Bangkok’s Danse Macabre

Thais love the bloody and the shocking.

Open the Thai Rath newspaper – or any of Thailand’s specialty magazines showing all but victims of violence and accidents.

You will see what you won’t see in any other newspapers of the world.

Or go to the movies trying to watch a Thai flick.

There’s a chance you see an excellent movie. Most likely though you either get a comedy celebrating ridiculousness. Or a horror movie with humans as living maggot pits or kindergarten parties culminating in a cheerful bloodbath.

Thai reality out there is tough. There’s a rich assortment of all kinds of violence happening around the clock. A shot drug dealer? Doesn’t even make it into a newspaper anymore. Too common.

Or ever happened to witness a major accident? Curious onlookers turning a site of mourning into an amusement park?

The love of Thais for carnage and massacres is the more astonishing as the outside world sees Thai people as filigree beings only obedient to kindness and politeness.

But there is a very dark world out here, just to speak of the incomprehensible amount of domestic violence, abuses and crimes that occur all about.

Does it come as a surprise then that Bangkok has a range of historical sites and museums dedicated to horror and blood?

absolutelyBangkok.com did a little research and has this sightseeing tour for you. A tour peppered with lesser known Bangkokian objects of interest.

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A nice start offers the Foundation of Ruamkatanyu – called the society of the body snappers.

Visit their main temple at Rama IV / Sri Praya Road near Silom. A wide photo collection of burnt, chopped up, torn and twisted bodies welcomes you at the entrance. At the shrine you’re invited to offer huge chunks of raw bacon to the gods of the dark.

The boys of Ruamkatanyu love accidents, suicides, mass murder.

They listen to police radio 24/7. If blood flows, the boys of Ruamkatanyu are the first on the spot. A not too good omen for the victims though. The pickup trucks of Ruamkatanyu are equipped with no life support stuff at all.

At a car crash, valuables of the victims, even the hi-fi systems, quite often go “missing”. There are reports about fights between the boys of Ruamkatanyu and its competitors of Phor Tek Thung. Fights about who gets the victim.

Ruamkatanyu though does work of merit, tamboon. The work of cleaning up blood and death is unpaid and considered a social contribution.

Ruamkatanyu gives furthermore burials to the nameless and the poor. It delivers food and blankets to victims of catastrophes. It cares for the people nobody cares for.

The colorful array of images at the entrance of the main temple shall attract donations and prayers.

* * * * * * *

Next, why not stop at Bangkok’s Corrections Museum, where you learn all about capital punishment – such as by sword by two executioners. To guarantee a quick death.

Learn about the fine art of Thai torture and truly Thai execution instruments. Ever heard of capital punishment by rattan ball? The convict was squeezed into a big rattan ball infested with nails. And the ball was given to elephants. Playing footy.

Told you Thais have a flair for the macabre.

You find the Corrections Museum at 436 Mahachai Road.

* * * * * * *

Next: The Forensic Museum at Siriraj Hospital – the hospital of the royal family. GPS coordinates: N13°43.132 – E100°30.776.

One of attractions – a giant, Elephantiasis-infected human scrotum:

To give you the account of a friendly website:

It’s been said that Vienna, with its Bestattungsmuseum (funeral museum), and Guanajuato, Mexico, with its mummified former residents, are cities that have a closer-than-normal relationship with the trappings of death. Nothing in those cities, however, comes close to what fans of the macabre will enjoy upon entering the friendly confines of the Siriraj Medical Museum, on the west bank of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River.

Here, you will find six museums within a one-block area dedicated to death and illness, with all manner of preserved bodies, body parts, and ephemera. On August 20, 2004, the museums were formally joined together, a new entrance was established, and ticket fees (40 baht) were implemented. Much of the signage remains in Thai, though all but the densest will be able to connect the dots. The most compelling exhibits are in the Pathological, Forensic and Parasitology museums.

Parasitology Museum

Most of us remember childhood admonitions to avoid going barefoot in barnyards, and to ensure that meat was well cooked before eaten. Now we know why. This museum’s exhibits focus on hookworms, pinworms, roundworms, and you-name-it. Perhaps the most notable exhibit concerns a scrotum, 75 cm in diameter, dissected from a victim of elephantiasis, a disease resulting from contact with the mansonia mosquito.

Ellis Pathological Museum

Upon entering, the visitor is lulled by the machinery in the front room: Typewriters, measuring devices, gadgets galore. Turn the corner, though, and you’ll witness a cornucopia of births gone wrong, the tiny bodies encased forever in sarcophaguses of glass and formaldehyde. If you’ve only read about hydrocephalus, cyclopia, gastroschisis, and conjoined twins, here’s your opportunity to get up close and personal. Along the way, you’ll find individual organs sporting flowering carcinomas and mortifying fungi.

Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum

Here, you’ll become intimately acquainted with embalmed bodies of murderers, exhibits of ghastly deaths, and the ephemera gathered from murder scenes. A crowd-pleaser is the standing, wax-filled remains of noted 1950’s cannibal, Si Quey. The cannibal’s body has been filled with paraffin, and the autopsy scar is visible on his forehead (his brain was removed to determine if a cannibal’s mind is different than anyone else’s: It wasn’t). The neatly hand-lettered sign notes that he killed “because he loves to eat human’s organ not because of starving.”

There is a strangely avant-garde artistic aspect to many of the exhibits: The head of a victim of a gunshot wound to the head is neatly sawed in half lengthwise, to illustrate the path of the bullet-hole, the whole package neatly encased in sealed glass filled with formaldehyde, perhaps the world’s grimmest aquarium. You’ve read about train wrecks, fatal car accidents, and motorcycle decapitations, and here, you can see photos that newspapers worldwide refuse to print. “Crush injury by machine” was particularly illustrative, as was “blast force injury (hand grenade).”

Other On-site Museums

There are three other museums on-site. The Thai Medicine Museum occupies the second floor of the Adulyadej Building, along with the three museums listed above. The Congdon Anatomical Museum, and the Prehistoric Museum & Laboratory are in the Anatomy Building, just around the corner.

How to get there? Take the Chao Phraya ferry to the Tha Rot Fai pier (also called Tha Bangkok Noi pier) on the western side of the river. Exit and walk due west, then walk left into the hospital grounds, and follow the signs to the Adulyadej building.

Next: I’m sure you could use a drink.

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Why not heading to the Snakeblood Bar at the market of Klong Toey. A great stopover by the way for the eager photographer. What a glorious Sodom and Gomorrah.

At the corner Asok / Rama IV each afternoon at around 3pm the Snakeblood Bar opens.

Well, you hardly recognize it as the bar. It’s a shabby array of plastic chairs, flanked by smudgy bottles filled with snake blood and Thai liquor of the rather harder kind. Good for the virility! – or so they say.

Try the cobra curry. It will scorch your intestines. And have – served by an old, half-blind Chinese – a glass of snake blood. As Leonardo di Caprio did in “The Beach”. Nope, Leo’s no fake. But a true Bangkok insider.

Last but not least: A little relaxation may be well deserved.

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We head to the Sao Ching Cha, the Giant Swing. A place of horror?!

In the early days – until the year of 1935 exactly -, the swing was a site for brahmin rituals, namely, religious swing competitions. Too many punters though died attempting to swing as high as 25 meters into a quasi-horizontal position – as the ritual required.

A pouch filled with pocket change was to be grabbed.

No more pouches hanging down from the sky. All you will find is a replica of the swing. It’s still worth a stroll – especially when you’re heading to the nearby Chinatown. Find the swing in front of Wat Suthat at 145 Bamrungmuang Road.

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Forgot a site of interest of the other kind? Let me know!




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January 14, 2008 | Filed Under Culture & Arts, Society, The Thai Mind, Truly Bangkok 

Comments

6 Responses to “Bangkok’s Danse Macabre”

  1. Axel on January 14th, 2008 10.33 am

    I feel sick …

  2. oneditorial on January 14th, 2008 12.05 pm

    Thai Rath is a rag, but it is also the most popular newspaper in Thailand.

    It is really not nice, isn’t it?

  3. BangkokDan on January 14th, 2008 12.24 pm

    Axel: Sorry ’bout that.

    Took out some sting and blurred that one victim …

    oneditorial: For heaven’s sake what are you implying!

    And being at it: In the latest Big Chilli you find this story – does say something about the Thais’ love for the bloody and gory:

    Ghosts, Gore and Go-Go Girls

    Recent changes in the import duties on boats have led to a boom in Thailand’s sailing and boating industries, with a huge increase in private ownership of yachts and all kinds of new regattas being hosted here

    The Thai film industry seems to have carved out a dubious niche for itself, producing some of the most spectacularly gory and at the same time deeply silly, movies in South East Asia. However, a new competitor entering this already overheated box office race promises to be something a little bit different. P, a modern tale of witchcraft set in the seedy underworld of Bangkok’s Go-Go Bars, is making history on two counts.

    For a start it’s the first Thai horror movie to win almost universal international critical acclaim, one of the world’s biggest movie review sites called it “The best movie of the year … a masterpiece in horror” and it took the Audience Best Film Award at the Erlangen Film Festival in Germany. And second, its director Paul Spurrier, is the first ever farang to direct a Thai language film. When Paul Spurrier first traveled to Thailand in 1999 on a documentary assignment for the BBC, he was surprised when the driver of the crew vehicle stopped at a particular corner and requested that everyone step out. At this corner, there had been many car accidents, and in order to pass safely, one must request permission from the spirits to pass by …

    BangkokDan

  4. Thaistory on January 18th, 2008 11.34 pm

    These pictures are supposed to “educate” the public …

  5. Death In Thailand on June 28th, 2008 2.43 pm

    [...] love the morbid, bloody and the shocking – or don’t they? Thais’ odd fondness for a very own danse macabre is legendary. Just have a look at the front page of a local [...]

  6. Bombed German on August 21st, 2009 8.24 pm

    [...] pages as far as I can tell. Foreigners just can’t take it. We had an earlier post about this danse macabre; about this Thai way of looking at death so much more indifferently than foreigners are used [...]

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