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Next: about 20 May 2027

Royal Ploughing Ceremony

An old royal rite in Bangkok and Phnom Penh opening the rice season, when a pair of sacred oxen choose the foods that foretell the year.

Royal Ploughing Ceremony in Thailand at Sanam Luang, Bangkok, 11 May 2009.
Photo: Xiengyod, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cattle at Royal Ploughing Ceremony

The Royal Ploughing Ceremony marks the start of the rice-growing season in Thailand and Cambodia, on a day set by court astrologers, usually in May. In Bangkok a Buddhist rite is followed the next morning by a Brahmin rite at Sanam Luang: a lord of the harvest ploughs furrows with a pair of white oxen and sows rice seed. Then the oxen are offered seven foods and drinks, rice, maize, green beans, sesame, grass, water and liquor, and the ones they choose are read as signs of the year's rain and harvest. Farmers gather the scattered seed for luck. In Thailand the day is also National Farmers' Day.

The breeds

ZebuThe sacred oxen are white humped cattle of the zebu type.
About this page

Written by the EveryCow desk with AI assistance. Background: "Royal Ploughing Ceremony" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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