The Bodhi Tree of Wat Benchamabophit

When Thailand received its first-ever direct cutting from the actual Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya in 1891, King Chulalongkorn did not plant it right away. He sent it two hundred kilometres to Wat Asdangnimit in Si Racha to be nursed for nine years first, unwilling to risk India's most sacred sapling on an unproven transplant. Only in 1900, once it had grown strong enough to travel again, did he personally plant it at Wat Benchamabophit, on the lawn behind the ordination hall, in the temple he had built as his own before ascending the throne and where his ashes would later be interred beneath the main Buddha image. Every other Bodhi tree in Thailand before this one had arrived at one remove, propagated from Sri Lankan trees that themselves descended from a cutting planted at Anuradhapura more than two thousand years earlier. This was the first to skip that detour and come straight from the source. Unusually for a Thai temple, this Bodhi stands where a chedi would normally rise, treated as the ordination hall's spiritual counterweight rather than a subordinate planting. At 126 years old it remains younger than the marble temple around it, itself finished only in 1911, eleven years after this tree was already established.