Ban Chang Nak

Baan Jang Nak — “the house of many elephants” in northern Thai — is the home and workshop of woodcarver Petch Viriya, in the village of Buak Khang in San Kamphaeng district, about 30 minutes east of central Chiang Mai. Petch opened the workshop in 1985; the name itself came three years later, when the Thai comic artist Prayoon Chanyavong visited and coined it. Entry is free, and the compound now holds hundreds of carved elephants, from palm-sized figures to life-size bulls, each worked in remarkable anatomical detail.

Wandering the rooms turns up elephants in every pose — trumpeting, kneeling, locking tusks — carved from solid blocks of wood and finished by hand. Other animals and figures appear among them, but the elephants are the collection’s heart and the reason carvers and collectors seek the place out. Teak grew harder to source over the decades, so the workshop increasingly turned to ironwood: a notoriously tough material to carve, but one that yields deeper natural colour once finished. On a typical day you can watch chisels at work, the floor scattered with fragrant shavings, and talk to the artisans about how a piece takes shape.

Insider Tip: Weekday mornings are quietest, and that’s when you’re most likely to catch carvers actually working rather than the shop between commissions — ask before photographing them up close.

Unlike the busy shopfronts along the main San Kamphaeng craft road, Baan Jang Nak keeps the calm of a private studio. There’s no hard sell; visitors are free to look slowly, photograph the finished work, and ask questions about technique. For anyone interested in northern Thai woodcarving, it’s one of the more rewarding stops in the area precisely because it still functions as a working studio rather than a tour-bus gift shop.

The workshop pairs naturally with the rest of the San Kamphaeng craft district — the Bo Sang umbrella village a short drive away, and the San Kamphaeng hot springs if you want to close the day with a soak. Watch out: parking near the workshop is limited to the roadside outside its gate, so arrive early on weekends when the craft road gets busy with day-trip traffic from Chiang Mai.