Thai cave is set to be a museum
A CAVE complex in Mae Sai, Thailand, where 12 schoolboys and their soccer coach were trapped for more than two weeks before they were safely brought out, will be turned into a museum to showcase the rescue, the head of the operation said yesterday.
Two British divers found the 12 boys and their coach in a cavern in the flooded Tham Luang cave system in the northern province of Chiang Rai on Monday last week, nine days after they went missing during an excursion.
They were all brought to safety following a mission fraught with obstacles, which ended late on Tuesday. A Thai rescue diver died on Friday, highlighting the dangers.
“This area will become a living museum to show how the operation unfolded,” said the head of the rescue mission, Narongsak Osottanakorn.
“An interactive database will be set up,” he added. “It will become another major attraction for Thailand.”
Thai officials say the fate of the boys and the multinational rescue has put the cave firmly on the map, and plans are in place to develop it into a tourist destination. But Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said on Tuesday extra precautions would have to be implemented both inside and outside the cave to safeguard tourists.
A guide book describes the relatively unexplored Tham Luang cave as having an “impressive entrance chamber”, leading to a marked path and then a series of chambers and boulders. Villagers say it is known to be prone to flooding and many had urged authorities to post clearer warnings.
Chongklai Worapongsathorn, deputy director-general of the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, said the cave would be closed, but did not say for how long.
FOR the past two weeks, a global audience has been transfixed by the drama of 12 boys and their coach trapped within Tham Luang Nang Non, a cave deep underneath the mountains that form the Thai-Burmese border.
The children – a soccer team who also dabbled in outdoor adventures, with the charming nickname the mu pa (wild pigs) – have been rescued, just as the monsoon begins and the prospect of more rain and more flooding appears.
The name of the cave means, literally “the cave of the reclining lady”, named after a princess who, as the legend goes, committed suicide after she was forbidden to be with her commoner love.
Her body became the mountains, and her genitals, the cave. She is now the ruler – jao mae – of both.
I first visited Nang Non Cave in the rainy season of 2007 with my partner for my book project, Ghosts of the New City.
While attention has focused on the treacherous flooded passages, the trapped children and their heroic rescuers, as I found, there is much more to the story.
The cave is enthralling.
Its entrance is broad, like a cathedral door, and during the rainy season the humidity pours out of it like steam. It looks like the gateway to another world. In some senses, it is.
I started down the rocky descent toward the entrance, drawn in by its vast scale and emptiness.
Only my companion, having heeded better the sign at the entrance forbidding ingress during the rainy season, called me back.
I was right to retreat. As the schoolchildren found out, in the rainy season the water levels at tight spots can rise dramatically, trapping would-be explorers inside.
So in the faces of the trapped children I can see a little of me had I kept going.
But I spent a great deal of time in other caves in the region, interviewing religious attendants and guides about how people understand the power of caves and other sacred sites, and what their role is in northern Thai mythology.
Just south of Nang Non Cave and about an hour north of the city of Chiang Mai, the capital of Thailand’s north, is Chiang Dao peak.
It is an impressive mountain, rising straight up from rice fields.
And, like many such mountains in the region, there is a cave that winds down into its heart.
Local chronicle and oral legend varies. My favourite story has a northern Thai lord – Jao Luang Kham Daeng, the Lord of Burnished Copper – who was tricked into following a beautiful woman into the cave, where he was later devoured by the spirits within.
However, in his death, according to one version, he became its ruler.
In each version, the cave becomes the home of a powerful but sometimes dangerous spirit that keeps the region safe, prosperous and healthy so long as the spirit and the power of the mountain is respected.
It could be inferred that northern Thai caves have little to do with Buddhism. But religion in Thailand, and especially the north, is, as scholars such as Pattana Kitiarsa, Erick White and Justin McDaniel have pointed out, a blend of influences: a belief in the power of particular people and places, a respect for Buddhist teachings and a model of kingly power based on older Hindu traditions in the region.
The caves of northern Thailand are places where these religious traditions blend – there are shrines to the Buddha, Hindu hermits and the spirit lords of the mountain, all in the same space.
These, as some might expect, are not three separate traditions.
They blend together, especially so in cave legends.
For instance, the caves in Sri Lanna National Park, in-between Chiang Dao and Nang Non caves, are rumoured to be the home of two princesses who hid after their kingdom was destroyed.
They sought protection in a cave, and the Buddha, hearing their pleas, appointed a monstrous ghost to keep them safe – a ghost that persists, according to legend, today.
Thus, kingship, Buddhism and spirits all combine in one story.
Caves are liminal spaces – inbetween spaces. They are openings to another world, shrouded in darkness, difficult to access and, as the story of the 12 boys shows, often hostile to humans.
And in them are spirits. In Thailand, these nature spirits are often women and, as counterparts to the figures of Buddhist monks, offer their followers something that Buddhism cannot: assistance with love, money and other things of this world with which monks do not concern themselves.
At the same time, they pose a potential danger if slighted.
As such, Thailand’s sacred caves are full of power – and danger.
They often have yearly rituals to ensure that the spirits provide for the village in the future.
In many, the spirits acquire a bit of a ferocious aspect. After all, they are the rulers of an inhospitable natural world that must be tamed before it can be of use to humans.
This acknowledgement of nature’s danger is a drama played out in rituals across the region, a number of which I attended.
In Chiang Mai, each year the people hold a tradition wherein two mountain spirits possess two human mediums, who in turn devour a raw buffalo and drink its blood before surrendering to the Buddha and agreeing to help the city with cool breezes and clean water.
The story of the 12 trapped boys, then, can be read at multiple levels.
For some, it is a story of the heroism of rescue workers against an inhospitable environment.
For others, it emphasises the Buddhist piety of the team’s coach and the power of Buddhist prayers over the spirits of the mountain.
In my view, such ideas of danger and power were always a part of the liminal spaces of mountain caves.
The stories of the spirit lords under the Earth reflect both human fascination and human fears. – The Conversation
Johnson is an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University.