"The Golden Home of Buddha's Bones"
The legend of how this temple came to be is a fun story, but like many of the legends from long ago, parts of it seem pretty hard for me to believe.
Here's how Wikipedia tells it... "According to legend, a monk named Sumanathera from the Sukhothai Kingdom had a dream. In this vision he was told to go to Pang Cha and look for a relic. Sumanathera ventured to Pang Cha and found a bone. Many claim it was Gautama Buddha's shoulder bone. The relic displayed magical powers: it glowed, it was able to vanish, it could move and replicate itself. Sumanathera took the relic to King Dhammaraja, who ruled Sukhothai. The eager Dhammaraja made offerings and hosted a ceremony when Sumanathera arrived. However, the relic displayed no abnormal characteristics, and the king, doubtful of the relic's authenticity, told Sumanathera to keep it.
King Nu Naone of Lan Na heard of the relic and bade the monk to bring it to him. In 1368, with Dharmmaraja's permission, Sumanathera took the relic to what is now Lamphun, in northern Thailand. Once there, the relic broke into two pieces. The smaller piece was enshrined at a temple in Suandok. The other piece was placed by the king on the back of a white elephant which was released into the jungle. The elephant is said to have climbed up Doi Suthep, at that time called Doi Aoy Chang (Sugar Elephant Mountain), stopped, trumpeted three times, then dropped dead. This was interpreted as an omen. King Nu Naone immediately ordered the construction of a temple at the site." -Wikipedia
This golden chedi is where the alleged piece of Buddha's shoulder bone is stored, among other relics, like the ashes or bones of other important people.
It was very crowded here, and tough to get a shot of the chedi without someone standing in from of it, so I found a relatively safe pace to set up my tripod (next to a wall) and I shot a timelapse. That way I could make a time stack (with the mean stack mode in photoshop) to "erase" all the people, only this place was so crowded that there's still some ghostly remnants of them.
For this image, I stacked 122 photos using the mean stack mode in photoshop. Here's a quick and easy Photoshop tutorial of the process I use to make time stacks. https://youtu.be/oTfp47jTzWc
