On Henri Dunant Road in central Bangkok, one of the city's most distinctive buildings doesn't look like a university facility at all. The Maha Vajiravudh Building — better known as the Devalai, Thai for a heavenly palace — resembles a temple, and it has been a fixture of Chulalongkorn University for generations. It first housed both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Science, then became the university's central library, reportedly holding more than 500,000 books. Now, as the Devalai prepares for yet another transformation, an exhibition called "Times Within Devalai" is pausing to take stock.
Running until November 15 across three floors, the show blends archival documents, photographs and rare publications with personal recollections — deliberately organised around memory and unexpected connections rather than a tidy timeline. The first floor uses projection mapping (on until November 9) to trace the building's origins, the second explores personal memories, and a section on the library's heritage sits in the auditorium. Upstairs, a crowdsourcing display asks visitors to supply their own stories for unexplained photographs.
Some of the discoveries reach well beyond the campus. Among the archives, curators found a report documenting how a Chulalongkorn arts professor pushed students to adopt "sawasdee" as a greeting — a word he compared to a love potion. That campus habit eventually became Thailand's everyday hello, and in 1977 it even travelled to space on Nasa's Voyager Golden Record. The exhibition also flags a fresh archival puzzle: a signature on the building's architectural plan appears to read Mario Ceradini, an Italian architect, rather than the long-credited Dohring — potentially rewriting the building's authorship.
There's a contemporary hook too: the Devalai appears as a gym in Pokémon Go, giving the century-old landmark a second life among younger visitors. And the show doesn't dodge the obvious question — why keep a physical library in the digital age? Faculty members argue that browsing shelves still surfaces books you'd never find through a search bar, and that shared reading spaces matter beyond pure information access.
For travellers, this is a good excuse to look beyond Bangkok's temples and malls. Chulalongkorn University's campus is easy to reach via the BTS (National Stadium or Siam stations), and a free exhibition on Thai intellectual history — including the origin story of the greeting you'll use everywhere in Thailand — makes for a rewarding hour or two. Alumni and locals get a farewell-style reflection on a beloved building; visitors get an unusually intimate primer on how a single campus shaped modern Thai culture. Free entry, air-conditioning, and one of the city's more photogenic facades: not a bad detour.
Story via Bangkok Post Life.
