A few days later commence the Taut Katin ceremonies, or the annual visitation of the kings to the sixty or seventy royal temples to perform their devotions and make offerings to the priests. This is one of the great events of the year—a festival season with the people. The temples near the palace within the city-walls are first visited. His Majesty, seated on an elegant golden chair of state sparkling with gems, is borne on men’s shoulders and followed by princes and nobles in costly carriages and by other vehicles loaded with presents of various kinds. Then for some twelve days he, with all his princes, ministers of state and high nobles, makes a business of visiting daily some three or four of the temples that are accessible only by water, and after this the second king makes his visits. The river presents a very animated appearance as the boat-processions pass escorting His Majesty. It is filled with barges, slender and graceful in their proportions, each propelled by from forty to eighty natives, who fill the air with their wild outcries as they simultaneously dip their long paddles into the water and then raise them high into the air. First, two by two, will be a score of canoe-like vessels, each perhaps fifty feet long, with a bright crimson awning over the centre and some sixty or seventy men in red uniform; then boats with music preceding the stately barge that conveys His Majesty. This is perhaps one hundred and twenty feet long, besides the gilded stern, which curves gracefully up some fifteen or twenty feet from the water. From prow and stern hang two graceful plumes of long white horse-hair, and between them a small apron-like banner floats in the breeze. In the centre of the boat reclines His Majesty on an elevated cushioned platform, in a pavilion with an arching roof from which hang curtains of crimson-and-gold cloth. The barge is propelled by eighty men with long gilded paddles. Following the king will be a crowd of similar elegant boats with the princes and nobles. These boats hover near in clusters of sevens or fives or threes, and after them others, till there is a train of eighty or a hundred boats, containing perhaps four thousand men. All this is a splendid sight, but the Christian beholder is pained by the thought that the display is to do honor to a false religion and a false god.
CARRYING THE KING TO THE TEMPLE.
While the kings are thus engaged the common people in city and country are visiting their favorite temples and priests. Families unite, and groups of boats may be seen filled with young men and maidens in their gayest attire, while the air resounds with Siamese instrumental music and the merry shouts of the boatmen as they convey their presents of priests’ robes, fruit and flowers to the temple.
The visitation of the temples over, the Taut Katin ceremonies wind up with a repetition for three evenings of fireworks much the same as already described.
Superstition and the worship of idols enter not only into the holidays of the Siamese, but into everything they do. “They praise the gods of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand their breath is, and whose are all their ways, they have not glorified;” “Happy is that people whose God is the Lord.”
CHAPTER XIII.
VISIT TO A GAMBLING ESTABLISHMENT.
I have just now returned from exploring a celebrated gambling establishment near my house. It is a floating house occupied by a Chinaman. Chinamen are the master-gamblers of Siam.