The dead were kept outside the wall. On a bicycle you can reach all of it and be back by dark.
Hire: 50–150 ฿ a day for a city bike from a shop on Moon Muang or Ratchaphakhinai; 300–600 ฿ for something with gears worth riding up Suthep. Prices seen September 2026; check them.
Tharrawaddy Min, son of Bayinnaung, who ruled Lanna 1578–1607 — his ashes in the chedi
What is said to be thereTharrawaddy Min governed this city for thirty years and his ashes are in the melon chedi, in a Shan wat, in a Thai town, and Burma is where he was from. The northern category for a dead person nobody at home can feed is the hungry one. The Shan community has kept this wat and its rites going round him for four hundred years, which is one way of answering the problem.
HereA tray, dedicated to a foreign dead person buried far from home. The Shan community will know exactly what you are doing. (Tan khan khao — the tray of rice, Offering a tung, Pouring the water)
0.9 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Nobody in particular. What is kept here is the office, not the man.
What is said to be thereLords changed their clothes here before going through the gate, and lords riding out to war stopped here on the way. Both directions. What a place like that accumulates, in the northern reckoning, is the office rather than the officers — the ones who came back and the ones who did not are equally present, and equally uninterested in you.
HereA tray, in the name of somebody who held an office and had to hand it on. It is what the place is for. (Tan khan khao — the tray of rice, Khan tang — the tray for a spirit, Pouring the water)
1.2 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Members of the Mangrai line, in and around the brick chedi
What is said to be thereThe Mangrai line is in and around the brick, and the wall was the reason: royal ash went outside it. The dead were kept on the far side of the line the living lived inside, close enough to be fed and far enough not to be underfoot. Stand here at dusk and the geography is the whole belief, laid out flat.
HereA tung. The poles are along the wall and the wat sells the banners at the office. (Offering a tung, Pouring the water)
2.3 km on from the last one, by bicycle
The ruling house of Chiang Mai. The white chedis hold their ashes, moved here in 1909.
What is said to be thereThe white chedis are not where these people were first buried. Princess Dara Rasmi had the Lanna royal dead gathered up from grounds all over the city in 1909 and brought here into one field. Moving a grave is the thing the northern rites are most careful about, and this was moving a dynasty. Whatever was done to settle them was done in 1909 and the field has been quiet since, which people here will tell you is not an accident.
HereBangsukun, at the hall behind the chedis. If there is a service running for someone else's family, stand at the back and pour water with them; nobody minds. (Pha bangsukun — the cloth, Pouring the water, Tan khan khao — the tray of rice)
3.8 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Whoever the seniors say, told to each new intake
What is said to be thereCampus Star collected seven of them. They run to type, because campus ghost stories are a genre with rules: a drowning in the reservoir, a corridor in a hall of residence, a bend on the mountain road, a girl at the roadside who wants a lift and is not there when you look again. They are told to first-years in the first week by second-years, on a campus built on ground that was battlefield and burial before it was a university, and being told is the point of them.
HereThe spirit house at the campus entrance takes flowers. For the drowned, pour water at the edge. (Pouring the water)
4.1 km on from the last one, by bicycle
A field of broken Buddha images, collected from wats that failed
What is said to be thereThe story told about the tunnels is that they were cut and painted with trees and birds for a monk who wandered, so that he could go somewhere without leaving. It is repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere.
HereA lamp in the tunnel niches, where the wat allows it, and sweeping outside. The image field takes no offering — it is a resting place, not a shrine. (Sweeping, Lighting a pang pratip, Pouring the water)
4.0 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Kham Fu, fourth king of the Mangrai line — the chedi was raised for his ashes in 1345
What is said to be thereTwo sets of remains, of different kinds. King Kham Fu's ashes are in the chedi, and his son built it to put them there. The Phra Singh image in the Lai Kham hall is the other kind: an image that old, moved that often and claimed by three cities at once is treated in the north as a resident rather than an object — something that consented to be where it is and could stop consenting.
HereMorning. A tray at the hall behind the chedi, with a name on it. The wat is busy enough that there is always a monk free before eleven. (Tan khan khao — the tray of rice, Pouring the water, Pha bangsukun — the cloth)
1.1 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Six centuries of them, all outbound
What is said to be thereExecutions at the gate, by driving a sharpened stake into the stomach, and every corpse in the city carried out through the same arch for six hundred years. Both classes of ผีตายโหง in one doorway, in bulk. It is a traffic junction now with a rebuilt brick face, and the people who cross it on foot at two in the morning are not thinking about it, and the taxi drivers who will not stop there are.
HereNothing here is set up to receive an offering, so leave no food or wax on the brick. Carry the act a few minutes south on Wualai to Wat Muen San and put it in the name of whoever went out through this gate unnamed. (Song khro — sending it away, Lighting a pang pratip)
0.8 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Not the corpse gate — that is two hundred metres west — but the road beyond it runs to Haiya and the burning grounds
What is said to be thereNot the corpse gate — that is two hundred metres west — but the road that runs out of it goes to Haiya and the burning grounds, and it did that job for centuries. A crossing where the dead went out is where misfortune is still set down and left: a tray at the kerb, a raft, a little figure standing in for somebody. Outward, always. Look down when you cross.
HereThe rescue-foundation station on this side of town keeps a box. Ask for ศพไร้ญาติ. (Paying for the unclaimed dead)
5.4 km on from the last one, by bicycle
A whole town's worth, under three metres of river sand
What is said to be thereA capital under three metres of river sand, and the wats coming back out of it one at a time since 1984 — below the level of the road, between houses, with washing strung up over them. The story people bring to it is a city that went on underneath, which is a folk tale and is told as one. The part that is not folklore is that these are graves and shrines that were covered while in use, and that the people whose gardens they are in have been living on the roof of them for five hundred years.
HereWat Chang Kham is a working wat standing on top of the buried one, and takes a tray or a lamp. At the excavated ruins, nothing — they are archaeology, and wax marks brick. (Lighting a pang pratip, Offering a tung, Pouring the water)
4.1 km on from the last one, by bicycle
Missionaries, teak men, consuls, soldiers, and people who died here last year
What is said to be thereTwenty-four rai of people who were buried by the rites of somewhere else. No tray in the morning, no monk, no water poured at the root of a tree, no banner with the name on it — none of the things the rest of this route is about. By the reckoning of the city they are lying in, that is the description of a dead person with nobody making merit for them, and there are over a thousand of them under the trees beside a golf course.
HereNot a Buddhist ground, so no tray and no monk. Water at the root of a tree and the names read off the stones out loud is the form that fits. Take the rubbish out with you. (Pouring the water, Sweeping)
1.7 km on from the last one, by bicycle
The drowned, who in northern telling do not leave the water
What is said to be thereผีพราย: the drowned, who in the northern classification do not move on, because the water keeps them. The belief has a mechanism attached — one of them gets out by putting somebody else in — and it is the reason a northern grandmother will not let a child swim in the Ping at dusk, and the reason the lamps go downstream at Loi Krathong rather than up.
HereA lamp floated, or water poured off the parapet. Loi Krathong is this by the hundred thousand, and the rest of the year the act is the same act. (Lighting a pang pratip, Pouring the water)