Tuesday, January 10, 2012

BKK: Guardian Demons of Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok

See, before I went to Bangkok, I've always seen people taking photo of the huge statue at the Grand Palace. Not knowing what it was then, I thought it was just some decorative statues placed in the temple compound.

Am terribly sorry if I've offended the Thais with the paragraph above.

But when we were finally inside the temple, we finally saw how huge and how beautiful the statues actually were. I thought I went around taking all the 16 different coloured guardian demons who were placed by the entrances of the temple. But I only managed to find like, a few in my folder now though.

Thing is, we signed up the local guide to the temple. What we learned was how to differentiate guardian demons from evil demons; i.e. guardian demons have rings on their fingers. And one piece of information that we picked up, be the most kiasu one if you want to take photo with the guardian demon. Take photo with the Green. Why?

Because he's the KING of all the guardian demons.

And I remembered after that guide, we were so busy going around looking for green colour-ed guardian demons, only to find now that, the photo we camwhored with, were turquoise. -.-"

Clearly, I wasn't kiasu enough. I didn't have one of that! *stomp feet* Hmph!

5 Jujus:

Twilight Man said...

How many huge statues they had outside? I am just wondering whether they are similar to our 4 Heavenly Kings that guard the heavens/temples!

Medie007 said...

12 in total.

TZ said...

good question ... i went there twice i didn't even count how many :p

Medie007 said...

Haha. Wiki is a powerful tool

SK. said...

These are the statues of "Yak" (Yaksa in Sanskrit), a kind of giant in Thai mythology. Specifically, they are from the Ramakien (Thai adaptation of the Hindu epic Ramayana) story. The green colored king of giant is Tosakanth (from Sanskrit Dasakantha, "ten-headed one"), which is another name for the demon king Ravana in the Ramayana story.