Wat Traimit Withayaram

Wat Traimit holds the world’s largest solid-gold Buddha image — 5.5 tonnes of it, sitting in a marble hall on the edge of Bangkok’s Chinatown. Entry to the hall is 40 THB for foreign visitors (free for Thai nationals), open daily 08:00-17:00.

For nearly two centuries, nobody knew what the statue actually was. Cast in the Sukhothai style and covered floor to crown in plaster and coloured glass — likely to hide its value from Burmese forces before the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767 — it sat in obscurity as an unremarkable stucco Buddha, moved between temples and eventually parked under a corrugated tin roof at Wat Traimit (then called Wat Sam Chin, after the three Chinese merchants who funded its upkeep). The truth surfaced on 25 May 1955, when a crane lifting the statue into a new hall snapped its cables and dropped it. The plaster cracked open on impact, and workers found gold underneath. The image — Phra Phuttha Maha Suwanna Patimakon, known locally as Luang Pho Thong Kham — turned out to be cast in ten interlocking sections that could be assembled and disassembled, a design detail that likely made the original disguise possible in the first place.

The gold Buddha now sits inside a four-storey marble mondop purpose-built to display it, completed in 2010. The ground floor houses the Golden Buddha itself; the upper levels hold the Yaowarat Chinatown Heritage Center, a separate 100 THB museum covering the history of Bangkok’s Chinese community and the temple’s own backstory, including a replica of the original stucco shell the statue wore for two centuries.

Insider Tip: Arrive right at 08:00 opening — the hall is small, and by mid-morning tour groups from the Chao Phraya river piers fill it shoulder to shoulder for photos.

Watch out: As with most Bangkok temples, cover shoulders and knees before entering, and remove shoes at the door. Sarongs are sometimes available at the entrance for anyone underdressed.

Wat Traimit sits a five-minute walk from Hua Lamphong station and the edge of Yaowarat, Bangkok’s Chinatown — easy to fold into the same outing as Wat Mangkon Kamalawat, Chinatown’s main working temple, or a wander down Yaowarat Road itself for the food stalls that come alive after dark.