Mini Siam

The guide to Mini Siam in Pattaya follows a businessman, Kasem Kasemkietsakul, who kept flying off to see the world's monuments and kept running out of time, until he decided in the mid-1980s to shrink the world down to something he could finish building instead. It traces the five years he spent studying famous sites after seeing miniature parks in the Netherlands and Taiwan, and the first model he raised here, Bangkok's Democracy Monument, before the gates opened in 1986. Along the way it walks the grounds from Ayutthaya's temple spires to the bridge over the River Kwai.