‘AIDS temple’ aims to shock Thais

Tucked in lush rural hills, Thailand’s ‘‘AIDS temple’’ aims to shock people out of their complacency with a macabre display of withered corpses and bones of the rejected dead.

Each day, scores of visitors troop through the country’s largest Buddhist hospice, snapping pictures in hospital wards, the crematorium and a ‘‘Life Museum’’. The first stop on a tour of Wat Phrabaht Nampu temple is a glass-windowed room where 12 formaldehyde-preserved bodies lie exposed on wooden slats. Their dark brown, leathery skin is stretched taut over bones. They include a sex worker infected by a customer, a woman infected by her husband and a child born with the disease. All were former patients who donated their bodies.

Thousands have died at the temple in just over a decade — 172 in the first six months of this year — and its founder believes the loneliness those patients endured is every bit as frightening as the corpses he has on display.

‘‘It is the best medium to teach people,’’ said Abbot Alongkot Tikkapanyo, who started the hospice after watching a man die of AIDS. The hospice is refuge to hundreds of men and women who come here to die. Alongkot wants to drive home the lesson that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is still infecting 20,000 Thais each year.—(Reuters)