Ayutthaya Gold Treasure Exhibition Building

The story of this building begins several centuries before it was built, beneath a monastery on the island of Ayutthaya, WatBuddhist monastic complex that brings together, within a single enclosure, several religious buildings, monks’ quarters and ancillary buildings; the word does not refer to a single building. Ratchaburana. King Borommarachathirat II (died 1448), ruler of the Ayutthaya Kingdom, also known as Chao Sam Phraya, had this monastery raised together with its prangTower-sanctuary rooted in Khmer architectural tradition, later adopted and transformed in Siamese and Thai architecture; depending on the context, it serves a religious function or acts as a reliquary., a tall, slender reliquaryA container intended to hold and protect one or more relics. tower that dominates the whole complex. Beneath this tower, a cryptA closed masonry chamber built beneath a monument, in which relics and offerings are deposited. – that is, a closed masonry chamber in which relics and offerings were deposited – held a collection of exceptional richness. Most of the pieces on display today come from there.¹⁷

This deposit comprised gold objects, gemstones, Buddha images – the term used in Thailand for statues of the Buddha – and votive tablets, small moulded plaques bearing his likeness. The crypt was arranged on several levels, the uppermost of which held mainly images and tablets. The gold objects found there date for the most part from the fifteenth century, the era of the founding king. They bear witness to a time when the royal power of Ayutthaya affirmed its piety by burying, beneath the monuments it raised, regaliaThe set of insignia and objects symbolising royal power., ornaments and offerings intended to accompany the relics.⁸

In the mid-1950s, the crypt of Wat Ratchaburana was discovered and then looted. The thieves were arrested, but only part of the stolen objects was recovered. The affair revealed how much the ruins of the former capital still concealed, and spurred the authorities into action. Between 1956 and 1958, the Fine Arts Department of Thailand (Krom Sinlapakon), the government body responsible for monuments, museums and archaeology, carried out a campaign of survey and excavation on the island of Ayutthaya.¹⁷

These excavations focused on Wat Ratchaburana and Wat Mahathat. They yielded gold objects, gemstones, Buddha images and hundreds of thousands of votive tablets. For want of a suitable home, this collection was at first divided between the Bangkok National Museum, Ayutthaya town hall, a police station and several temples. The treasure had been saved, but it was scattered. The looting thus set in motion an institutional history that culminated, more than sixty years later, in the present building: without it, neither the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum nor its gold pavilion would have come into being.¹⁵

To house the finds on site, a museum was built in Ayutthaya and opened at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. It is presented as the first national museum to open outside Bangkok. Its funding was itself tied to the treasure, since votive tablets from the crypt of Wat Ratchaburana were handed to the public in exchange for sums of money earmarked for the construction.⁴

Accounts differ as to the form this operation took. Some speak of an auction of the tablets, others of donations from the public, each donor receiving a tablet from the crypt by way of thanks. In both versions, part of the sacred deposit circulated among the faithful and collectors so that the rest could be preserved and displayed. This choice sheds light on the particular status of votive tablets, produced in very large numbers and sought after for their protective value, alongside the gold pieces, which remain in the national collections.¹

By royal permission, the museum was given the name Chao Sam Phraya. This choice links the institution to the very origin of its collections: the king who had Wat Ratchaburana and its prang raised becomes the patron of the place charged with displaying what the crypt had held. The name thus places the museum in continuity with a fifteenth-century act of royal foundation, rather than in the memory of the looting alone.¹

For decades, the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum preserved and displayed part of the treasure. Another part of the gold objects from Wat Ratchaburana remained at the Bangkok National Museum. The buildings and displays of the Ayutthaya museum underwent no thorough renovation after its opening, so that at the beginning of the twenty-first century the whole still reflected the museography of its early days.⁶

In 2014, the Fine Arts Department of Thailand decided to renovate the Chao Sam Phraya National Museum entirely. Rather than spreading the gold objects through a general display, it chose to give them pride of place and devote a building of their own to them. The project formed part of a reorganisation of the whole museum, of which it is the centrepiece.⁹

This choice served two aims. The first was to preserve and display, in better conditions, the Ayutthaya-period gold objects found at the province’s archaeological sites. The second was to make this heritage better known to the public, as Phnombootra Chandrajoti, Director-General of the Fine Arts Department of Thailand, emphasised at the inauguration. The new building also made it possible to reunite what had been scattered: the gold objects from Wat Ratchaburana held at the Bangkok National Museum returned to Ayutthaya, and all the gold objects from the province’s excavations are presented in the same place for the first time.⁴

The foundation stone was laid on 2 August 2017 by Vira Rojpojchanarat, then Minister of Culture, in the presence of Anan Chuchot, Director-General of the Fine Arts Department of Thailand at the time. The works stretched over several years. Before the opening, Itthiphol Kunplome, by then Minister of Culture, came to ensure that the building was ready to receive the public.¹⁰

The inauguration ceremony took place on 29 December 2022, and the building opened its doors to visitors the very next day. It has since been managed by the Fine Arts Department of Thailand, which comes under the Ministry of Culture, through its Ayutthaya regional office. The objects it houses belong to the national collections.¹⁴

The building adopts the style known in Thailand as ‘applied ThaiA contemporary Thai architectural style that takes up and adapts forms from traditional Thai architecture.’, a contemporary architecture that takes up and adapts forms from traditional architecture. It rises over two floors and offers just over 3,000 m² of usable floor space. This architecture places the pavilion in the lineage of Thai public buildings that seek to reconcile modern functions with references to the national heritage.¹⁴

Inside, these spaces house 2,244 objects. Their number, like the floor area devoted to them, reflects the change in scale of the project: what was once shown in a few rooms of the 1961 museum now has an entire building, designed for it.¹⁴

The display opens with the gold objects from Wat Ratchaburana connected with royalty. Here are regalia – that is, the insignia of royal power – insignia of high rank, utensils intended for the sovereign, and ornaments. This first section brings together what belongs to the secular world: objects owned by the king or associated with his person.²

Their presence in a crypt beneath a religious monument is significant in itself. These objects were not intended for the everyday use of the court but were deposited alongside the relics. They show how, in Ayutthaya, the emblems of royalty could be offered to Buddhism and buried beneath a prang, uniting in a single deposit the imageIn Thai Buddhism, a devotional representation of the Buddha, most often a statue, venerated as an object of worship. of the sovereign and that of the Buddha.

The second section presents the gold objects from Wat Ratchaburana intended for Buddhist worship: offerings, votive objects and relics, together with votive tablets, amulets and Buddha images, some of them in gold. Moving from the first part to the second makes it clear that the treasure is not a mere heap of riches but an organised whole, in which each category of object serves a function.

This section includes a reconstruction of the crypt of Wat Ratchaburana as it appeared before the excavations, with the gold objects and relics in place. It reveals a space that visitors can no longer discover at the site itself, as the crypt is no longer open to the public. Visitors thus grasp the arrangement of the deposit, which display cases by their very nature break up.¹²

The third part widens the view beyond Wat Ratchaburana. It sets out the ideas connected with the enshrinementThe ritual deposit of relics at the heart of a monument, often accompanied by precious objects. of relics – that is, their ritual deposit at the heart of a monument – and presents relics and objects found in other buildings in the province: the prang of Wat Phra Ram, the prang of Wat Mahathat, the chediA bell-shaped reliquary monument, the Thai version of the Indian stupa. of Wat Phra Si Sanphet and the Chedi Si Suriyothai. The chedi is a bell-shaped reliquary monument, the Thai version of the Indian stupaA Buddhist monument of Indian origin intended to house relics..¹³

This juxtaposition shows that the practice observed at Wat Ratchaburana was not an isolated one. From one monument to another, and across several periods of the kingdom’s history, relics of the Buddha were sealed together with precious objects inside prang and chedi. The final section thus turns the presentation of a treasure into a reading of the city itself, whose great monuments emerge as so many caskets for relics.

Among the highlighted pieces is the Phra Saeng Khan Chai Si sword, a ceremonial weapon associated with royalty. Beside it stands a scale model of a mounted royal elephant, the sovereign’s mount for war and pageantry, rendered here in gold. Other gold swords, head ornaments, a crown and a gold miniature of the regalia of Siam complete this group, which reveals the kingship of Ayutthaya through its attributes.¹⁰

The religious offerings strike a more intimate note. Fine sheets of gold bear depictions of the Buddha, worked in metal thin enough to be cut and stamped. Between the monumentality of the royal insignia and the delicacy of these sheets, visitors can gauge the range of skills of the fifteenth-century goldsmiths.⁴

A stupa-shaped reliquary illustrates the place of precious stones in these deposits. Its gems are set in three tiers: at the bottom a lilac-coloured stone, at the top red spinels, rare stones whose colour is not found in Thailand’s deposits. The sides of the base are adorned with emeralds and zircons.⁸

The interior continues this decoration. Further gems are lined up inside, among them spinels and garnets, around a small gold box containing a relicBodily remains of, or objects associated with, the Buddha or a holy figure, preserved and venerated. of the Buddha. The object makes the logic of enshrinement clear: the relic, at the centre, is surrounded by ever more precious materials, like a monument in miniature. The presence of stones from elsewhere is also a reminder that Ayutthaya had access to materials brought from afar.⁸

The presentation relies on redesigned lighting, multimedia installations and display cases that allow the objects to be seen from every angle. The work on lighting improves the legibility of pieces whose brilliance depends on how they are lit, and 360-degree viewing reveals details of goldsmithing that were once hidden.¹⁵

These choices mark the difference from the museum of the 1960s. The objects are no longer simply shown as treasures; they are placed in an order that distinguishes the royal from the religious, linked to their monuments of origin and made visible in their detail. The building thus completes the journey that began with the looting of the crypt: objects scattered after their discovery find, in Ayutthaya, a single place where they can be understood together.