Udon Thani TimeWat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew
I am surprised that I have not heard of this temple before, since I tend to pay attention to Thailand-related items of interest ever since first going there in January, 2003.
But I was ignorant of this temple until receiving a PowerPoint attachment in an E-mail this week that was featuring the very unusual structure.
I located an article in the Telegraph.co.uk dated February 18, 2009, that featured the temple.
Buddhist temple built out of one million beer bottles
A temple has been built by monks in northeast Thailand who used over a million recycled beer bottles to make the walls and roof.
Buddhist monks have recycled over one million used bottles to build their temple in Khun Han, Thailand near the Cambodian border Photo: BRONEK KAMINSKI/BARCROFT MEDIA
Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew, also known as Wat Lan Kuad or ‘the Temple of a Million Bottles’, is in Sisaket province near the Cambodian border, 400 miles from the capital Bangkok.
The Buddhist monks began collecting bottles in 1984 and they collected so many that they decided to use them as a building material.
They encouraged the local authorities to send them more and they have now created a complex of around 20 buildings using the beer bottles, comprising the main temple over a lake, crematorium, prayer rooms, a hall, water tower, tourist bathrooms and several small bungalows raised off the ground which serve as monks quarters.
The bottles do not lose their colour, provide good lighting and are easy to clean, the men say.
A concrete core is used to strengthen the building and the green bottles are Heineken and the brown ones are the Thai beer Chang.
The monks are so eco-friendly that the mosaics of Buddha are created with recycled beer bottle caps.
Altogether there are about 1.5 million recycled bottles in the temple, and the monks at the temple are intending to reuse even more.
Abbot San Kataboonyo said: “The more bottles we get, the more buildings we make.”
The beer bottle temple is now on an approved list of eco-friendly sight-seeing tours in southeast Asia.
This is the PowerPoint attachment that had been sent to me.
- Wat Lan Kuad: Million Bottle Temple
Interestingly, one of the temple monks has been featured in a video with a bit of an interview.
ecoideasnet | April 19, 2010
http://eco-ideas.net/story/id/184
http://twitter.com/ecoideasnet
Buddhist monks from Thailand’s Sisaket province took matters into their own hands and collected a million bottles to build the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple.
The Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple, about 600 km (370 miles) northeast of Bangkok, is better known as “Wat Lan Kuad” or “Temple of Million Bottles”. People keep donating bottles to build other buildings such as a pagoda, ceremony hall and toilets. With millions of bottles, the big pavilion was built in two years.
Amazing Thailand, indeed!
Related articles
- Russian Woman Builds House of 5,000 Glass Bottles (treehugger.com)
- 6 Absolutely Heavenly Green Houses of Worship (inhabitat.com)
Tags: Bangkok, Beer bottle, Buddhism, List of Buddhist temples, thailand, Wat
