Dynastic History|Chao Sam Phraya National Museum — The Amulets Paid for the Building

On 28 September 1957 the Fine Arts Department was told that the crypt inside the main prang at Wat Ratchaburana had been broken into. Most of what came out was melted down within days at gold shops in the Hua Ro quarter. One of the group carried an ornate gold Buddha image around the market while drunk, which is how the gang was traced and arrested; only a fraction of the metal came back.

What the department found when it excavated the crypts itself was larger than what had been taken. Its work at Wat Ratchaburana and Wat Mahathat produced gold objects and gemstones, Buddha images, and votive tablets in the hundreds of thousands; the Bangkok Post reports more than six hundred embossed and jewelled gold rings from the Wat Ratchaburana crypt alone.

The tablets paid for the building they are now kept in. In 1959 they were auctioned to the public to raise money for a museum. The museum's own account records 3,461,928 baht and 22 satang subscribed, against 1,718,500 baht for construction and a further 1,496,781 baht for fittings and ground preparation. It opened on 26 December 1961, carrying the name the chronicles give the king who founded Wat Ratchaburana: Chao Sam Phraya, the surviving third brother.

A gold gallery was added much later. The foundation stone was laid on 2 August 2017; the two-storey building runs to about 3,275 m² and shows 2,244 objects, among them a sword, a coronet and a miniature royal elephant of gold.

The doorway is lettered, in Thai and English, Gold Artefacts from the Crypt of Wat Ratchaburana. Just inside it, a sign says no photography.

📸 Cover: The doorway of the crypt-gold room at the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum, Iudexvivorum, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons