History and Provenance

The traditional history, set down in the northern Thai chronicle known as the Ratanapanna or Jinakalamali tradition, has the image fashioned in India by a sage or a god, carried to Sri Lanka for safekeeping, and then dispatched toward Cambodia, from which it entered the world of the Thai and Lao kingdoms. Documented history begins in 1434, when a lightning strike cracked open a stupa at Chiang Rai and exposed a plain stucco image; as the covering flaked away it revealed the green-stone Buddha hidden inside, a common medieval practice for protecting precious images.

From Chiang Rai the Emerald Buddha travelled the courts of the north, Lampang, then Chiang Mai, the Lan Na capital. In the mid-sixteenth century the Lao king Setthathirath, who had ruled Lan Na, took it to Luang Prabang and later to Vientiane, where it stayed for more than two hundred years. In 1779 the Thai general Chao Phraya Chakri captured Vientiane and carried the image back to Thonburi; when he became King Rama I and founded Bangkok, he enshrined it in the newly built Wat Phra Kaew in 1784. It has remained there as the palladium of the Chakri dynasty and of the Thai nation ever since.