Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The best known of all the works in Dusit was also one of the first. Wat Bencham-
abophit, Temple of the Fifth King, the Marble Temple, so named for the gleaming white
Carrara marble with which it is clad, is a remarkable blending of Siamese and Italian art
forms. A Buddhist temple laid out in Christian cruciform plan, Wat Ben as the Thais know
it was begun in 1900, and followed the tradition that a Siamese king should always have a
royal temple adjacent to his palace. There had been a small temple in the Dusit area, Wat
Laem, but this was demolished to make way for the garden development. Rather than re-
place it, the king decided upon a completely new temple that was in grandeur to equal the
palaces. Prince Naris, who was artistically gifted, created the design, and Mario Tamagno
was the architect. Allegri came up with the idea of white Carrara marble cladding and pil-
lars, and the marble courtyard. The red-painted iron bridges that arch so elegantly over
the canal are stamped with the name of their Italian manufacturer, and even the street-
lamps have a Venetian touch to them.
Unlike the older temple complexes in Bangkok, the Marble Temple has no central
wiharn
or
chedi
, having instead many smaller buildings that combine European influences
such as stained-glass windows with traditional Thai religious architecture. The main
ubosot
contains a golden Buddha statue against an illuminated blue backdrop, and the
ashes of Rama
V
are buried beneath the image. Beyond the
ubosot
is a cloister containing
fifty-two bronze Buddha images in many different styles, representing various Buddhist
countries and regions, and behind the cloister is a large bodhi tree, grown from a cutting
brought from Bodhgaya, where the Buddha found Enlightenment. Unlike other temples,
monks do not go out seeking alms but are instead visited by merit-makers at dawn each
morning.
As the architectural splendours of Dusit began to rise out of the alluvial mud, orches-
trated by Carlo Allegri at the peak of his creative powers, his personal life was unravelling.
Two of the children he had by his Siamese wife died young, one of malaria and one by
drowning in the little stream that flowed through the grounds of their house on Surawong
Road. His wife died soon after of fever. Allegri began a long slide into opium addiction,
frequenting the divans on Chinatown's Sampeng Lane. The project that, by his own ac-
count, was to bring him back out of his decline was Rama
V
's grandest of all: the Ananta
Samakhom Throne Hall was to be a majestic throne hall that would rival the Renaissance
buildings he had so admired on his two visits to Italy. Working to Indian ink drawings
supplied by the monarch, Allegri as chief engineer along with Tamagno and Rigotti as ar-
chitects drew up the plans for a baroque structure with a Latin crossplan, topped with a
central cupola clad in copper and placed at the point where nave and transept intersected.
