Ghost Chiang Mai

The Shan wat inside the wallWat Pa Pao วัดป่าเป้า

The Shan wat inside the wall

Shan founders and abbots, in the small stupas around the chedi

Ziegler175 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons
Where
Mani Nopparat Road, just inside the north-east of the moat · 18.79600, 98.99236 from OpenStreetMap
Open
Daylight
Cost
Free
Who is dead
Shan founders and abbots, in the small stupas around the chedi
On
On foot

Founded in the late fifteenth century by Shan who came down with the army and stayed. The chedi is Shan-Burmese work and the compound is laid out nothing like a Thai wat.

A community that has been here five hundred years and is still counted as from somewhere else.

What is said to be there

Shan founders, Shan abbots, in the small stupas round the chedi, five centuries into a city that still files them under from somewhere else. Northern households feed their own dead — ผีปู่ย่า, the grandparents, danced to and given food so they stay ancestors and do not turn into something hungrier. A community that buried its dead a thousand kilometres from where those dead were born has been doing that work here since the 1400s.

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

Making merit here

A tung, written for someone who died away from where they were born. The Shan community here has been doing exactly that for five hundred years.

Wat Pa Pao
Јованвб · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Commons

Yours would be better

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Sources for this stop

WhatWho published itNote
ผี ไม่ได้มีแค่สยองขวัญ เมื่อ 'ผีล้านนา' คือการปกปักรักษาLannerthe Lanna split between ผีดี and ผีร้าย, and what เสื้อบ้าน เสื้อเมือง are
คำเรียกผีและความเชื่อเรื่องผีในภาษาไทยถิ่นเหนือVeridian E-Journal, Silpakorn Universitythe northern names for the dead, collected and classified
ผีปู่ย่ากรมศิลปากร พิพิธภัณฑสถานแห่งชาติ เชียงใหม่the ancestor spirits of a Chiang Mai household, from the national museum
ฟ้อนผี ประเพณีการนับถือบรรพบุรุษOpenBase.in.ththe dance by which a northern family's ancestors are fed