Wat Sri Suphan - Silver Temple

This guide to Wat Sri Suphan, the Silver Temple in Chiang Mai, opens with the warning sign at its door: step inside as a woman, it claims, and you risk more than breaking a rule. The hammered-metal ordination hall dates to a temple founded under a Lanna king in the early fifteen hundreds, its real silver reserved for an inner sanctuary almost no one enters. A few streets over, in the silversmith quarter of Wua Lai, women's hands still shape the same metal the hall is built from.