Thai Arts and Crafts

In Theravada Buddhism a Buddha image is not a god but a reminder of the Buddha and his teaching, and making or gilding one earns merit. Images follow canonical rules handed down from India: elongated earlobes from the heavy earrings the young prince once wore, a cranial bump of wisdom topped by a flame or bud, curled hair, and long arms and fingers.

There are four postures. Seated images are the most common. Standing images usually teach or offer protection. Walking images, the great invention of Sukhothai, show the Buddha in mid-stride. Reclining images show the Buddha at the moment of his death and final release, not asleep, as at Wat Pho in Bangkok.

The hands (mudra) tell you which moment is meant: - Calling the earth to witness: seated, the right hand reaching down over the right knee to touch the ground. This recalls the night of the enlightenment, when the demon Mara challenged the Buddha’s right to sit under the bodhi tree and the earth goddess answered for him. It is the most common pose in Thailand. - Meditation: seated, both hands resting in the lap, palms up. - Dispelling fear: one or both palms raised and facing outwards, usually standing or walking. - Teaching: thumb and forefinger joined in a circle, the wheel of the law set in motion. - Calling for rain: standing with both arms held straight down at the sides, a pose used in northern and central ceremonies to bring the rains.

Thais also link an image to each day of the week, and many temples have a row of seven so visitors can make an offering to the Buddha of the day they were born: the Monday image stands with its palms raised outwards, the Tuesday Buddha reclines, the Thursday Buddha meditates, and the Saturday Buddha sits sheltered by the hood of the naga king.

Thai art historians name styles after kingdoms, and with practice you can date most images at a glance.

• Dvaravati (about 6th to 11th centuries): Mon images with broad faces, eyebrows joined in a single curve and thick lips, often in grey stone. Best seen at the Bangkok National Museum and around Nakhon Pathom.
• Lopburi (11th to 13th centuries): Khmer-influenced, with square faces, straight mouths and headbands; Buddhas often sit on the coils of the naga with its seven heads raised as a canopy.
• Lanna or Chiang Saen (from the 14th century): plump, round-faced northern bronzes with a lotus-bud top and a short flap of robe on the chest. The Chiang Saen National Museum and Wat Phra Singh in Chiang Mai have fine examples.
• Sukhothai (13th to 15th centuries): the high point. Oval faces, arched brows, a gentle smile, a flame rising from the head and a body that seems to flow, never more so than in the walking Buddha. Phra Buddha Chinnarat at Wat Phra Si Rattana Mahathat in Phitsanulok, cast in the late Sukhothai period, is often called the most beautiful image in the country.
• Ayutthaya (14th to 18th centuries): more formal and often crowned and jewelled, reflecting the idea of the Buddha as universal king; bronze, stucco and brick were used far more than stone.
• Rattanakosin (from 1782): Bangkok-period images copy and refine earlier styles. The cloister of Wat Benchamabophit lines up dozens of images and replicas from every period, an excellent primer.

The most revered image in Thailand, the small Emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kaew, is carved from green stone, not emerald. The king changes its gold costume at the start of each of the three seasons.

Thai murals were painted in tempera on dry plaster, and the heat and damp destroyed most early work; what survives is mainly from the late 18th and 19th centuries. The usual scheme puts the Buddha’s victory over Mara on the wall facing the main image, the universe of Buddhist cosmology behind it, and the Jataka tales of the Buddha’s past lives along the sides. In the gaps the painters let themselves go: market scenes, flirting couples, Chinese traders and bearded Europeans in top hats fill the margins.

The Ramakien murals along the cloister of Wat Phra Kaew tell the whole epic in sequence and have been repainted several times since the reign of Rama I. In Bangkok, the tall vihara of Wat Suthat has some of the finest 19th-century murals, and the Buddhaisawan Chapel inside the Bangkok National Museum keeps paintings from the first years of the city. The most loved murals in the north are at Wat Phumin in Nan, painted by Tai Lue artists in the late 19th century, where a man whispering into a woman’s ear has become an emblem of the town; Wat Nong Bua outside Nan has more in the same style. Murals are still painted today, as at Wat Rong Khun near Chiang Rai, where the artist Chalermchai Kositpipat mixes Buddhist cosmology with cartoon heroes and modern politics.

The Ramakien is the Thai version of the Indian Ramayana, and it runs through Thai art like a thread. The story follows Phra Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu, whose wife Sida is carried off by the ten-headed demon king Thotsakan to his island city of Longka. With the help of the white monkey general Hanuman and his army, Phra Ram builds a causeway across the sea and wins her back. The Thai telling adds local colour, makes Hanuman a lovable rogue and gives far more space to battles and magic. Versions existed in Ayutthaya, but most were lost in 1767; the standard text was composed under King Rama I at the end of the 18th century.

Other classics are worth knowing by name. Lilit Phra Lo, from the Ayutthaya period, is a tragic romance often compared to Romeo and Juliet. Khun Chang Khun Phaen, a folk epic of love, war and magic set in Ayutthaya times, was polished into verse at the early Bangkok court, with sections attributed to King Rama II and to Sunthorn Phu (1786 to 1855), the most celebrated Thai poet, whose own masterpiece is the long fantasy Phra Aphai Mani.

Classical Thai music is played by ensembles, not soloists. The piphat orchestra, which accompanies khon and temple ceremonies, is built around the ranat ek, a curved wooden xylophone that carries the melody, and the khong wong yai, a circle of tuned bronze gongs that the player sits inside. A quadruple-reed oboe called the pi, barrel drums and small cymbals keep time. Thai scales divide the octave into seven roughly equal steps, which is why Thai music can sound slightly off-key to Western ears, and players learn by ear from a teacher, with each piece elaborated on a shared skeleton melody.

The northeast has its own sound. The khaen, a mouth organ of bamboo pipes, drives mor lam, sung storytelling and courting songs that now fill festivals and radio stations, alongside luk thung, Thailand’s country music. Listen for both at temple fairs in Khon Kaen and Ubon Ratchathani.

Khon is the masked dance drama of the Ramakien and the most prestigious of the Thai performing arts, added to UNESCO’s list of intangible heritage in 2018. Dancers play heroes, heroines, demons and monkeys in lacquered masks and jewelled costumes; they do not speak, while narrators and a chorus deliver the lines and the piphat sets the pace. Every gesture has a fixed meaning, from a raised hand to a stamp of the foot, and training starts in childhood.

Lakhon dance drama uses many of the same stories without masks, while likay is its popular cousin: glittering costumes, improvised dialogue, slapstick and song, performed at temple fairs and on television. In the north, the slow fon lep or fingernail dance is performed by women wearing long brass nail extensions, often as a welcome at ceremonies.

Shadow puppetry came in two sizes. Nang yai uses large panels of cut and painted leather, each showing a whole scene, held up by dancers in front of a backlit screen; the tradition survives at Wat Khanon in Ratchaburi. Nang talung, the southern form, uses smaller jointed puppets with moving arms, all voiced by a single puppeteer who mixes the Ramakien with local gossip and earthy comedy. It is still performed around Nakhon Si Thammarat and Phatthalung.

Thailand’s silk comes mainly from the villages of the northeast, where women raise silkworms on mulberry leaves and weave on looms under their stilt houses. The signature technique is mudmee, a form of ikat in which bundles of weft thread are tied and dyed before weaving so the pattern emerges as the cloth is woven; patterns pass down through families, and each district has its own. Town names to look for are Pak Thong Chai near Nakhon Ratchasima, Khon Kaen province and Surin, whose Khmer-speaking weavers make some of the finest pieces.

Thai silk became an international brand thanks to Jim Thompson, an American former intelligence officer who promoted the hand-woven cloth abroad after World War II and then vanished on a walk in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands in 1967. His teak houses in Bangkok, now the Jim Thompson House museum, are full of his Asian art collection. From the 1970s Queen Sirikit’s support for village weaving kept many techniques alive; the Bang Sai Royal Folk Arts and Crafts Centre near Ayutthaya trains young craftspeople and shows their work. In the north, San Kamphaeng east of Chiang Mai has long been known for silk and cotton, and the hill peoples produce their own embroidered textiles, covered in our hill tribes guide.

From the 14th to the 16th century the kilns of Si Satchanalai and Sukhothai produced glazed stoneware, known as Sangkhalok ware, that was traded across Southeast Asia and has been found in shipwrecks from the Philippines to Indonesia. Its best-known glaze is celadon, a translucent grey-green, alongside pieces painted in dark iron-brown under the glaze. The Si Satchanalai kiln centre keeps excavated kilns on site, and the Sangkhalok Museum in Sukhothai displays the wares. Modern celadon workshops around Chiang Mai still use wood-ash glazes in the old colours.

Benjarong (“five colours”) is the opposite of celadon’s restraint: porcelain covered in dense enamel patterns of flames and flowers, often with gold. It was first made in China to Thai designs for the Ayutthaya and early Bangkok courts, and is now produced in Thai workshops, particularly in the provinces west of Bangkok.

Lacquer: the court technique of lai rot nam, gold leaf laid over black lacquer, decorates temple doors and the cabinets that once stored palm-leaf scriptures; the Suan Pakkad Palace museum in Bangkok has a whole late-Ayutthaya lacquer pavilion, moved from a temple near the old capital. In the north, lacquerware is built up on woven bamboo and painted red and black, a tradition shared with the Shan and Burmese.

Inlay and niello: mother-of-pearl inlay covers temple doors and the soles of the reclining Buddha at Wat Pho, and Nakhon Si Thammarat is the home of nielloware, silver engraved and filled with a black alloy.

Silver: Chiang Mai’s Wualai quarter has been a silversmiths’ street since the Lanna kings brought craftsmen from Burma, and its temple, Wat Sri Suphan, is clad in embossed silver and aluminium panels. Hmong, Mien and Karen silver, from heavy neck rings to fine beads, is sold at northern markets.

Wood: the carvers of Ban Tawai, south of Chiang Mai, turn out everything from small figures to furniture, and the carved gables of Lanna temples show the tradition at its best.

Umbrellas: at Bo Sang, east of Chiang Mai, families make parasols from bamboo and paper pressed from mulberry bark, then paint them by hand; you can watch each stage and have a bag or phone case painted while you wait. The village holds an umbrella festival each January.

Bronze: the Buranathai foundry in Phitsanulok casts Buddha images by the lost-wax method, and visitors can watch the moulds being made.

Bangkok has the most regular performances. Khon is staged at the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre and the National Theatre next to Sanam Luang, and the annual royal-sponsored khon production, usually late in the year, is the most lavish of all. Likay and mor lam turn up at temple fairs around the country, and the Bangkok National Museum is the single best place to see sculpture, ceramics, lacquer and textiles together. In the north, Chiang Mai’s Night Bazaar and Sunday walking street sell crafts from the surrounding villages, with plenty of imports from Myanmar, Laos and China mixed in, so it pays to buy at the source when you can. Our shopping guide covers markets and what to buy, and the culture guide covers festivals and muay thai.