In Singapore, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City stand bronze elephant statues gifted by Thai Kings. Erected in 1872 (Singapore and Jakarta), and 1936 (Ho Chi Minh City), these monuments were designed to commemorate the kings’ visits to these cities and to visualise royal power. In the decades since, they have been localised and become part of the urban spaces they inhabit. The lecture will attempt to contextualise these statues in contemporary diplomatic practice and politics during the Fifth and Seventh Reigns. The wider cultural setting and symbolism of elephants in general, and the elephant statues in particular, will be explored, and they will be analysed in the context of diplomatic gift-giving in the 19th and 20th centuries. The lecture will then zoom in on the history of secular bronze sculpture in Thailand and position the statues at key stages of an artistic tradition that leads from the mid-1850s up to the present. A focus will be on the statue in Ho Chi Minh City, which is identified as the first major bronze cast at the foundry of the Fine Arts Department in Bangkok. The process of its creation, led by Prince Narisara Nuwattiwong and Corrado Feroci (Silpa Bhirasri) before and after the political upheavals of 1932, will be reconstructed from documents from the Thai National Archives.