Wat Lan Kuat - The Temple of One Million Beer Bottles - Khun Han
On a trip to the Si Saket area by the Cambodian border with my family to go to the many waterfalls in that area I was told by my wife's sister about this funny Wat (temple) named Wat Lan Kuat in the city of Khun Han about 15 kilometers from the waterfalls we were visiting. She told me about this monk who was sick of all the bottles littering the nearby countryside and his ingenious way of getting the locals to clean up the litter they made. What he did was decide to build a temple with the old bottles. He got the people to bring the bottles to him and his acolytes and they built this huge and very beautiful temple complex, out of... mostly green Heineken beer bottles and brown glass Thai beer Chang bottles. This place was great and well worth the visit on our way back from the waterfalls. As you can see in the accompanying pictures below the glass was set in concrete, whole bottles, to make the buildings in this complex. What is very strange is every building in the place is done like this. The temples, the water tower, the monks quarters, even the crematorium and the many bathrooms they have for the many tourists visiting there. It was a very unique and wonderful place.
Here's a closer shot of the main temple.
A beautiful bottle-cap mosaic over the main temple entrance.
One of the most amazing things about this place, besides the fact it was so pretty and made out of beer bottles, was these mosaics everywhere throughout the complex. These are all made out of bottle caps! They are amazing and very intricate and gorgeous. The mosaic in the picture above is entirely made from bottle caps. I've never seen anything like this place.
Inside the bottle temple praying to Buddha and admiring the handiwork.
The wall mosaic behind the Buddha inside the temple is also done entirely of bottle caps. All the walls are made of bottles, even the floors on the outer terrace are made from inverted beer bottles. The designs used are very colorful and interesting. When you get close to the mosaics you can see the different bottle caps used to make these artworks.
The Wat Chedi.
This entire structure is covered in small brown vitamin drink bottles. There must be many thousands of them in just this one building. They say there are more than one million bottles used in decorating this temple complex. Hence the name of Wat Lan Kuat. 'Lan' in Thai means a million. 'Kuat' means bottle.
Even the temple crematorium is made from bottles!
I had to laugh when I saw that even the crematorium was done with bottles. This is a good place for a drinking man to be cremated I think.
Here's one of the monks living quarters.
I had to wonder if all this glass being put on the roofs and walls of the buildings made the places much warmer than they would be without. I can imagine this glass gets extremely hot baking in the tropical sun here all day long. Even the monks' living quarters were done with these green and brown beer bottles. Above is a picture of one of their homes. There were a few more further down the dusty lane.
Here is a close up of a bottle-cap mosaic.
Notice the small brown vitamin drink bottles surrounding the mosaic. These were the type of bottles used to make a huge bathroom building behind the temple area. They must have twenty bathrooms in here for the tourists. While you are here you'll notice a constant flow of tour busses coming in to see this temple, and they are all full.You can't see it in this picture but most of these bottle caps have writing on them. It's the reflection of the sun on them and the primary color on the caps that make them look the way they do. The gold bottle caps are from the small vitamin bottles.
Wat Lan Kuat is a strange, interesting, and even beautiful place. The grounds are shaded with many trees, there are monks caring for the grounds and doing some charity type of work, and manning the relics and Buddhas people come to pray to and give alms to. There is a deep voiced gong that seems to ring every minute softly in the background, and a sweet smelling incense floats through the air.
Plus, at the entrance to the temple grounds, there are food vendors and an ice cream cart. (I told you the Thais were very capitalistic and never miss a beat to make a few baht off the tourists.) We had some ice cream bars and watched the setting sun reflect off the bottle roofs of the temples and set off for home after we finished touring this odd temple complex in Khun Han.
I hope you all enjoyed this article on the Temple of One Million Beer Bottles.
Mike
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved by the author.
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