When Rama I established his capital on the east bank of the Chao Phraya in 1782, he built the palace and its chapel around a single image. The Emerald Buddha is a seated figure some sixty six centimetres high, carved from green jade rather than emerald, whose recorded history begins in the fifteenth century at Chiang Rai and runs through Lanna and then through more than two centuries in Laos before it was brought back as war booty. Possession of it has repeatedly accompanied claims to legitimate rule in the region.
Wat Phra Kaew, the temple that houses it, stands inside the palace walls and has no resident monks, which makes it a royal chapel rather than a monastery. Three times a year, at the changes of the hot, rainy and cool seasons, the king personally changes the image's costume, an act performed by the monarch alone and understood as part of what a Thai king is for. The cloister walls carry a painted version of the Ramakien, the Thai telling of the Ramayana, which sets a Hindu epic around a Buddhist shrine without anyone finding this contradictory.
The relationship works both ways. Thai kingship draws legitimacy from its patronage of the sangha, and the sangha is organised under a Supreme Patriarch appointed by the king, with a governing council and a state department of religious affairs. Bangkok is therefore the administrative centre of Thai Buddhism as well as its largest concentration of temples.