Twenty-four rai, granted 1898Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery สุสานชาวต่างชาติเชียงใหม่

Twenty-four rai, granted 1898

Missionaries, teak men, consuls, soldiers, and people who died here last year

Where: Chiang Mai–Lamphun Road, beside the Gymkhana Club · 18.77352, 99.00739 from OpenStreetMap
Open: Daylight; gate sometimes shut, the keeper opens it
Cost: Free; donation box
Who is dead: Missionaries, teak men, consuls, soldiers, and people who died here last year
On: By bicycle, On a scooter, With a driver

King Chulalongkorn granted twenty-four rai on 14 July 1898, after the British consul asked for somewhere to bury the dozen Britons then living in Chiang Mai. The first burial was in 1900.

It is still open. More than a quarter of the graves are twenty-first century and there are plots reserved by people who are alive.

A Queen Victoria memorial, a Second World War memorial, and the Wood Chapel. Under the trees at four in the afternoon it is the coolest ground in the city.

What is said to be there

Twenty-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.

The kind of dead this kind of place holds, in northern reckoning

Making merit here

Not 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 กรวดน้ำ — Pour a thin stream of water while the chanting runs, and say who it is for. Nothing.
Sweeping กวาดลานวัด — Pick up a broom that is already leaning there and sweep. Nothing.

Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery — Dahlfred · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons

Yours would be better

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Sources for this stop

What	Who published it	Note
Some corner of a foreign field: the story of the Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery	Chiang Mai Citylife
Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery	Find a Grave	the indexed burial list
De Mortuis: The Story of the Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery	White Lotus Books	the book-length account; not read for this build
ผี ไม่ได้มีแค่สยองขวัญ เมื่อ 'ผีล้านนา' คือการปกปักรักษา	Lanner	the Lanna split between ผีดี and ผีร้าย, and what เสื้อบ้าน เสื้อเมือง are
คำเรียกผีและความเชื่อเรื่องผีในภาษาไทยถิ่นเหนือ	Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University	the northern names for the dead, collected and classified