O Bangkok Magic name, blessed name”

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“But where does one begin with Bangkok,” English writer F. K. Exell mused in 1963. “It was a complete mixture of spurious West and inscrutable East. It was dirty. It was clean. It was beautiful. It was ugly. It was ancient. It was modern. It had scented temple flowers and the stench of rotting fish.”

For more than a century after Bangkok was founded in 1782 most westerners approached it expecting to find the ‘Venice of the East’, as the former Thai capital at Ayudhya had been called, and would only later discover its unique aspects. Ayudhya had been a prosperous city – like Bangkok, built on canals – and one of the greatest maritime ports of Southeast Asia until the Burmese vanquished it in 1767. The Chakri monarchs aimed to replicate the spiritual and physical glory of Ayudhya in the new capital. And succeeded, to judge from many nineteenth-century-travelers who responded with rapt delight at first view of the astonishing spectacle that appeared just after their steamers rounded the wide bend of the Chao Phraya River. A British traveler reaching Bangkok in 1865 thought he saw a mirage: the city “seemed to have arisen from the waters” right before his eyes. He would have seen the houseboats or huts built on stilts that stretched along the river banks as far as the eye could see. Picture them shaded by tall, slender palm trees. Flame-of-the-forest flowers accent a cerulean sky. Pendulous yellow blossoms - floral chandeliers -overhang impenetrable mangrove swamps.

The king owned all the land – because he is god-like, proclaimed a royal decree. His earthly abode was a fortified palace complex adjacent to the Chao Phraya, the river of kings, coursing through Bangkok before spilling into the Gulf of Siam thirty-five miles downstream. Over the centuries, the river became a bustling international emporium with great ships - first junks, then steamers - dwarfing the native dwellings. As the city laid claim to the vast, low-lying deltaic plain of the Chao Phraya valley, traditional amphibious habitats were gradually abandoned. Over the next century the water-world of Old Bangkok was paved over; the last holdouts of the unique floating city were evicted by government order in the early 1950s.

One of the most destructive factors in the changing nature of the “city in a garden” was undoubtedly the laying down of roads, replacing the watery lattice of canals that had been one of the great wonders of Southeast Asia. Rama IV Road, built in 1857, was the first truly public thoroughfare. New Road (Charoen Krung), the earliest macadam street for wheeled vehicles in the burgeoning commercial area next to the port, dates from 1862. The first major boulevard, which swathes through the old city, was cut in the late nineteenth century following King Chulalongkorn’s first visit to Paris.

During the second half of the twentieth century a sprawling, land-based, industrial metropolis began to mushroom on the alluvial plain. The rapid, unplanned and unimpeded expansion in the 1960s was largely due to American development money. Strategic roads led northeast to US military bases on the Thai border. These highways also encouraged an influx of poor peasants who gravitated to the capital, many ending up in sprawling slums.

Although so much has changed in Bangkok over the last century, visitors today experience feelings similar to those recorded in 1863. A sense of bafflement follows the generally conflicting impressions of the place; but few were bored then, and few now. An English visitor remarked that the “continuous and picturesque contrast of splendour and poverty, of fastidious etiquette and informality,” kept one on one’s toes. The same is true today.

The English writer James Kirkup liked Bangkok’s desultory confusion and dishevelment. Though grounded in his native Durham he would have preferred “to live in the East, where I am at home with my sense of disorder.”

There are colourful Hindu shrines in Bangkok, garuda on royal temples, and Brahmin priests preside over royal ceremonies but the great majority of Thais are adherents of Theravada Buddhism. The “imagined unity of the nation” promotes the myth that most of the 60 million people are ethnically Thai but over 100 other ethnicities co-exist. The reigning monarch King Rama IX is the focus of state ceremonial and the promoter of orthodox Buddhism. Royal capital and realm are yoked under the official motto: “Nation, Religion, and King”. Three distinct marks of Thai national identity are their pride in their independence (they were not colonized), their powers of assimilation, and the high degree of tolerance for pluralistic life-styles within the mixed ethnic pot of their society.



But tolerance has some limits, as Thai statesman-author Kukrit Pramoj wittily advised a gathering of foreigners in the ‘60s.

There are certain institutions which a Thai respects…They are his religion, which is mostly Buddhist, his king and his parents. If you say to a Thai that his politicians are rotten he will kiss you on both cheeks. If you tell him that he is a crook, he will deny it with great good humor and will not take offense. If you call his wife a bitch he will agree with you completely and ask you to have a drink to that. But as for those three institutions which I have already mentioned, I would advise you to leave well enough alone…since according to police statistics, the percentage of premeditated murders in this country is low; most murders are committed in sudden passion.

Victims of nocturnal accidents and violence are under special surveillance by rival groups dubbed “Bangkok’s body-snatchers” by the western media, employed by old Chinese benevolent associations, who do brisk business making runs to hospital morgues. Bangkok’s bars officially close at 2 a.m. but the anything goes nightlife continues in private clubs and hotel rooms.

Today over 11 million people live in the sprawling, densely populated capital that has been named the World’s Hottest City by the World Meteorological Organization. Although it is the prime city of Thailand, there is no single commercial centre, no historic downtown per se, and the ad hoc urban planning and cryptic zoning have resulted in an unfocused, fragmented city layout that can be utterly bewildering. In diametric contrast to an orderly, well-planned Southeast Asian metropolis such as Singapore, the capital is post-modern by default, an agglomeration that has many commercial and entertainment centres. Alistair Shearer dubbed Bangkok Americasia – “a hybrid of East and West, the twentieth century come up for air from the ancient swamp of Asia.”

Bangkok developed from paddy fields to villages, from small vernacular dwellings to high rise condominiums, from a trading post to the most prosperous city in the country. Although it is decidedly more western today, a rich artistic and cultural heritage exists within the collection of villages that constitute the city. Fragments of extraordinary beauty and sensation abound. Pockets of traditional indigenous life percolate under a cover of modernity. While the “nests of an aquatic race” that Joseph Conrad spotted in 1888 are long gone, the aquatic past flows through the life of the city.

Only a few travelers got beyond piquant, orientalizing contrasts and H. Warington Smyth was one of them. He wrote a lively account of his time as director of the newly created Department of Mines, Five Years in Siam, from 1891–1896. He recovered from a poor first impression of the city – “I had yet to learn that there are many Bangkoks.” He gives intriguing glimpses of dens of iniquity, of “such thieving as was never dreamt of in their jungle home, of much drinking, of more gambling” and of the great monster – “outrageous all-devouring – officialdom. And truly, I suppose, no place was less easy to fathom,” he frankly admits.

Rattanakosin

Rattanakosin lies at the heart of Bangkok. This artificial island (ko means island in Thai, the whole means island of Indra’s jewel) was created by King Rama I in the eighteenth century to house the royal palace complex which he constructed there. The king, intent on creating a city to compare with the grandeur of the old capital of Ayudhya, summoned experts who could recall details of the old city and replicate what had been destroyed. Because of the need to build Bangkok’s new defences quickly, with the meager resources available, rubble from the vanquished site was brought down river and imbedded into fortifications, palace buildings and monasteries. Ayudhya’s bricks then became quarry for Bangkok’s buildings, much like the antique marbles reused for Renaissance and Baroque Rome. The king ordered a second canal to be dug in a concentric arc some 800 meters east of the Klong Lawd canal, which had been dug during King Taksin’s reign. Ten thousand Cambodian prisoners of war were set to work on this. Five thousand Laotian captives herded from Vientiane then built a thick crenellated brick and stucco wall around the defensive moat with fourteen watchtowers punctuating it, of which two remain today: Pom Mahakan near the Golden Mount and Pom Phrasumane on the river at Banglampoo. The total surface area of the royal island was a mere four kilometers square, far smaller than the former capital.

A comparison of old maps of the two capitals shows how closely Bangkok’s general disposition echoed the layout of Ayudhya. The second palace or Wang Na (the Palace of the Front, now National Museum)) was built near the Grand Palace for the king’s brother, the deputy-king. Royal temples with the most important Buddhist relics were clustered around the palaces; these served religious, educational and recreational functions. Mandarin households ringed the royal complex; many nobles built family compounds and founded temples on the riverbanks and near major canal junctions. Artisans, merchants and traders often congregated on nearby waterways so as to profit from their patronage.

The royal citadel was to become the seat of the king and the dominion of the gods. Siamese kingship had inherited Hindu traditions of palace and religious life derived from eleventh-century Khmer polity. The devaraja (god-king) was a distant and imposing figure; commoners were forbidden to look at him. His city (muang), centre of his divine power, had three highly symbolic places: a royal palace for the ruler, a temple housing a Buddha images and relics, and a shrine to the spirit guardian of Siam, Phra Siam Devathiraj.

In 1785, three years after the birth of Bangkok, King Rama I staged a lavish ceremony to consolidate and legitimize the Chakri dynasty and the primacy of Buddhism. This splendid three-day festival at the start of the Siamese New Year was held “in honour of the king, for the well-being of the government, for the happiness of the people.” Buddhist monks chanted on the battlements and the festival offered the Thai equivalent of bread and circuses at royal expense. Food was distributed at key points around the city, coins were tossed to the crowds, and likay (traditional improvised Thai folk drama that runs in episodes like a TV sit-com) played day and night at theatres erected along the main path from the palace to Chinatown’s mall, Sampheng.

A Jesuit envoy to Ayudhya had noted that the Siamese “give pompous names to everything which they honour.” In this vein, the king conferred an auspicious title on the new island-citadel that yoked Brahmanic and Buddhist cosmology. A marble plaque in front of Bangkok City Hall spells out the forty-three syllables that constitute this, the longest city name in the world.

Great city of angels, the supreme repository of divine jewels, the great land unconquerable, the grand and prominent realm, the royal and delightful capital city full of nine noble gems, the highest royal dwelling and grand palace, the divine shelter and living place of reincarnated spirits.

Thais venerate their capital city as Krung Thep – The City of Angels – but the Portuguese called it Bangkok in the sixteenth century and this became its cosmopolitan name.

“It’s almost impossible to translate,” complained a Japanese interpreter and tour guide in Mishima’s The Temple of Dawn. He explains that: “Thai names are like temple decorations, unnecessarily pompous and flowery, ornate for the sake of ornateness… They choose exaggerated and ostentatious nouns and adjectives and string them together like beads on a necklace.” Joseph Conrad found it beautiful: “O Bangkok Magic name, blessed name/ Mesopotamia (recalling Odysseus) wasn’t a patch on it.”