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Thailand Day 10b
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Thailand Day
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Wat Chang Lom temple ruins next to hotel in Sukhothai
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See enlargement of elephants above - click here
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Sukhothai Historical Park Sukhothai was the first capital of Thailand (Siam). The temples and palaces, etc. were built in the early 1300's. But in the early 1400's Sukhothai was attacked by the king of the neighboring province to the South, Ayuthaya, and was defeated. The capitol of Siam then moved to Ayuthaya, and Sukhothai was left totally abandoned until the late 1700's. The ruins were overgrown with trees and shrubbery over the centuries. In 1977 the Thai government began a restoration of the original old capital, along with UNESCO, and the restoration was finished in 1993. Unfortunately for lovers of history and true antiquities, they decided to do major reconstructions of the original monuments and plaster moldings. Historians have decried this as a horrible example of defacing history. The park is huge - covering 17,300 acres. |
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For
a close-up view of the buddha in the above photo, click
here
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| Above is a more recent statue added to the park, depicting the King who was ruler when Sukhothai was the capitol. | Above is a stone which is the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, showing written language on all 4 sides. |
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The two images here were taken late in the evening.
The bright light in the photo on the right is the sun. The skies were
hazy not only with clouds, but with the smoke from illegal burning of
the rice fields. With hundreds of thousands of acres of rice fields
covering the Northern half of Thailand, burning the fields causes heavy
smoke pollution. Also, the dense forests will frequently have fires
(we saw lots of evidence of that alongside the highway...from tossed
cigarettes, perhaps...but there are no fire departments to put the fires
out, and little water. They have had to do a lot of newer water conservation
things...like building large and deep ponds to collect the water that
comes in feet-per-day rains in the Spring, but dries out after 10 months
of very little rain.
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