The Erawan Museum

This guide to the Erawan Museum in Bangkok follows Lek Viriyaphant, the businessman behind the Ancient City and the Sanctuary of Truth, who spent nine years from 1994 building a three-headed bronze elephant taller than a fourteen-story building and clad by hand in copper sheets. It traces the museum inside its legs and body, arranged as the Hindu cosmos across three ascending floors, from Lek's own collection of Ming and Qing vases to a stained-glass zodiac dome. Listen for what waits on the top floor, lodged inside the elephant's belly.