The Golden Buddha, officially titled "Phra Phuttha Maha Suwan Patimakon" is the world's biggest solid gold statue weighing 5500kg.
The statue has an interesting history.
It is thought that the statue came from Ayutthaya and it was disguised under plaster to hide it from the Burmese, who were besieging the city. After being moved to Bangkok, its true composition was forgotten for almost 200 years.
In the 1930s, the seemingly unattractive statue in a destroyed old abandoned temple was moved to Wat Traimit, a pagoda of minor relevance (like hundreds of other Buddhist temples that exist in Bangkok). The temple didn't have a building big enough to house the statue, so it was kept for 20 years under a simple tin roof.
In 1955 a new building was built and the monks decided to install the statue inside it. A crane was supposed to move the statue carefully, but a cable broke and the statue fell in the mud, an event that was seen as a bad omen by the workers, who ran away from the place, leaving the statue on the soil. It was the rainy season and, as for confirming the bad omen, a terrible storm came and it lasted the whole night, flooding the whole city.
At the dawn of the next day, the abbot of the temple came to evaluate the damage and started removing the mud. He observed that the wet plaster was cracked and under it was a statue made of solid gold.
Wat Traimit, Bangkok, Thailand
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Buddha_(statue)