Museum of World Insects and Natural Wonders

One of  the beauties of Chiang Mai is a gem of a private museum, owing more to the tradition of the “Cabinets of Wonder” (click) of the Age of Exploration than to the desiccated and fraying diorama that pass for natural history in many parts of the globe.  Called “quirky” by more than one guidebook, and promising bugs and interesting pieces of wood, it drew us in on our second day here, after the requisite wandering through wat after dusty, gilded wat.

We stood at the fence, smiling at the little old man inside.  A sign promised that the museum never closed, even on holidays, but the gate was shut.  I waved.  “If you want to come in, you have to ring my high-tech bell!”  he shouted, merrily pointing to a fishing line running across the length of the porch and down to an enormous clump of flipflops and rags near my waist.  I tugged a sandal, releasing a clunky din of chimes inside.  “Do you like my high-tech bell?” he cackled, coming to open the gate.  “It’s high technology!”  He was all grins and glasses and had more energy than the two of us put together, whose combined years equalled a decade fewer than his own.  We beamed at him, feeling welcome and overwhelmed and laughing at his eccentric little contraption, already sure we had come to the right place.  He pointed out in detail each of the chimes that had rung: a wooden horse bell from an old opium route; an elephant bell from a laborer; a cow bell; a bell to bring the rain…

Stepping inside the museum is like walking into a children’s book, or a sleepwalker’s dream: a two-storey ramble through the closets and memories of natural history.  The curator, Dr. Rampa Rattanarithikul, is a former Smithsonian researcher, a lifelong lover of mosquitoes, a malaria expert, a budding artist, and a worshipper and collector of all things that flutter, walk, erode, twist, leaf or grow.  Hornet’s nests the length of a human body loom above wind-warped pieces of old wood, and crystalline rocks glow from tiny hidden lamps.  Stones are labelled with jubilant imagination: “Elephant!” or “Pumpkin!!”  Others bear plaques that wax poetic about Mother Nature and begin to urge with the repetitious glee of Dr. Bronner’s soaps, proclaiming the centuries-old universalisms of “all-one.”  In the flyer that serves double as a museum map and ecosophical leaflet, we are reminded to “know God (Nature’s divine force) through nature…everything in nature has inherent use and balances everything – throughout all beings and ecological systems.  God is love and all of creation can live with understanding in the spirit of love, generosity, virtue, sympathy, compassion, and respect towards all of nature.   All things are a manifestation of nature’s divine force…”  A computer monitor is wedged onto a shelf beside a piece of driftwood, a beautifully dried leaf, and a chunk of honeycomb.  A handwritten sign reminds us that “humans can make a computer, but they cannot make a wasp nest.”

Downstairs, one room is dedicated to mosquitoes – all 436 varieties of them, (24 of which were identified and named by the curator himself), and the walls are lined with case after glass case of tiny specimens glued to little strips of paper, which are in turn pinned to display boards mapped with carefully-gummed descriptions of each in Thai and English.  Large signs seek to teach, to create understanding through familiarity.  Only 10 species of mosquitoes carry pathogens that can be harmful to humans, I learned.  Several posters describe the transmission cycles of mosquito-borne diseases: japanese encephalitis, malaria, filaria.  An arrow points from a pig to a mosquito, from the mosquito to a human, from the human back to a mosquito back to a pig, and so on.  Huge grotesque photographs of filaria victims with bizarrely oversized labial parts or hippotitanical leg-flesh or breasts take up one corner, and immediately filled me with the very specific, creeping dread that only medical disorders can bring out in me.  These are quickly and carefully attenuated with gentle, soothing statistics regarding the very unlikely chance of contracting the illness, the treatability of it, and other sane wisdom all thoughtfully given in the sincere belief that education leads to calm.  Small letters from “the Mosquito President” beg whimsically for forgiveness for the “kisses” of his people and asked for peace, illustrated with enormous hairy bugs holding fountain pens.  And on every horizontal surface rests a fascinating jumble of stones, leaves, rubber masks, glass tubes, hats, and every other imaginable small treasure washed aside in the tide of the doctor’s research and wanderings.

Upstairs are thousands of butterflies at rest on cotton matting and held carefully in small frames of glass, along with scorpions, beetles, stickbugs, moths, bats, spiders, things without names I knew, fossilized worms and shark teeth and meteorites and coral, rocks from all of his travels, as well as some sent from enthusiastic former guests of the museum.  There are also hundreds of tiny elephant carvings, each the size of a thumb and made from a different kind of wood so that the range of them spans a rich and earthy spectrum of burnished forest tones.

The gaps in the walls are filled with his art, a hobby only recently adopted, it seems: lurid New Age naturescapes with beatific gems and psychedelic stars and, most interestingly, naked nubile women (some winged, others human), often cradling monstrously large mosquitoes on their laps and breasts.  I really couldn’t have asked for more.

So much of Chiang Mai has been rendered invisible through the veil of tourism with which the local culture both protects and poisons itself.  This museum, on the other hand, was a trip of reality in itself, and a testament to the power of eccentricity to guard the gates of what we keep sincere.  If you are interested in finding out more about the charming doctor and his preservation projects, you can email him at insects_museum@hotmail.com.  The museum website, http://www.museumnature.com, does not seem to be working any longer.

~ by knifemaker on January 15, 2008.