Where the lightning landedHo Phaya Mangrai
หอพญามังราย
- Where
- Ratchadamnoen Road, Si Phum, a short block east of the Three Kings square · 18.78828, 98.98788 from CMHY.city
- Open
- Open air, unstaffed, any hour
- Cost
- Free
- Who is dead
- Mangrai, founder of Chiang Mai, killed by a lightning strike in the market — B.E. 1854, 1311 CE, aged 72
- On
- On foot
He had built the city fifteen years earlier and was walking through its market when the storm came in. The Thai chronicle entry is one sentence long: struck by lightning, dead in the middle of the town.
A Lanna-roofed shrine stands under a big bodhi tree on Ratchadamnoen with a cast figure of him inside, in the dress of an old northern king. The building is modern — CMHY dates it to 1975, put up when the earlier marker became awkward to reach.
Nobody walks past it. People stop, kneel on the concrete, and talk to him.
He did not leave. In the northern reckoning a lord who dies in his own town becomes its เสื้อเมือง — the spirit of the place, wearing the office he held — and goes on running it from wherever he was put down. That is why the offerings at this shrine are not requests. People come and tell him things: what has been built, what has been sold off, who is in charge now. Seven hundred years of a city reporting to its founder on a street corner.
The kind of dead this kind of place holds, in northern reckoning
Where this is arguedThree spots claim the strike. chiangmai1.com names the ruins of Wat Sadue Muang near the Tilokarat hall, a collapsed chedi behind a royal residence by a bodhi tree, and a later memorial at the Klang Wiang intersection. The shrine you are standing at is the one people use. It may not be the one it happened at.
Making merit here
A khan tang. He is not being asked for a favour so much as reported to — the city's founder, told how his city is doing. Flowers and candles in pairs, set down, then pour the water at the root of the bodhi tree.
- Khan tang — the tray for a spirit ขันตั้ง — Paired flowers and candles on a tray, set down in front of a spirit or a teacher. 30–150 ฿ ready-made at the shrine. Less if you assemble it.
- Pouring the water กรวดน้ำ — Pour a thin stream of water while the chanting runs, and say who it is for. Nothing.
Јован Вуковић · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons
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