Intakin Festival

Posted by Northerner on May 20th, 2011 filed in Festival

Intakin is an annual festival held at Chedi Luang Temple in Chiang Mai’s old city quarter. The event takes place in late May or early June and lasts for seven days and nights. Intakin is the name of Chiang Mai’s historic city pillar. The symbolic relic is housed in a small shrine at the temple, which legend says is also the home of the guardian spirit that ensures the city does not suffer misfortune.

City residents visit Chedi Luang Temple during the festival to pay their respects as well as offer donations and presents to ensure the spiritual health and happiness of their hometown. Festival participants pour scented jasmine water on Buddha effigies in the temple grounds, and place lighted candles and joss-sticks in bowls in strategic places.

The pouring of the water is meant to invoke propitious rains for the coming monsoon and rice harvests. Just inside the temple walls off Phrapokklao Road, there are a series of receptacles where visitors drop in small coins, 25 and 50 satang denominations are said to be extremely lucky, to improve their own personal fortunes.

City pillars are a feature of many old Thai provincial capitals and are called Sao Lak Mueang. They were mostly enshrined in pagodas and signified the central power of the city over the surrounding region.