Wat Mahathat was one of Ayutthaya's most important royal temples, home to a prang, a Khmer-style tower said to have enshrined relics of the Buddha, and it suffered heavy damage during the Burmese sack of the city in 1767, when the temple's many Buddha images were deliberately damaged or beheaded along with most of the capital's other religious monuments. Among the statues left behind was one whose stone head, separated from its body at some point during or after the destruction, came to rest at the base of a banyan tree growing on the temple grounds, and over the following decades and centuries the tree's roots grew slowly around the fallen head, gradually enclosing it until stone and living root appear, in modern photographs, almost fused into a single object.
The image has become one of the most widely reproduced photographs of Ayutthaya, drawing visitors specifically to see it and generating a small informal etiquette around the site, since local custom and site management ask visitors to crouch rather than stand while photographing the head, so that no one's own head appears positioned above the Buddha's, a mark of respect consistent with wider Thai Buddhist practice around images of the Buddha generally. Unlike most of the ruined city's hundreds of other broken statues, which remain scattered fragments among fallen brick and stone, the tree-held head has taken on an afterlife of its own as a genuinely recognized devotional and photographic site, an accident of decay and slow-growing roots that visitors now approach with the same care due an intact and actively venerated image.