Chiang Rai - The Border Town That Found its Colours
The highway north from Chiang Mai unspools like magnetic tape through rice fields and military checkpoints. You start to feel like you’re approaching the end of the road here, the end of “safe civilisation”. Here, Thailand bleeds into Laos and Myanmar with nothing more dramatic than a muddy bend of river, but every map-maker since colonial times has circled the spot in red: the Golden Triangle.
Once, mule caravans a mile long carried raw opium down these slopes, KMT soldiers guarding the loads in exchange for a cut, and CIA supply planes banked low over the hills “to fight Communism” and accidentally financed a narcotics super-highway in the process. At its peak in the 90s, seventy percent of the heroin on New York streets could be traced back to these valleys.
Today the narcotic of choice is meth by the ton, lashed to the backs of smugglers who still sprint the same goat paths after nightfall. UN reports say production in the Triangle has hit record levels since Myanmar’s 2021 coup cracked its borders wide open. It is the Wild West, but with better Wi-Fi: encrypted phones, crypto laundering, and Chinese warlords overseeing it all.
Yet drive an hour south and you’ll find guesthouses painted salmon-pink, backpackers renting scooters, and monks sweeping leaves as if no underworld ever passed through. Chiang Rai is an anomaly, an ordinary small border town that is at complete odds to its environment.
It starts to sink in at dawn, at first light the White Temple (Wat Rong Khun) turns all eyes. A bone white castle of mirror chips and stucco.
It began in 1997 when local painter Chalermchai Kositpipat sold everything bar his conviction and started pouring baht into a nine-building fever dream he swears won’t be finished until 2070. This Thai Sagrada Familia is intentionally unfinished, and he’s trained dozens of apprentices to continue after his morality. He caps outside donations to keep the vision unsullied - he’d rather finish slowly and purely than quickly with strings attached.
Step onto his bridge and you cross a moat of grasping hands, a silent scream of souls begging for another go in life. Inside, comic-book heroes share wall space with nuclear mushroom clouds; Chalermchai’s moral universe is big enough for both Spider-Man and the Buddha. The place is equal parts sermon, fun-house, and warning sign - however cameras are heavily restricted in certain places.
Ten kilometers away, the Blue Temple (Wat Rong Suea Ten) - sits like the yin to the yang. Built by Phuttha Kabkaew, one of Chalermchai’s many apprentices, it finished in one uninterrupted surge in 2016. Visitors drift through, cameras unpoliced. Kabkaew wants the temple seen, shared, lived in. If the white temple is the sterile sacred hall, the blue temple is a religious nightclub, with LED back-lighting until twilight turns the whole sanctuary into a breathing lantern.
Chalermchai’s manifesto is relentless motion: keep building, never let the concrete of belief fully set. Kabkaew counters with completion - one perfect pour, delivered to the public on time. One rejects big donors, the other leans on community sweat equity.
Their dialogue sprawls beyond temple walls. In 2023 UNESCO dubbed Chiang Rai a Creative City of Design, citing the constellation of artist-run spaces these two helped ignite. Suddenly a sleepy river town had a new industry, art tourism.
But why here, of all places?
Cheap land helped - Chalermchai could afford six acres of blank canvas for his white masterpiece. Hungry young artisans followed, trading Bangkok’s cramped galleries for rice-paddy studios. Border-zone fluidity coloured the palette - Tai Lue weavers, Yunnan traders, Akha silver-smiths.
So the White Temple keeps growing, the Blue Temple keeps collecting starlight, and buses keep emptying backpackers into parking lots that smell of incense and hot diesel. And that, more than any postcard sheen, is why these temples matter. In a corner of Thailand previously known for morning fog and the drugs trade, two artists opened rival doors to a different future for Chiang Rai.
