Wat Traimit, Bangkok's Temple of the Golden Buddha, owes its fame to an accident.

The centrepiece is a solid gold Buddha weighing 5.5 tonnes, cast somewhere between 1200 and 1700 and kept in Ayutthaya, Siam's capital. As Burmese armies closed in, someone covered it in plaster to disguise its value. When they sacked Ayutthaya in 1767, everyone who knew the secret was killed, captured or scattered, and the statue was forgotten.

Rama I later had it relocated to Bangkok, where it sat ignored in a minor temple for decades. In 1955, workers moving it dropped it. The plaster cracked, and the gold was revealed for the first time in nearly two centuries.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours use Wat Traimit to anchor a walk through Chinatown, connecting the statue's concealment to the fall of Ayutthaya, the founding of Bangkok and the Chinese community Rama I displaced to build his new capital.