Sao Inthakin (Lak Meaung) Festival, Chiang Mai, June 5~12, 2013

Sawasdee Khrup,

One of Chiang Mai's most important limnal-ritual times begins this week, the "City Pillar" (Lak Meaung) festival, at Wat Chedi Luang. This festival usually occurs in May, but its date is determined by the waning quarter-moon of the sixth month of the old Lanna calendrical system.

"Sao Inthakin" (Indra's Pillar) is the name of Chiang Mai's city pillar.

The pillar, so typical of ancient "sacred geometry" (viz. the omphalos at Delphi, and the presence of many ancient Siva Lingams in various sacred sites around Thailand), was originally at Wat Sadeu Muang, and was moved to Wat Chedi Luang around 1800CE by King Kawila of Lampang ... Chiang Mai had been a de-populated, deserted ruin, with wild tigers roaming its jungle-overgrown former roads, for around twenty years after the Burmese (controlling Chiang Mai and most of Lanna for nearly two-hundred years) finally left in roughly 1780CE.

Today, the pillar is in its own shrine, in a separate cruciform building, closer to the main road than Wat Chedi Luang's primary ubosot, and viharn, and other buildings; it is now encased in a pediment, on top of which is a standing Buddha in the Chiang Mai/Chiang Saen style. A magnificent dipterocarp tree, one of the three planted by King Kawila, is near it, and is reputed to also be a "guardian" of Chiang Mai's existence.

The Inthakin rite, not surpisingly, is supposedly Brahmanic in origin. A very special bronze Phra Buddha Roob (Buddha image), a beautiful example of the classic Chiang Mai / Chiang Saen style, will be ritually "paraded" around the Wat, and then placed in an open-sided outdoor shrine, where any respectful person can come and lustrate the image with water ... this is usually accompanied by the typical offerings of incense, flowers, candles.

As you might expect (but always be delighted by), at the Inthakin festival you will find devotion, and reverence, and Thai people being social, eating great "street" food, and having sanuk Here are four photographs I took of the 2003 Inthakin festival.