Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
boats in forty-five minutes. The husk was stored in a shed and transported to the boilers
by means of four screw compressors. There were ten boilers, feeding steam to six turbines,
each turbine driving an alternator that generated alternating current at 3,600 volts and 50
cycles. From the alternators the current went through a switchboard that distributed it via
high-tension underground cables to feeders and thence all over town, providing lighting
for streets, houses and offices, and power for installations such as the city waterworks and
the Memorial Bridge lifting mechanism. The feeders supplied current to the generating
plant for the tramways, where there were three electric motor generators that supplied
the necessary 550-volt direct current for traction; from 1926 onwards, when it was elec-
trified, they also supplied the Paknam Railway that ran the 21 kilometres (13 miles) from
Hua Lampong to Paknam, the town at the mouth of the Chao Phraya.
Wat Liab, although continuing to be known as such, had officially been renamed Wat
Ratchaburana in the reign of Rama
I
, when it had been designated as a royal temple, first
class, the name being taken from a prominent temple at Sukhothai. Rama
II
built a cloister
to enshrine some of the 162 Buddha images that he brought in from the provinces, eighty
of which he placed in a new
wiharn
. Rama
III
added a
prang
that was decorated with
coloured ceramic tiles, and in the reign of Rama
IV
the master artist Khrua In Khong,
a pioneer in using European perspective in traditional Siamese art, added murals to the
ubosot
. In 1935, something very curious was added to Wat Liab. The number of Japan-
ese citizens in Bangkok had been increasing, and after making numerous requests they
were finally given permission to build an ossuary in Bangkok to house the ashes of their
dead. A monk named Fujii Shinsui, who was from the Shingon sect centre at Mount Koya
and was then studying in Bangkok, conceived the idea of a three-storey concrete ossuary
based on the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, and was given permission to build it
in the grounds of Wat Liab. Funds were raised through the Japanese Association of Siam.
A Buddha image was sent to the ossuary from a temple known as Ni Thai Ji, or Japan
Thai Temple, in Japan's Nagoya province. Monk Fujii, still in Bangkok at the outbreak
of the Pacific War in December 1941, was sent as a military chaplain to serve with the
Japanese army during the invasion of Burma, leaving the ossuary in the care of an elderly
monk named Chino and a student named Sasaki Kyogo. With the Japanese army occupy-
ing Siam, the electricity generating station at Wat Liab became a primary target for Allied
bombers, and in April 1945, in the final stages of the war, the temple itself was hit and so
badly damaged that it was deleted from the official list. Only the
prang
and, ironically, the
Japanese ossuary survived.
