Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

To be honest, I never knew this temple existed if not for a project I was doing at work. I had to design a locality map that featured popular tourist spots in Singapore. This was what I discovered as interesting seeing photos of its rich interior and striking facade.

The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum sits in the middle of Chinatown, just a short walk from Pagoda Street. You can't miss it as it's quite prominent and very red and it looks different being surrounded by square modern buildings or those colorful heritage buildings.

It's worth noting how nicely intricate this temple looks, the roof details are my favorite that I thought I'd never get enough pictures of them. Looking up from the entrance, the shapes make a lot of nice geometric patterns and repetition that I always love to capture. (Personally, I prefer these kinds of compositions because I know I struggle at photojournalist types of photos.)

As for the interior, it is even more interesting to see so much detail in the floors, ceiling, pillars, walls, the statues from the smallest Buddha to the biggest ones at the center of the great hall. I have never been to Thailand and haven't been to a Buddhist temple before so please excuse my ignorance when I thought there was just one Buddha. It turns out there are so many of them. And to add to that, I totally forgot I was visiting a temple and wore denim shorts. So when I asked if I could go inside, the security person helped me put on the brown wrap-around thing. There are four levels in this temple and I only got to explore the first floor, but I was even encouraged to go up and see the rest of it. I was in a rush to go so I will definitely just do that another time.

I'm sorting the photos as exteriors first and then interior shots, as I took so many.