The past gets room to grow
The hi-tech National Artefacts Storage facility will house five millennia of our history
Thailand's National Artefacts Storage facility, set to open in two years, will be fine-tuned with high technology to make it an archaeological study centre for all of Southeast Asia.
The Culture Ministry recently approved a Bt491.5-million budget for erecting the world-class storehouse in Pathum Thani’s Klong Luang district. The four-storey structure will shelter more than 200,000 cultural relics over 30,000 square metres, protected by hi-tech humidity controls, handprint scanners and a fire-fighting system of the type found in the finest museums.
“When the storage facility opens its doors in 2018 it will be a learning centre for archaeologists and museologists from across Southeast Asia,” says Anan Chuchote, director general of the ministry’s Fine Arts Department.
“The new building will be a modern ‘visible storage and study collection’ centre for both academics and the general public to learn more about the region’s history and heritage.”
Construction is underway on the facility, at which artefacts will be kept in separate rooms according to material – stone, metal, paper, textiles, ceramic or leather. Another storeroom will hold the more than 3,500 pieces that the department has seized from smugglers in recent years, better enabling the investigation of criminal networks. A large hall will be equipped for exhibitions.
Secure windows allowing in natural light to save energy without damaging the collection are part of the mainly concrete facility’s “contemporary Thai” design. Heavier artefacts will be displayed on the ground floor, lighter items on the upper levels. Scholars and casual visitors alike will be able to locate specific items through computer indexing.
Anan and his team have brushed up on their museum planning and management knowledge with the help of experts in Japan and Singapore. They learned about preserving archives at the Kyushu National Museum near Fukuoka, Japan, the first new national museum built in that country in more than a century and the first to focus on history over art.
They also toured the Osaka National Museum, and in Singapore visited the new Bt13.7-billion National Gallery, one of the biggest museums in Southeast Asia.
For more than a decade the Fine Arts Department has been moving its artefacts collection from |the National Museum near Sanam Luang to temporary facilities |on Pathum Thani’s Klong 5. The Bangkok centre has had 60,000 pieces dating as far back 5,000 years squeezed into 8,000 square metres.
The new storehouse will be part of a 500-rai government compound that is already home to the Kanchanapisek National Museum and the Golden Jubilee Museum.
“We’ve always had to lock |the doors at our storage facilities to the general public for security seasons,” Anan says, “but when this building is finished in 2018, we’ll have 60,000 artefacts on display in a modern exhibition format and accessible databases. Then, in the second phase, another 20,000 artefacts now jammed into our museums around Central Region will be transferred there.”
To date the public has only had occasional, partial glimpses of what’s in storage through exhibitions at department-run museums – chiefly the National Museum in Bangkok – at which the display items were alternated.
In 2014 Culture Ministry Permanent Secretary Apinan Poshayananda organised the critically acclaimed show “Thai Charisma: Heritage + Creative Power” at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, where important Buddha statues and Tripitaka artefacts were set out alongside contemporary art.
In November that year more than 500 artefacts smuggled out of Thailand in the 1970s were repatriated after being identified at a museum in Santa Ana, California, following a four-year undercover investigation. Most originated from the five-millennia-old Ban Chiang civilisation, at what is now a Unesco World Heritage site in Udon Thani.
Many of those items went on |public view at the Kanjanapisek National Museum in Pathum Thani early in 2015, in an exhibition titled “Looted Art Returns to the Motherland:Thai Artefacts from the United States”. They included pottery, tools and ornaments of earthenware, bronze, stone, glass and animal bones, in some cases believed to be in use as early as 1500 BC.
