Bangkok

William Warren

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781861894441
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

William Warren's Bangkok is an informal portrait of this most vibrant and perplexing of modern cities. Divided into two parts, the first is a selective history, showing how Bangkok has developed over the last 200 years, while the second explores the contemporary face of the city through a series of personal impressions.The author explains how the charms of Bangkok and its people outweigh the disadvantages of pollution, traffic and stifling heat. He also introduces celebrities, such as the early kings of Thailand's present dynasty and Anna Leonowens, heroine of The King and I, as well as Jim Thompson, the US-born silk entrepreneur and art collector who mysteriously vanished in the jungles of Malaysia. Bangkok provides a much needed history of the city, but is also imbued with the warmth of Warren's love affair with its frenetic way of life.

I Bangkok in Time

For a century or so, Bangkok’s development was largely the result of royal dreams, aspirations and, occasionally, eccentric whims, in particular those of the first six rulers of the Chakri dynasty. Known as Lords of Life and ruling (at least theoretically) with absolute authority, they were responsible for the city’s original layout and architectural forms, as well as for the art that adorned its earliest buildings and the laws that governed its people. Many of their contributions survive and, while physically now only a small part of the sprawling whole, still play a significant symbolic role in Thai life.

It was the first Chakri King, known in Thai history as Rama I, who chose the site of the capital in 1782 to celebrate the beginning of a hopeful new era. Successive members of the dynasty made the major decisions on expansions and additions until 1932, when the absolute monarchy came to a surprisingly peaceful end.

As a place, though, Bangkok had existed long before the dynasty. For several centuries, first as a small village and later as a sizeable trading port, it had been a major stop on the busy river route to Ayutthaya, the glittering, cosmopolitan capital a little further upstream.

The city’s name derives from bang, meaning village, and kok, a species of wild plum (Spondias pinnata) that apparently grew in some quantity along the river. It began to appear on maps made by the Portuguese shortly after their first official contact with Ayutthaya in 1511. Later that century, an Ayutthaya King raised Bangkok’s status to that of a town, at the same time changing its name to Thon Buri. However, Europeans persisted in calling it Bangkok, as they would even after it became the capital and was given another, far more elaborate title; Thon Buri eventually came to refer only to the settlement on the west bank. To reduce travel time for ships coming up from the Gulf of Thailand, the same King had a two-kilometre canal dug across a long loop in the river at this point; erosion over the years eventually widened the canal until it became the main course, passing beside today’s Grand Palace.

According to European missionaries in the seventeenth century, Bangkok was actually a collection of villages noted for their plantations of tall betel-nut palms. The main village, with the governor’s house, was on the west bank of the Chao Phraya. The site was strategic, ‘the only place that could offer some resistance to enemy attack’, according to Nicholas Gervaise, and two forts were built for this purpose, one on each bank.

A grand embassy dispatched by King Louis XIV stopped in Bangkok in October 1685, part of what would prove to be an ill-fated effort to establish a strong French presence in what was then known as Siam (the country’s name was changed to Thailand in the 1930s). With the party was the Abbé de Choisy, a rather unlikely ecclesiastic (in his earlier life, he had been a noted Parisian transvestite), who observed with approval the splendidly carved royal barges sent to greet the visitors and the profusion of wildlife in the surrounding countryside. ‘There are many animals in this land,’ he wrote, ‘because people dare not kill them in case they kill their father; metempsychosis is an article of faith among the Siamese.’ Three years later, the dreams of the French ended in a bloody revolt led by court conservatives, and their soldiers were back in Bangkok, this time fighting for their lives in the east-bank fort until a truce allowed them (and most other Westerners) to leave Siam for the better part of a century.

In 1767 the worst disaster in Thai history came with the fall of Ayutthaya to an invading army from Burma. There had been defeats before, followed by relatively benign occupations, but this time the Burmese were ruthless. They put the great city to the torch, burning most of its fabled Buddhist temples and palaces, looting its treasures and scattering its demoralized population into the countryside to starve. This catastrophe would haunt the Thais for generations and would strongly influence the history of Bangkok.

Out of the confusion emerged a charismatic leader of Chinese descent, who, within a year, had rallied his people, expelled the Burmese and established himself as King Taksin. Taksin made his headquarters at Thon Buri and began to build a capital there – a palace near the old fort with an adjacent royal wat, or Buddhist temple – but for the next decade, most of his energies were expended on consolidating his power and adding to his territory. By 1782, his behaviour had become increasingly eccentric, and many in the court were convinced he had lost his mind. There was again a palace revolt; the King was overthrown and, in due course, executed in the manner prescribed for royalty by Ayutthaya law: he was placed in a velvet sack and beaten to death with a sandalwood club.

The popular choice for Taksin’s successor was another military figure, Chao Phraya Chakri, who had distinguished himself by many victories, the most famous of which had been the capture of Vientiane in present-day Laos. From there, he had brought back one of the greatest treasures of the region, a legendary nephrite image known as Phra Keo, or the Emerald Buddha, originally found in the far north in the fifteenth century. The image had been kept in various northern cities, principally Chiang Mai, until 1552, when it had been taken to Vientiane to save it from the Burmese.

Chakri was off fighting again, this time in Cambodia, when he heard of events in Thon Buri and hastened back. Legend has it that he marched down what is now called Chetupon Road – a narrow thoroughfare that separates the two parts of Wat Phra Chetupon (Wat Po) – on 6 April 1792. That same day, after crossing the river, he was offered and accepted the crown, thus inaugurating a new dynasty bearing his name. (Chakri Day is celebrated every year on 6 April, and tribute is paid to some of his ashes at Wat Phra Chetupon.)

One of Chakri’s first decisions was to move the capital across to Bangkok. There were several good reasons for doing so, both practical and psychological. From a military standpoint, Bangkok could be defended more easily, with the river serving as a natural defence on one side and, on the other, a swampy plain known as the Sea of Mud, which extended almost to the Gulf of Thailand. (Today, one of Bangkok’s most exclusive residential districts is located on this plain, and it is still subject to frequent floods in the rainy season.) Symbolically, too, a change seemed advisable; Thon Buri was too closely associated with the previous reign, the palace area was too small and unimpressive, and a new city would proclaim the aspirations of a new dynasty.

These aspirations were hardly modest. They called for the virtual recreation of lost Ayutthaya, to the point of duplicating as closely as possible many of its well-remembered palaces and temples as well as its physical layout. Thus an old canal was enlarged and extended to form an artificial island at a point where the river bent sharply, and a new one, fortified by a high wall, was dug farther to the east. The new city wall was 3.6 m high, dotted with sixteen gates and sixteen forts, and built partially with stones brought down on barges from the old capital.

Within this area, known today as Rattanakosin Island, the King proposed to erect a palace for himself, another for the Second King, who acted as a sort of vice-ruler (the institution was abolished in the reign of Rama V), and a splendid temple for the sacred Emerald Buddha. Other temples would also be built to gain merit and old ones like Wat Phra Chetupon restored for the same reason. Part of the site was occupied by a prosperous Chinese trading community that was relocated about 3 km to the south, outside the walls but still on the river. Continuing its business, this became the nucleus of Bangkok’s Chinatown and for the next two centuries – to some extent, even today – the centre of the town’s economic power.

Construction of the Grand Palace took three years, with the King himself, it is said, living on the site in a simple wooden house to supervise the small army of labourers. Prince Chula Chakrabongse, a descendant of Rama I who wrote a history of the dynasty, points out that while these workers were conscripted for the task,

it is unlikely that they suffered great hardship. They were fed at the royal expense by a communal kitchen, and some might have had better and more food than at home. If there was hardship, some of the stories would have survived. But even if we grant that forced labour, with threats of punishment, was employed for the building of the new capital, the architects, craftsmen, and skilled artisans who embellished these buildings, could not be coerced by fear into producing such beautiful works of art. Judging by what we can see today, even if a lot of it has been restored, these men must have been profoundly inspired and stirred by love for Rama I himself as much as for the glory of Thai culture, to have accomplished so much of it in the space of three years.

Stirred by love or not, what they produced was an authentic wonder, and remains one today. Even outsiders who find it a bit over-the-top (no Thai ever would) are invariably stunned by the sheer quantity of gilt and glass mosaic, the swooping multi-tiered roofs and tall spires rising everywhere, a creation that seems even more fantastic in modern Bangkok than in the earlier city that produced it, at a time when such buildings were more common.

Like the Forbidden City of Beijing, and specifically like the royal palace of Ayutthaya, the Grand Palace was much more than the residence of the King. The compound originally covered an area of 21 hectares – another 3.5 hectares were added to the south by Rama II in 1809 – and faced north, the most auspicious direction, with the Chao Phraya on the right. The surrounding high walls had seventeen gates, the principal one being Pratu Wiset Chaisi, the ‘Gate of Glorious Victory’, in the centre of the north wall. Within were several clearly defined areas, an outer one that contained the civil and military headquarters, a central one with the King’s living quarters and the audience halls where he received visitors and presided over royal ceremonies, and another, well-guarded quarter for the female members of the royal family and their attendants, who steadily increased in number over the years. Elsewhere in the compound was the royal chapel, formally known as Wat Phra Sriratana Sasadaram, but more usually called Wat Phra Keo, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha.

In the words of Prince Chula, ‘the palace was the very core and centre of the capital and indeed of the whole country.’ On its completion in 1785, there were celebrations lasting three days, during which pavilions serving free food were set up in the area and monks chanted prayers from the heart-shaped battlements on the city walls. The Emerald Buddha ceremonially crossed the Chao Phraya and was installed in its new home, conferring immense merit on both the King and his subjects.

Just outside the palace walls was a large open field, Sanam Luang, which became the place where royal cremations and other ceremonies were held. At one end, Rama I installed the Lak Muang, or city pillar, which is to be found in every old provincial capital and generally marks a city’s exact geographical centre. This was a Brahmin custom, inherited, like much else involving royalty, from the Khmers; the pillar was supposed to enshrine the city’s guardian spirit. Ever since its installation, the Lak Muang has been an important place for worship by the people of Bangkok, who come asking for everything from success in business to a winning ticket in the national lottery.

As a final act, the King bestowed an impressive new title on his capital, one so filled with honorifics that it qualifies as the longest city name in the world. Thais shorten it to Krung Thep, which can be roughly translated as ‘city of divinities or angels’, while foreigners (and most foreign map makers) have continued to use the old village name.

At the beginning, then, Bangkok was basically a medieval Thai city, a fortified island surrounded by smaller communities that arose to satisfy its needs for food, various crafts and manual labour. Water was the dominant element, as it had been in Ayutthaya. Though there were elephants, horses and oxen, and rough roads for them to travel along, nearly all long-distance communication was by way of the great river and along an increasingly intricate network of man-made canals, or klongs, that served as streets. An extraordinary variety of boats were used, ranging from simple canoes fashioned from hollowed-out tree trunks to magnificent royal barges as elaborately decorated as the palace and temple buildings.

These barges, another legacy from Ayutthaya, were originally designed as war ships and armed with cannons in the prow. As the threat of invasion subsided, they were used to carry the King about his capital as well as for kathins, annual merit-making ceremonies held at the end of the rainy season when robes and other gifts are presented to the monks of riverside temples. The French had been dazzled by such processions in the old capital – nearly all of their memoirs include a description – and so would the Westerners be who came to Bangkok during the nineteenth century.

Ordinary people lived in plain wooden houses outside the city walls, either raised up on posts as protection against floods or floating structures anchored along both banks of the river. Dense forest was quite near, cleared in some places for rice fields and fruit orchards, though as yet there was only a suggestion of the vast, abundant plains that would spread across the surrounding countryside.

The gulf was near the capital – considerably nearer then than now; accumulated silt has pushed it back over the years by 30-odd km – but relatively few ships called to trade at first. No Westerners were on hand to record Bangkok’s construction or the ways of life within its massive walls. Yet as David K. Wyatt, the leading historian of Thailand, has pointed out, the city was hardly isolated from the outside world. Mural paintings of the period, while religious in theme, show crowds of what are obviously Bangkok residents, some of them Thai, but others belonging to different ethnic groups from neighbouring countries. ‘This was no monolithic, homogeneous society, then,’ Wyatt has said, ‘but one with a good deal of diversity and vitality.’

Several more Burmese invasions had been repelled by the end of the eighteenth century. Siamese authority now extended over most of the territory that had been lost, and Bangkok, enjoying a period of stability, was poised to assume its proper place in the region.

As they had been in Ayutthaya, the Chinese were among the first to take advantage of the situation. Junks came up the Chao Phraya under their great, bat-wing sails, bringing luxury goods and precious metals to exchange for rice and forest products. They arrived with the north-east monsoon in late January or early February and remained until June, when they left on the winds of the south-west monsoon. The royal court was the chief beneficiary of such trade, but the prosperity had a broader effect as well and attracted more people to the city.

Rama I died in September 1809 at the age of 72. He had been a man of extraordinary ability and considerable vision for his time. Unlike the kings of Ayutthaya, who, following the Khmer example, had been lofty, god-like figures seldom seen by their subjects, he was a recognizable human being, frequently going out to inspect the progress of his new capital and sharing power with his associates. Besides prowess on the battlefield, he also demonstrated an appreciation for the arts; literature, mural painting and the classical masked khon dance all flourished during his reign, and he participated in writing a revision of the Thai version of the Indian epic Ramayana.

One of Rama’s greatest legacies was the fact that, for the first time in nearly a century, his death was followed by no bloody power struggle. He was peacefully succeeded by the eldest of his seventeen sons, thus ensuring continuity and further proclaiming the new dynasty’s stability. (It should be pointed out here that under the Thai system, the eldest son did not automatically become King, the latter instead being chosen by an Accession Council from various possible candidates. More often than not in the past, this practice had led to conflict and sometimes to the elimination of whole families regarded as hostile to the winner).

Owing to Thai custom and new threats from Burma, Rama I’s funeral was not held until eighteen months after his death. It was the first of many royal cremations held in the field outside the Grand Palace, a splendid event that blended solemn ritual with a carnival atmosphere in a distinctively Thai way. The King’s body, in a golden urn, was carried out of the palace by 60 men on a palanquin and then transferred to a gilded chariot weighing over 20 tons. Prince Chula described the process:

To take the heavy urn from the palanquin to the top of the lofty coach, an open lift, worked by a pulley, had been invented . . . and it might well have been the first lift in the world. Many religious rites and alms-giving preceded the actual cremation. Offerings were made to no less than 10,000 monks, coins enclosed in lime fruits were thrown to the masses from eight points around the Phra Meru [pyre]. Clothing was distributed to the old and poor of over seventy years of age. There were open-air theatres, boxing matches, and colourful fireworks.

Farangs – the word signifying all Westerners, is of uncertain origin, some claiming it came from the Thai pronunciation of French, others that it was derived from Persian – had been largely absent from Siam since the late seventeenth century. A few remained; the Dutch, for instance, maintained a trading post at Ayutthaya almost until the end, Catholic missionaries ministered to a small number of converts, and an unknown number of Portuguese, or half-Portuguese (they had intermarried freely with local girls), were probably among the original settlers of Bangkok. In general, though, the kingdom was off the map as far as the newly expanding European powers were concerned – too remote, not rich enough (or so they thought) for exploitation.

This attitude began to change towards the end of the second reign. Having taken the island of Penang, off the coast of the Malay Peninsula, in 1785, the British came close to Rama I’s southernmost territories; with the establishment of Singapore as a free port in 1819, trade became a more pressing issue. Towards the end of 1821, the British decided that some sort of negotiations were called for, and John Crawfurd, a Scot, was dispatched by the governor-general of British India to Bangkok.

Crawfurd was not the first Westerner to come on such a mission. A Portuguese, Carlos Manuel Silveira, had arrived a few years earlier from Macao. As he had not been sent by the King of Portugal, Rama II received him merely as a merchant. But the meeting went off well because Silveira was willing to sell modern weapons. Thus he was warmly received, even given a royal title and a house on the river that subsequently, after many changes, became the Portuguese Embassy, the oldest in Bangkok today.

Crawfurd must have seemed an ideal choice. He had lived in Penang, where he had learned to speak Malay, as well as in Java during its brief period of British occupation; he had a reputation for being able to get along with ‘natives’ and adapt himself to foreign customs. But his experiences had been in places where foreign domination was established and more or less accepted; Siam offered a different challenge, and not for the first time, nor for the last, there was a clash of cultures that brought few benefits to either side.

‘An eighteenth century gentleman rather lost in the nineteenth century world of commerce’, as Michael Smithies has described him, Crawfurd found much to dislike in Bangkok. ‘This people, of half-naked and enslaved barbarians,’ he wrote later, ‘have the hardihood to consider themselves the first nation in the world, and to view the performance of any servile office to a stranger as an act of degradation.’ He had difficulty in finding suitable servants, his Malay was useless at the Thai court except through inadequate interpreters, negotiations were constantly interrupted by some royal funeral or other ceremony (perhaps invented to avoid some difficult decision); moreover, like so many Westerners at the court of the Chinese Emperor, he was deeply revolted by the custom of prostration in the presence of royalty, not just before the King but before lesser officials...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Bangkok in Time
• II The City Today
• Bibliography
• Photographic Acknowledgements