Tucked away just inside a canal across the river from the Grand Palace is the Royal Barge Museum. Here are displayed just eight of the over 50 barges that make up formal processions. That may seem like a lot, but during the Ayutthaya period, when the river was the main means of transport, royal barges apparently numbered in the thousands. The Abbé de Choisy, in his account of the first French embassy to Siam in 1685, writes of the embassy travelling upriver in hundreds of barges, some of which were the King's own.