As Bangkok tells it
Erawan Shrine, Ratchaprasong · 3 min read
In the 1950s the government of Thailand set out to build a grand hotel in the middle of Bangkok, at the crossing of roads called Ratchaprasong. It was to be named the Erawan, after the three-headed white elephant that the god Indra rides.
From the start, nothing went right.
The costs ran over. Workmen were hurt. A whole shipload of Italian marble meant for the lobby was lost at sea. People began to say the ground was unlucky. Long before, they remembered, criminals had been put on show at that crossing.
Someone sent for an astrologer.
"The foundation was laid on the wrong day," he said. "The bad luck is in the ground now, and the building will not rise until it is answered."
"Answered how?" they asked him.
"Build a shrine," he said. "Build it to Phra Phrom."
Phra Phrom is Brahma, the creator, as the Thais know him: a golden figure with four faces, looking out in four directions at once, and with arms enough to hold all his things. In Thailand he is not quite the god of the Indian books. He is also Maha Brahma, the great Brahma of Buddhist heaven, and he is also something older, a guardian spirit of the kind every Thai house and office has in a little shrine in its grounds.
The Fine Arts Department made the statue. On 9 November 1956 it was consecrated and set up on its platform by the corner of the building site. After that, the story goes, the hotel went up without another accident.
People noticed. They began to stop at the shrine on their way past, at first a few and then a great many. They brought flowers, garlands of marigold and jasmine, and incense, and little wooden elephants, because of the hotel's name. They prayed to the four faces, and the people of Bangkok came to say that each face looks after one part of a life: work, love, money and health.
And when a prayer was answered, they paid. The custom grew up of hiring dancers. A troupe of women in gold costumes and tall pointed headdresses dances beside the shrine, all day, for whoever has paid them.
"For my daughter's exam," someone tells the leader of the troupe, and pays, and the women dance.
The old hotel was pulled down in 1987 and a new one built in its place. The shrine stayed where it was.
In March 2006 a young man came in the early hours with a hammer and smashed the statue to pieces, the four faces, the arms and the weapons. Bystanders beat him to death on the spot. His father said afterwards that his son had been mentally ill, and that killing him was not the act of anyone with real faith in Brahma. Two months later a new statue, made partly from fragments of the old one, was set up at the moment the sun stood directly overhead.
In August 2015 a bomb went off beside the railings in the evening crowd and killed twenty people. The statue was only slightly damaged. Within two days the shrine was open again, and the dancers were back.
He is still there. The skytrain passes over him, and a walkway looks down into his enclosure, and the traffic of one of the busiest crossings in Asia goes round him day and night.