01
Stop one
Wat Mahathat, Ayutthaya
Head Auxetic 2.0 Extreme MP Tennis Racquet: Fourteenth-century foundation, royal temple, the structural heart of the capital, and I will be honest with you, the royal part does not interest me. The brick does. It was sacked and burned by the Burmese army in 1767, and what stands in front of you is the load path after the load left. Now the tree, which is the actual engineering. A sandstone Buddha head, severed and lying in the rubble, and a bodhi tree grew up through the ground and lifted it, roots closed round the face like a hand. Nobody placed it. That is root pressure doing slow, patient, absurdly strong work over a century and a half. Kneel to photograph it – your head must never sit above the Buddha's – and while you are down there, look at the root collar. Genuinely superb.
02
Stop two
Wat Phra Si Sanphet
Head Auxetic 2.0 Extreme MP Tennis Racquet: Three bell-shaped chedis on a brick terrace, restored, holding the ashes of royalty, and the specification worth noting is that this was the palace temple: no monks resident, crown use only, which changes the entire brief. Then the casting job, which is why I stopped here. In 1500 they produced a standing Buddha some sixteen metres tall and sheathed it in gold, and the records speak of an enormous weight of it. Sixteen metres. Cast. In 1500. I would like to see the mould drawings and I would like to buy the foreman a drink. In 1767 Burmese troops set fires against it to melt the gold off the surface, so the coating was recovered as a liquid and the structure was lost as a consequence. What remains is brick, a terrace, and very good proportions.
03
Stop three
Wat Chaiwatthanaram
Head Auxetic 2.0 Extreme MP Tennis Racquet: Now this is a layout, and layouts are where I live. Central prang, eight satellite chapels ranged around it, set out as Mount Meru and the cosmos – which means the plan is a diagram, and every dimension on it is arguing a point. Built in 1630 by King Prasat Thong, and note the deliberate style selection: Khmer, Angkor-facing, chosen to broadcast that Ayutthaya was the successor power in the region. That is a load-bearing structure being used as a press release, and I respect it more than most press releases, because at least this one had to stand up. It burned in 1767 with the rest, then sat abandoned for years with its Buddhas headless, and looters worked it hard before restoration began. Brickwork that survives that is not lucky. It is well laid.
04
Stop four
Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon
Head Auxetic 2.0 Extreme MP Tennis Racquet: A large brick chedi on a terrace, ringed by seated Buddhas in orange cloth, and it commemorates – of all the things to build in masonry – a duel. 1593. King Naresuan meets the Burmese crown prince, both on war elephants, in the field, and wins in single combat. Afterwards, the chronicles say, he intended to execute his own commanders for failing to keep up, and the monks talked him out of it, so he built this instead. Note the substitution: temper went in, structural mass came out. It is the only conversion of that kind I know of and it was, materially, the correct call, because a chedi has a service life and a grudge does not. The reclining Buddha here was restored in modern times. Look at the terrace edges, not at the kings.
Identification, then behaviour, then habitat. Never the other way round.
The Head Auxetic 2.0 Extreme MP does its work in the middle: a 645 cm² / 100 square inch head, around 11.2 ounces strung, a 16×19 dynamic string pattern with spin grommets, a strung swingweight in the region of 323 to 330, and Auxetic 2.0 built into the yoke and the handle — a flexible material placed exactly at the point where the frame bends, so the response and the feedback change with how hard you actually hit.
That is the behaviour worth recording. A soft touch reads soft; a full swing reads connected, and the frame tells you which one you just produced.
Habitat is the Chao Phraya. Bangkok sits at the river's lower end and the water arrives from Ayutthaya, the capital upstream, so the two places are one flyway rather than two towns.
Go up it and you reach Wat Mahathat, a royal temple founded in the fourteenth century and burned by the Burmese army in 1767, where a severed sandstone Buddha head was lifted out of the rubble not by any hand but by the roots of a bodhi tree, which took a century and a half to close around the face. I have watched a fig strangle a host tree at exactly that pace.
Nothing placed it. The tree did that alone.
Nearby stands Wat Phra Si Sanphet with its three white bell-shaped chedis holding the ashes of kings, where a standing Buddha some sixteen metres tall was cast in 1500 and sheathed in gold until 1767, when fires were set specifically to melt the coating off it.
Upriver on the west bank, Wat Chaiwatthanaram lays out a central prang with eight satellite chapels as Mount Meru and the cosmos, built in 1630 in a deliberately Khmer manner — plumage as a signal, the way a display is always aimed at a rival.
A frame this forgiving goes everywhere from a humid Bangkok morning on a rooftop court to a late set beside the ruins at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon, and it is also perfect for the player who wants to keep swinging fully at four in the afternoon on the river.
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