Indian Buddhism, and when, five hundred years later, one of the Lanna kings from a neighbouring city conquered Hariphunchai and remade it as Chiang Mai proper, he and his family kept up the strong connections between the royal family and the Buddhist tradition (the king was even the one who got to call conferences to revise the holy texts).  As a result, Chiang Mai is still packed with temples (even though they flooded several ancient ones in the 1960s to build a dam), and the museum itself has loads of fantastic sacred art (including everything they could grab before the dam went up – some gorgeous crystal Buddhas and amazing gold miniatures of religious objects).

The section on the later kings of Chiang Mai (the city had its own royal family up through the early 20^th century, though they hadn’t really been a power in their own right since the 1500s, when Chiang Mai was conquered by Burma, before being freed and coming under the rule of the kings of Thailand in the late eighteenth century) was interesting for two reasons.  One was the portraits of the last ten or so kings:  you can see their outfits change from ornate local dress, to very simple local dress, to a Western-style military jacket with northern Thai-style trousers, to a full-on copy of a British military uniform.  The second reason was the cool, working Victorian 3-D viewer, like a steampunk version of those red plastic viewers with slide wheels that we all had back in the 80s.  (What the hell were those called?  Can anyone remember?)  The sign informed me that it was a “peed box”.  I just… what.

The second floor of the museum deals with the economic and artistic history of the city, and is well worth checking out.  For the most part, it’s a pretty straightforward look at types of trade, the roles of different communities (for example, the river trade was dominated for centuries by Chinese immigrants, who dealt directly with the Chinese community in Bankok), and the ways in which the creation of railroads drastically changed the local culture and economic structure.  The sections on banking, education, and healthcare are… surprisingly uncritical of Western influence (really, guys, you had no form of medicine whatsoever until missionaries built a hospital?), but very interesting.  (The latter also contains the line, “The doctor then began the construction of American inventor Cyrus McCormick.”  I didn’t know McCormick was an android. :))  There’s also a great display on forest industries, including a replica house with plows, a loom, and other tools, and a look at the sordid history of logging in this part of the world (a part of the museum where the Western powers don’t exactly come off so well).

I’m a sucker for the ornate and spangled, so my favourite bits were the more elaborate pieces of sacred art (there was a gorgeous dragon with blue, jewelled scales, which used to serve as a support for a temple gong).  However, the “peed box” made my day.

I realise, also, that I’d love to read a good history of museums around the world.  The British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery and Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum both provide fascinating looks at the evolution of Western museums, but I’d like to get a more complete sense of how we, as humans, started to collect and examine things from our past in different cultures and times.

Anyway, made it back, crashed out for a bit, and now I should really get down to the market before things start closing up (there’s never very much going on on Sundays here).  The only things in the fridge right now, apart from mah chocolate stash, are the remnants of the few Thai foods I wasn’t crazy about:  coffee-flavoured biscuits that I thought were going to be chocolate, five-spiced dried tamarind, and pickled mango.  Hey, at least I tried. :)