A privately-owned museum in Phitsanulok seems determined to preserve Thai wisdom
PATSINEE KRANLERT
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| Ancient brass lanterns grace this corner. |
Drums... for long the mainstay of folk music. |
A wooden coconut grater patterned after rabbits. |
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| The traditional Thai kitchen is conspicuous by its `tao fun' stove that uses firewood for fuel. |
Ancient weaponry... spears and swords sourced from the northern regions of Thailand. |
The innocuous-looking two-storey building in Muang district of Phitsanulok looks anything but what it's supposed to be, not until you step inside and it hits you with the full weight of its presence.
The place is a virtual cultural treasure trove presenting some fine links to our ancestors and their way of life, for it gives you a peek at their aesthetic skills and a chance to appreciate how they were used to devise simple every-day-use implements that must have gone a long way in fashioning their lifestyle.
Situated on Wisutkasat Road, Ja Thawee Folk Museum houses a large collection of indigenous artefacts and household items from the northern regions of Thailand. These range from folk arts, pottery, basketry, kitchenware, household goods, weapons and children's playthings to agricultural implements and animal traps. They reflect the ingenuity of our ancestors, their creativity, intellect and wisdom, something we all Thais should be proud of.
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| Toys on show are colourful as well as cuddly. |
The museum is named after Thawee Buranakhet, its owner and founder who is a sergeant major. Also an accomplished sculptor with good knowledge of Thai folklore, for 30 years he went around collecting the samples, buying them when failing to persuade their owners to give them away, before turning his house into a museum and opening it to the public in 1983.
Locals fondly call him Ja Thawee. To him, local wisdom and traditions are our cultural heritage. His museum is a vault of information about our society and how it's evolved since the items on display here were conceived and have been in use.
Among the exhibits are hand-carved wooden coconut graters adorned with head of animals at one end. From the head extends a small metal disc with serrated margins. This implement, symbolic of the traditional Thai kitchen, was elaborately carved into various styles and shapes of animals like lion, pheasant, elephant, pig or cat. But most of all it was inspired by the rabbit or kratai and its prominent front teeth and therefore generally referred to as kratai khut maphrao in Thai, even if it adorns the head of other animals.
The manual graters, however, are being increasingly replaced by electric ones that save time and energy, and may even completely disappear from our kitchens in time which would be a great loss to the purists as far as Thai cooking is concerned.
This contraption is just one of many hundreds of objects exhibited at the museum. A few metres away is a collection of animal and insect traps. Different forms of devices created to trap animals big or small show us how familiar the villagers were with their prey.
The traps are animal-specific, born out of knowledge about an animal's natural instincts and habit, and using it to plot its downfall. So, snakes are enmeshed in a lattice work of bamboo strips, a tick-eating bird lands onto a buffalo's back and gets snared by its feet, or a mischievous monkey puts a hand into a pot in search of goodies only to find it stuck there for good.
The other highlight is krua fai traditional kitchen equipped with tao fun, a firewood fuelled stove, which was the heart of all kitchens before the arrival of gas and electricity. Another attraction is a replica of the balcony you see in a Thai-style house, covered with elephant-grass roof and split-bamboo walls called phalai.
Ja Thawee's dedication to preserve these artefacts and keep old traditions alive is evident in every corner of the museum. A repository of local ways and ancient wisdom, the museum was cited at Thailand Tourism Awards in 1998 as the Best Conservation and Preservation Organisation in the country.
With modern society driven by materialism, the museum will hopefully have a sobering effect, reminding us of our roots and how local ingenuity can help us deal with some of the problems we face today.
Ja Thawee Folk Museum opens from 8:30am to 4:30pm everyday, except Monday. Address: 26/43 Wisutkasat Road, Muang district, Phitsanulok 65000; tel: 055-212-749 and 055-258-715.
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