Suphanburi is Epic

When I’m on the road I like buying the newspaper for some local color—the more local, the more colorful. Thailand offers no shortage of rag sheets, tabloids, and tales of romance or true crime. My reading vocabulary, though, still has a ways to go before all that mystery and drama is accessible to me.

Instead I settle for the epics, stories that have been handed down for long enough that they’ve attracted the attention of a translator. Generally they contain material that’s not so different from the tabloids—it’s just older and thus that much more respectable. The light covering of dust on these epics obscures their naughty bits.

A story called Khun Chang Khun Phaen came my way. It interested me enough that I traced it to its source. Suphanburi is a province not far out of Bangkok, an easy day trip. Its other claim to fame, as far as I could gather, is a space needle-like thing in the center of the provincial capital, built when a favorite-son prime minister was in power, as a sort of monument to himself. On the outskirts of town sits a temple that has weathered several centuries since it was the center of the epic in question.

It was here that a novice monk called Phaen first laid eyes on a beautiful maiden named Wanthong who had come to the temple with offerings of one kind or another. Strictly speaking, if he’d been any kind of monk at all, he’d have kept his eyes lowered. But of course if he had, we wouldn’t have much of an epic.

We’re also told early on that Phaen wasn’t the only one interested in this young beauty. The rival, a layman, had also shown up at the temple on a dual errand. Partly he hoped to make merit, like Wanthong did, but mostly he wanted to show off his wealth yet again (as if the town needed to be reminded), this time in hopes that it would win the hand of Wanthong.

So with that love triangle set up in Chapter 1, we know we’re in for several nights of, say, romance and true crime.

What catches the Westerner off guard is just how bawdy the romance can get. Over the course of the tale we also learn a good deal about Buddhism, Thai geography, supernatural beliefs, and the complex role of women in Thailand.

It’s nice to study this tale on site because recently the temple has commissioned a series of gorgeous painted scenes. The nearly two dozen intricate renditions contain enough detail so that viewers will always find something from the many-chaptered story that they haven’t seen before, even after multiple visits. I spent about two hours. Despite some helpful bilingual captions, I just scratched the surface. No doubt I’ll be back.