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Guanyu altar on the back wall of Ancient Guanyin Temple (Guanyin gumiao 觀音古廟) (ศาลเจ้ากวนอิม San Tchaw Kuan Im)

From the Ground Up: Buddhism & East Asian Religions (FROGBEAR Project)

The Ancient Guanyin Temple (觀音古廟) (ศาลเจ้ากวนอิม San Tchaw Kuan Im) is a Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand. This one room neighborhood temple was constructed during the reign of King Rama V, roughly from 1853-1910, as specified by the temple caretaker. The caretaker said that the temple was bombed during the Japanese invasion of Thailand in 1941, but was later rebuilt. The temple regularly hosts chanting groups, the majority of whom were specified to be Teochew Chinese (唐人). The caretaker stated that the temple has no state support, but does regularly pay money to a Chinese foundation. It is not known to what extent the temple has been renovated, nor how often, but the most recent set of renovations occured in 2021. The following images show the right altar of Daoist deity Holy Ruler Guan Yu (關羽) included in the main altar box on the back wall of the temple. Image 01 shows an overview of the altar box. On the gold borders of the box are motifs of birds and flowers. Image 02 shows a close-up of the inscription at the top of the box, reading from right to left 関 [關]聖帝君 referring to the deity, Holy Lord Guanyu. The 関 [關] in the inscription may be a variant of the regular version that appears in historical dictionaries and is close to the Japanese version. Image 03 and Image 04 show close-ups of the right and left vertical inscriptions respectively, reading from top to bottom 高義秉帀秋 and 丹心扶漢室. Image 05 shows a close-up of the Guanyu and Image 06 shows the smaller Guanyu figure in front of it, with two little smaller figures in front of that. Metadata created and compiled by: Kira Johansen.

Bangkok (Thailand); 13.739641; 100.509704

chi

Cluster 3.4: Typologies of Text-Image Relations

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0440920

Non UBC

Faculty; Graduate; Undergraduate

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