What are these?

Following are a series of photographs of objects found everywhere on the palace grounds, in various temples, all over the city. What are they? Look at them and see below for the answer. PS there are literally thousands of them all over the place.









































You will notice that these are Chinese characters carved primarily in some kind of sand stone- not a very hard stone.












Notice too that they are kind of elaborate carvings.














These are in fact ship's ballast!

When Thai sailors first opened up routes to China and began an intense trade with them, they would sail their ships fully laden to China, and sometimes sailed back less full than they went. All of these ships did not sail well if they were too buoyant and hence needed to manage their waterline buoyancy with ballast. The same was true of all the older sailing ships in the rest of the world too.

The only difference here is that the Chinese, instead of providing them sand, or bricks, or plain old rocks to use as ballast, gave them these stone carvings- since they were only student examples, prototypes, etc etc and were starting to pile up in the courtyards!!

The Thai traders were only too happy to have something as ballast they didn't have to pay for and it was a good deal all around- until they got home. Well what should they do with these statues? They had no need for ballast on the outbound trips and now these statues were starting to pile up in Thailand. ( Chinese had a good laugh on that one!)

In a grand gesture of support and love they donated these statues to the King, who used them to decorate damn near everything in the city, and to this day there is probably a storehouse full of these statues lying around some where waiting to be sprung on the next state park!