Chaiya Mangalaram Thai Buddhist Temple

This guide to Chaiya Mangalaram Thai Buddhist Temple in Penang opens with an unusual offering left near the entrance, a bowl of hot laksa noodle soup, for Phra Phorthan Kuad, the monk who founded the temple in 1845. It follows the land Queen Victoria granted to Penang's Siamese and Burmese communities, and the two women who held it in trust for over a century before the temple took its present name in 1948. In the late 1950s, monks marked a Buddhist anniversary with an undertaking sculptors spent a year building.