There are two temples here. One on each side of the road with the entrance to both directly opposite each other. Wat Chaiya Mangalaram or the Reclining Buddha Thai Temple is a glorious Thai temple of gold and bright colours and spires and dragons devoted to Buddha. The second is the Dharmikarama Burmese Temple a less colourful but nonetheless impressive house of reverence. Entry is free to both and once inside you are treated to some magnificent and glorious statues and shrines. I have added pictures of both into one gallery here for ease of posting and viewing. The first 24 pictures are of the Burmese Temple. The remainder are of the Thai Temple.
Shane and I were at Komtar with a free afternoon when I suggested we hop on the bus to go to Wat Chaiya Mangalaram Temple at Pulau Tikus. This is just behind where we stayed way back in May when we started our 2016 adventure along with Ian, Julie, Helen & Col. It is a wonder that we hadn’t been here before now. When we got off the bus the Temples are just there on the corner. Easy peasy!
DBT (you didn’t expect me to retype these names over and over again did you?) was the first Burmese monastery-temple in Malaysia, built in 1803. The temple is filled with striking features of a rich past. It provides historical evidence of Burmese residence in Penang as well as the retreat for Buddhist devotees. You can see the residences for these devotees in several pictures. The detail in the ornate decorations is awesome and would require someone with immense patience to complete. For example in the 9th picture there are two timber screen arches over the doors. These are each made of 1 single piece of timber, hand carved. On these grounds are also some beautiful murals, fountains and even a shrine in a large pond that had some huge fish over a meter long in it. A couple of photos on and you can notice the mass of individual statues mounted on the walls (behind the heads of two goddess’) Each of these has the name of a family on it. Not sure if they are memorials or donors names. There are thousands of them.
The WCMT Temple was built in 1845 and houses a 33 meter long statue of a sleeping Buddha which represents the Buddha at his time of death. Behind the statue there are hundreds of recesses holding urns with the ashes of devotees over the years. The 5 acres of land on which the WCMT is built was apparently given to Penang’s Thai community by Queen Victoria. Behind the temple is a small Thai village and cemetery. Besides the Sleeping Buddha there are dragons and pagodas and a huge tower of gold about 11 storeys high. It is interesting to see that the statues, the dragons and even the window frames are decorated with a mosaic of coloured mirrors making them very striking. The gold paint in this temple is also a bold gloss paint while in the DBT it’s a matt gold paint.
Naturally there are shops within each temple grounds selling souvenirs and religious artifacts.
That’s about it for this blog post. I hope you have been enjoying our travels. Shane & I leave beautiful Penang next week for Bali. We’ll have Xmas there and meet up with Adrian, Lin and our gorgeous granddaughter Joy who we’ve missed so much. We then have tickets home to Townsville for the 10th of February.
So watch for new blog posts as it ain’t all over yet folks!
Cheers
Garry & Shane.