'Bangkok': in brief-II

Raana Haider

Today, the city's diminished network of canals result in visitors frequenting the postcard picturesque floating markets of paddle-boats that ply the rich bounty of Thai fruits and vegetables. Everyone laments the passing of the unique Bangkok canals khlongs, so integral to the city's heritage. Some environmental experts point to the filling of such khlongs as the reason for the monsoon flooding of certain neighbourhoods. The nationally renowned Dr Sumet Jumsai, a former Cambridge don, a member of the French Academic d'Architecture, an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a National Artist of Architecture has been active in the preservation of historical buildings and sites in Thailand since the 1960s. In a series of lectures 'Cultural Crusade' delivered at the eminent Siam Society in Bangkok this year, Dr. Jumsai has elaborated on the closing of the water front vistas of the city and the impact of the filled-up khlongs on the city's river-based communities and the building of water gates and flood walls The ever-popular downtown Pratunam market once-upon a time had a water gate in its environs; hence its name.
   Long the bane of Bangkok living, the notorious traffic snarls make entry in every write-up on the city. The wave of motor-cyclists revving their engines at the traffic lights is much a scenario of the recent past. The wave of tuk-tuk swarming in and out - so inherent to the city's landscape - is also much a thing of the past. The predecessor of Bangkok's three-wheeled motorized vehicle was the human-drawn rickshaw or 'Chinese vehicle' or rot chek. Wealthy Chinamen first presented them to King Rama V in 1871. So popular were they that by 1901, laws had to be introduced to limit their numbers. By the early twentieth century, the three-wheeled pedicab samlor became common in the streets of Bangkok. Post-World War II, once fitted with inexpensive Japanese two-stroke engine, the samlor was reinvented as the ubiquitous tuk-tuk. By 1908, a four-wheeled invention was introduced - the car.
   Very much a spectacle of the present is the above-borne 'Sky Train' that transports increasing number of travellers to their destination. In fact, on a day trip to Kanchanaburi (the site of 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' film; we were off-loaded at a 'Sky Train' station once we crossed the Chao Phraya River. Speeding along the super-highway that connects Kanchanaburi and Bangkok - it was simple sailing in a minibus - until we reached the inner city's outer limit. Then, it was expedient to switch one's mode of transport. Was it not the British novelist, diplomat and author of 'Alexandria Quartet', Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) who sought it fit to remark in Bitter Lemons (1957): 'Journeys, like artists, are born and not made.
   A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will- whatever we may think.' More cryptic are the invaluable words of Plautus: 'Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.'
   The same Chao Phrya River provides the setting of Bangkok's most celebrated heritage hotel - the Oriental Hotel whose old world style, elegance and oriental grace has attracted travellers since the nineteenth century's 'Golden Age of Travel'. Contemporary hotels in the region are the Strand in Rangoon on the Yangon River and the Raffles in Singapore. The Armenian Sarkies brothers built both and both hotels quickly gained fame as noted residential halts in the Orient.
   The Oriental Hotel remained a destination for many a traveller in the twentieth century and shows no sign of letting up - well into the twenty-first century - gauging the lawns hosting a wedding, the crowds sipping tea in the Author's Lounge, the to and fro of human traffic in the main entrance foyer, corridors, shopping arcade and the high occupancy as seen by the many rooms lit up in the hotel building.
   Its antecedents were more humble. A small guest-house overlooking the river was set-up in 1865. Burnt down the same year, a more substantial building replaced it. H.N. Andersen, a Danish trader of the East Asiatic Company, a European trading-house; had his offices in an adjacent group of wooden buildings. As business flourished and more and more Westerners touched base in Bangkok, Andersen foresaw the need for a more comfortable hotel with luxurious amenities. So was born the Oriental Hotel in 1887; designed by an Italian architect - 'forty commodious and well-furnished rooms.' Andersen returned to Denmark but his long ties with Thailand continued till his demise in 1938. He served as Consul-general of Thailand in Demark.
   Today, only the 'Author's Wing' remains as part of the late nineteenth century original structure. This we reached by boarding one of Oriental Hotel's fairy-lit ferries that transport hotel residents and visitors from pier to destination. Disembarking as dusk approached, we walked on the pathway through lush tropical vegetation and floral exotica. Entering the historic Author's Lounge, a pale cream and soft-green interior - greets one: bamboo seating, lounging chairs and walls graced with black and white photographs of past Thai monarchs, princes and princesses in resplendent splendour; and in contrast - many of them photographed at English boarding schools and Swiss resorts. The last lingerers over afternoon-tea lounge in the central atrium. A stroll into a hallway reveal nineteenth century glass-fronted cupboards holding leather-bound copies of books by authors closely associated with the Oriental Hotel.
   A Polish-born sailor named Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski a.k.a. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a hotel resident in 1888. His novel Lord Jim set in Bangkok lent itself to Oriental Hotel's restaurant 'Lord Jim's' whose interior resembles a nineteenth century Asian steamer - an elegant marriage of the old and the new forms of Thai architecture. Elsewhere in the city, a 'Conrad Bangkok' hotel positions itself as a brand name. Conrad was overwhelmed by the city. He gushed: 'Bangkok! I was thrilled, I had seen six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way - but Bangkok!...Here and there, towered great piles of masonry, king's palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable, which seem to enter one's breast with the breath of one's nostrils and soak into one's limbs through every pore of the skin.'
   Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) noted for his ironic and detached style; while suffering from malaria took rest here. During his period of convalescence, Maugham completed the travelogue Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong. Mulling his thoughts while sitting on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel and gazing out across the Chao Phraya River he wrote: '...a flight of egrets flew down the river, flying low and scattered. They were like a ripple of white notes, sweet and pure and spring-like, which an unseen hand drew forth, like a divine arpeggio from an unseen harp.' Elsewhere, he has left us with this nugget of philosophy on arm-chair travelling: 'The wise traveller travels only in imagination...Those are the best journeys, the journeys that you take at your own fireside, for then you lose none of your illusions.' This appears in 'Honolulu', The Trembling of a Leaf.
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