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    A Local’s Guide to Chiang Rai, Thailand

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    Four insiders on where to stay, eat “micro-seasonal” dishes and shop for handmade pottery and textiles.T’s monthly travel series, Flocking To, highlights places you might already have on your wish list, sharing tips from frequent visitors and locals alike. Sign up here to find us in your inbox once a month, along with our weekly roundup of cultural recommendations, monthly beauty guides and the latest stories from our print issues. Have a question? You can always reach us at tmagazine@nytimes.com.Travelers to the northern provinces of Thailand have long been drawn by two things — elephant camps and campy temples. The most famous examples of each are within or near the 13th-century city of Chiang Rai, where the Wat Rong Khun, or White Temple, stands as an artist’s parable of the world’s ills, as depicted in the form of pop culture villains and other icons of kitsch. (If crossing a sea of grasping arms at the entrance doesn’t terrify you, beware the Freddy Krueger-themed hanging planters.) Chiang Rai is also where the Emerald Buddha, a national treasure now housed in Bangkok’s Grand Palace, was reportedly discovered in 1434. According to legend, a bolt of lightning cracked the stupa in which it had been hidden years prior.Chiang Rai — the city shares its name with the surrounding province — has gained a reputation as something of a tourist trap, thanks to the tour buses that ferry visitors from the White Temple to the equally gaudy Blue Temple and then to the very bleak Black House (which the artist Thawan Duchanee, who died in 2014, decorated with elephant skulls and antlers and a table runner made of snakeskin). But the city, having played second fiddle to the luxe-boho paradise of Chiang Mai ever since King Mang Rai moved the capital of the Lanna Kingdom — which ruled over most of what is now northern Thailand — to the “new city” in 1296, has more recently emerged as an unhurried haven for serious artists and other creative professionals seeking to escape the heat and sprawl of Bangkok.The third edition of Thailand’s roaming Biennale, which brought dozens of international and Thai artists to Chiang Rai this past winter and spring, shed light on an often-overlooked aspect of the city — its long history as a cultural crossroads. Owing both to its proximity to Laos and Myanmar and, to some degree, the Golden Triangle’s uncomfortable past as a center of the global drug trade, Chiang Rai has been the site of intermingling cultures for centuries.“The constant migration of people of different races and religions make this an interesting place both geographically and culturally,” says the Chiang Rai-born artist and gallerist Angkrit Ajchariyasophon. In 2023, Chiang Rai was also recognized by UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network for its sustainable architecture design and landscapes. “My house is near the city’s oldest Christian church, close to an Islamic mosque and a Buddhist temple off the same road,” says Ajchariyasophon. “This is where I grew up and learned about cultural diversity, which I find wonderful.”Today, multigenerational family-run restaurants featuring traditional Thai, Chinese and Myanmarese specialties likewise share a slow-movement sensibility with hipster cafes that serve coffee from beans grown on local farms, and stylish home stays that incorporate teak wood scavenged from nearby forests. Here, Ajchariyasophon and other Chiang Rai enthusiasts offer their recommendations on where to stay, eat, shop and sightsee in and around the city.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Everett Benson, Who Chiseled John F. Kennedy’s Grave, Dies at 85

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      A master of the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock, he was 25 when he began his first major commission, at Arlington National Cemetery. John Everett Benson, a master stone carver, designer and calligrapher whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists, as well as generations of American families — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, government buildings and houses of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 85.His son Christopher said he died in a hospital but did not specify the cause.Mr. Benson practiced the ancient and exacting art of carving into rock; slate was his preferred medium. He did so, precisely and gorgeously, on cornerstones, gravestones and monuments, as his father had before him, working out of an atelier in Newport called the John Stevens Shop. Founded in 1705, it is one of the oldest continuously run businesses in the country.The art Mr. Benson practiced is mostly devoted to mortality, the brief span of a life, though it is designed for eternity, or something close to it. It is often described as the slowest writing in the world. Mr. Benson could spend a day carving a cross; a gravestone might take three months.For the inscriptions for the East Building of the National Gallery in Washington, designed by I.M. Pei in the 1970s, he averaged an hour and a half carving each letter, some of which are nearly a foot tall. He and his team at the time, two young carvers named John Hegnauer and Brooke Roberts, spent months completing the painstaking work.Mr. Benson in 2020 at the John Stevens Shop, in Newport, R.I., with his son Nick, who took over his business in 1993, and his granddaughter Hope, who is training to be a stone carver like her father and grandfather.via Benson FamilyHe carved the words on the pedestal that supports Secretariat’s statue at Belmont Park; he also carved John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s credo into a slab of polished granite in Rockefeller Center. His elegant slate alphabet stone — alphabet stones are where lapidary artists show off their chops, their calligraphic feats and flourishes — lives in Harvard’s Houghton Library. He also worked on the National Cathedral in Washington, Yale University and the Boston Public Library, among other institutions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s Hidden in Woodlawn’s Mausoleums? Extraordinary Stained Glass.

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      On a sunny Bronx morning late last year, an all-star team of stained-glass experts prepared to enter a dank 1894 tomb at Woodlawn Cemetery that had been opened just once in the past century.The mausoleum at hand held the remains of José Maria Muñoz, a Panamanian-born New York merchant and son of a Spanish general. The scholarly tomb raiders were five energetic stained-glass conservators and art historians conducting an unprecedented survey of some 1,200 stained-glass windows that were installed in free-standing Woodlawn mausoleums from 1878 to the present.The 1894 mausoleum of José Maria Muñoz, a Panamanian-born New York merchant and son of a Spanish general.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWoodlawn sits on 400 rolling acres ornamented with 1,300 such private family mausoleums, including extravagant Gilded Age temples erected for captains of industry, robber barons and the merely very wealthy. These titans of affluence and their spouses often spent lavishly on the adornment of their final resting places — even if the interiors of these grand structures weren’t destined to be seen by more than friends and family.As soon as the team entered the mausoleum, shrieks could be heard bouncing off the interior stone walls. The experts had discovered a variety of stained glass none of them had ever encountered before.On the back wall of the sepulcher, behind the stone sarcophagus that filled most of the clammy chamber, a jeweled blue-glass orb protruded from the flat plane of a stained-glass window — breaking through into the third dimension. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More