The Thai Palace was supposed to be our last stop of the day, but our tour guide insisted that we stop at a special exhibition highlighting the royal family’s royal treasures. The queen has implemented a social program to keep Thailand’s traditional arts alive, and the exhibition highlights some of the most beautiful pieces from the program that have been created as gifts to the royal family (kind of funny if you think about it – the queen pays for the materials and for workers’ wages so that the workers can make gifts for her). Regardless, our tour guide wanted us to see it because she said that all westerners think Thailand is a poor country but really they have treasures just like the European countries. So we went to appease her.
The exhibition was held in a European style state hall that has no other purpose, at least from what I gathered, than to hold fancy parties for important people. The actual exhibition showed about fifteen elaborate pieces made from gold, diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and other precious metals. There were animal figurines, long-tail boat figurines, etc. Some were about the size of a coffee pot and others were the size of small kitchen table. There were also seats made to sit on the tops of elephants for the king, and a few of those things that royal people sit in that have poles in the sides so servants can carry them. All the items were exquisitely made and must have been worth millions. My favorite thing about the exhibit, though, was the fact that lining a lot of the items was a material that changed colors depending on what angle you were looking at them from. The material turned out to be the wings of a beetle that lives in the jungles of Thailand! They must have used millions of beetles to make all the things in that room.
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