Baan Dam Museum

Last Updated: July 07,2020

Amon all the famous attractions in Chiang Rai, Thailand, there is the Baan Dam Museum and the WAT RONG KHUN. Although the construction time of the Baan Dam Museum is not long, people who have been there will never forget it. Surprisingly, the Baan Dam Museum in Chiang Rai is not a temple, but an open private museum that respects life.

Buildings made of thick teak wood resemble wooden houses that were hunted by ancient ancestors, and they are scattered randomly in the woods. These black buildings feature the ridges that are like spears pierced into the sky and the eaves like warp and curved horns. They look more like black swan in the song, and they produce creatures in the subconscious mind.

Baan Dam Museum was designed and built by the artist Thawan Duchanee in Thailand in 36 years. Because all its buildings are black, and the columns in the room are painted black, people also call it black house. Why is it called Baan Dam Museum? Perhaps what is listed here, to be precise, is the remains of all creatures.

Baan Dam Museum

In front of the main hall of the Baan Dam Museum, there are two gods guarding it. These two statues of evil spirits and ghosts are enough to make the museum justice for all things, to block all evil, and to make those who step into the museum have their minds upright. In the middle of the gate, there is the bust of white marble of the designer of Baan Dam Museum. Behind the statue, it is a large golden rooster with chicken head, scales and phoenix wings. The golden picture frame contains the photo of the designer and it is placed on the back of the golden rooster.

There is a huge black wooden box in the middle of the high ridge of the hall of the museum, with a golden face mask upside down. It is said that this is a coffin of the designer and constructor of the Baan Dam Museum. It is placed closer to heaven at high altitudes, and the face is intended to look forward to heaven. The hall is filled with specimens and remains of pythons, giant crocodiles, antlers, bull heads, and eagle beaks. It seems to tell people that all life in the world is a god worthy of respect.

Every hall here is a work of art. In particular, the dragon-like and phoenixes-like eaves sculpture whose roof ridges pierce the sky are suspected of expressing the designer's ideology and subjective desire to ascend into heaven after death and transform into flying sky. There are remains of elephants, tiger leopards, bear wolves, and whale sharks; and there are shellfish, stone formations, skulls, reproductive totems of human reproduction, fishing and hunting tools, and the creepy and seemingly scary embryo sculpture, and a special-shaped sword that can only be stored in an open big house like an axe. It is more reminiscent of the survival rule that the ancient ancestors and the souls coexist and depend on each other.

The Baan Dam Museum has no shadow of Buddhism except for the only stone sculpture of the Hanuman, the monkey god with the proboscis and face of the Indian Buddhist monkey. What does it believe in? It believes in heaven! Baan Dam Museum does not charge tickets. This is what the owner who owns this Baan Dam Museum wants to tell people: money is something outside of the body, but the soul is the one to keep.

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