roman influences in Thailand




roman influences in Thailand

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This is from the Summer Palace at Bang Pa-In. It’s quite a strange place. It was built to entertain visiting diplomats and emissaries, and the architecture was designed primarily to make them feel at home. So you have roman statues, a “Chinese House,” and a primarily receiving building/residence that could be out of Victorian England.

Then again, you also have the building visible behind the statue, in the middle of the pond, that is classic Thai, and is also adherent to Buddhist and Thai royal philosophies. It is separated from any other building by the pond itself, and only the king and his wife is allowed to take the small boat across to it. It is a mini-temple just for the king, separated from the “foreign” influences (and I don’t mean that in a bad way) seen around the rest of the palace.

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