Wat Trai Mit Witthayaram Worawihan

This guide to Wat Traimit in Bangkok's Chinatown opens in May 1955, as workers went about the routine task of moving a large plaster Buddha to make room for a new building. It reaches back to the years before 1767, when Burmese armies swept toward the old capital of Ayutthaya, and to the priests who decided how to protect what they were guarding. The exhibition hall upstairs is worth slowing down in, where that earlier history is laid out in full.