Plant a tung and carry your intentions this Songkran at The Museum of Broken Relationships

If your idea of Songkran usually involves water fights and street parties, here’s something a little quieter but arguably more meaningful to add to your calendar. Head to the Museum of Broken Relationships for a special ‘Carry Your Intention: A Songkran Ritual Festival’ that brings a more reflective pause amid the splashy chaos of Thailand’s New Year.

Running from April 6-19, this contemporary take on a traditional ritual meets turns into an art experience, letting you swap water buckets for something more symbolic: a tung, or the traditional Lanna prayer flag. 

Create your own tung sai moo and choose colours based on what you want to carry into the new year – red for courage, green for growth, white for letting go – and inscribe your own intention onto the flag. Whether that’s a bold life pivot or simply to drink more water is entirely up to you.

The ritual draws from the Lanna tradition of Tan Tung, where offering a flag is believed to generate merit and symbolically release the weight of the past. In other words, it’s a culturally rooted way of saying new year new me. 

Once you’re done, you can choose to keep your creation, leave it as part of a collective display in the museum or take it to a temple on April 15 when the tradition of sticking it in a big pile of sand is widely observed across Chiang Mai.

True to the museum’s ethos, the experience also opens the door to something more personal. Visitors are invited to donate objects and stories tied to past relationships – items that might one day join the museum’s quietly powerful global archive. So, what are you ready to carry forward and what are you ready to leave behind?

General admission is B200 or you can qualify by spending B150 at the museum shop – a win-win for all and a small price for a moment of calm during Thailand’s best festival of the year.

April 6-19. General admission is B200 or B150 for students, seniors, persons with disabilities. Contact infoTH@brokenships.com for more information. Museum of Broken Relationships. Open 10am-10pm