When you visit the Grand Palace in Bangkok, the 500 Baht entrance ticket is bundled with free tickets to other venues. The main ones are the Grand Palace, Wat Phra Kaew (the Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and Wat Phra Kaew Museum. They also used to include a free ticket to other royal palaces such as Vimanmek Mansion. However, the free ticket now allows you to watch a Khon performance at the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre. you can either watch this on the same day or within seven days of purchasing the ticket.

There are five performances daily of the 25-minute masked dance drama from Monday to Friday, at 10:30am, 1:00pm, 2:30pm, 4:00pm, and 5:30pm. A shuttle bus is available to take the one-way trip from the Phiman Deves Gate at the Grand Palace to Sala Chalermkrung, leaving 30 minutes before the start of each performance.

Thailand’s Khon performance, which depicts the glory of Rama the hero and incarnation of the god Vishnu, is inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, where it is described as “a performing art that combines musical, vocal, literary, dance, ritual and handicraft elements. On one level, Khon represents high art cultivated by the Siamese/Thai courts over centuries, while at another level, as a dramatic performance, it can be interpreted and enjoyed by spectators from different social backgrounds.”

Khon is among Thailand’s most significant performing arts, and the performance at Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre follows in the efforts of His Majesty King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s to preserve and carry forward the masked dance drama. The theatre itself, symbolically, is an institute to present the nation’s arts and culture and true identity. Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre’s Khon performance embraces the grace and beauty of the Khon masked dance drama, with accompanying live traditional music and narrators’ singing. English and Chinese subtitles are provided throughout the performance.