[Kain]

#5.The World's Largest Solid Gold Statue

The Golden Buddha is a solid gold statue that is almost 10-feet tall, more than 12-feet wide and weighs in at an impressive five and a half tons. In other words, it isn't the sort of thing that slips between the couch cushions and vanishes.


And it's old. Experts' best guess is that it's from the 13th century. So about the time that Marco Polo was pretending to explore China, somebody in Thailand was shaping a buttload of gold into this guy.

Yet, from the late 17th century until the 1950s, no one had any clue that the statue existed. Even though it was in plain sight.

How Could We Have Forgotten It?

In the 1700s the Burmese were invading Thailand, and the Thai king needed to protect the country's most precious assets, among them being this ginormous solid gold statue, which was sittin' around, all shiny and rich looking. So the king ordered that the locals cover it with plaster and stick it in an inauspicious temple.


A year later, the Thai population revolted against the Burmese occupation and took back control of the city. Although accurate records are lost, it is speculated the Thais celebrated their victory with Red Bull, a pinata and not bothering to take the plaster off of the Golden Buddha right away.

Eventually, people forgot there were 11,000 pounds of gold under there. Let's see, gold is currently worth over $1,100 an ounce, 16 ounces in a pound, so... that's about two hundred million dollars worth of gold.

Enough Gold to make Manute Bol look like Spud Webb, and really really black.

Decades passed and Golden Buddha still sat in stucco. Eventually the statue was relegated to a tin-roofed shed because it was simply just in the way. It was this ugly, plaster thing that was way heavier than it should be. But it couldn't be destroyed, because it was a Buddha statue. Ultimately, even the shed started falling apart, so in the 1950s the monks figure they'd better put the effigy somewhere out of the rain, lest they risk the wrath of the Enlightened One.


Even with the finest crane technology available in Thailand in the 1950s, the monks still botched the job, dropping the statue in a mud puddle. Attempting to dodge the karmic lightning bolts they incurred through their inept hoisting, they fled the scene, leaving the statue in a puddle overnight. Seriously, monks, get it together.

When one of them poked at the statue the next morning, some of the plaster scraped off, revealing that, oh, wait, this is one of the most valuable things in the history of mankind.