Bangkok’s first boundary was described in water. When King Rama I established the capital in 1782, it was on an island his predecessor had made by slicing a canal throughout a peninsula within the Chao Phraya River. However after I drift by way of town immediately, it’s straightforward for me to neglect this defining relationship between land and water. Straightforward to be misplaced amongst malls with names that sign their preeminence (Paragon, Centralworld) or their sparkle (Palladium, Platinum). However then, after I cross a bridge over the Saen Saep Canal, my consideration is drawn to the brown water and the commuter boat passing beneath me. I think about following the boat upriver, previous stilt houses, open-air markets, and temples, earlier than it enters one other neighborhood: my childhood.
In Bangkok, one is rarely removed from water. Canals, or khlong, lace the land, as they’ve because the fifteenth century, once they had been used to deliver water to rice fields, farmers to markets, and other people to 1 one other. Behind my boyhood residence within the Prawet district was a canal, alongside which ran a concrete walkway that served each as a shortcut between streets and an avenue to my infantile diversions. On any given afternoon, I may discover taxi drivers kicking a sepak takraw, a woven ball, over a web strung between phone poles, or be drawn to a road market, the place I might get my sugar repair from rambutan and rose apple.
Guests to Thailand can nonetheless discover that previous lifestyle on a canal tour of the Thon Buri district. On a latest Sunday afternoon, I joined a bunch of pals on one such tour, boarding a ship from Saphan Taksin pier. We traveled by way of a quiet suburban neighborhood, stopping on the Paknam Phasi Charoen Temple, a landmark recognized for its 20-story-tall Buddha, which towers over its environment. Subsequent was the Artist Home, a bohemian café and gallery. Standing inside, its timber stilts and shutters, shows of conventional khon masks, and shaved ice in flavors named “purple” and “inexperienced,” I felt like I’d entered a scene calibrated for authenticity.
To me, the place recalled Kaew Kap Kla, a schoolbook all people in my technology remembers studying on the impressionable age of six. It taught us how you can learn Thai whereas concurrently instructing us what it meant to be Thai, telling the story of a household of 4 (each member had smiling eyes) who lived in a stilt residence beside rice fields. That they had water buffalo, a charcoal range, and a brand new pet. The guide’s bucolic illustrations appeared to seize a shared, idealized previous that served as a stage for our shared, idealized identification. However the Thailand that the storybook siblings grew up in doesn’t sq. with the current most of us inhabit. For immediately’s metropolis dwellers, an authentically Thai expertise in all probability isn’t a visit down Reminiscence Canal, however a day on the mall.
Most of the waterways have now been stuffed in, paved over, or hidden from view. Thailand’s typically unhealthy observe report of historic preservation signifies that the alternative of the previous by the brand new will not be unusual. A buddy just lately lamented that in Thailand, in contrast to Japan or India, we don’t have a tradition of carrying conventional gown apart from particular occasions. That is partly a results of the Thai court docket, which adopted European customs and gown on the finish of the nineteenth century to look extra “civilized” to Western powers.
However much more modern expressions of “Thainess,” just like the nation’s distinctive Modernist buildings (impressed by Brutalism however incorporating Thai motifs), are disappearing. A latest instance: the closure of the Scala Cinema, Bangkok’s final stand-alone movie show. For its remaining present, Scala screened Cinema Paradiso, the story of an previous movie show and the pull of nostalgia. My common badminton corridor was transformed from one other movie show. The hand-painted posters for Cleopatra and Mackenna’s Gold remained on the partitions till, in 2018, it was lastly bulldozed. To me, the actors’ faces had been like portraits of revered elders: Elizabeth Taylor and Omar Sharif watching over the video games, patrons of fine play. Now they, too, are gone.
However a metropolis that’s unhealthy at preservation can also be proving to be good at reinvention. When it opened inside a renovated Chinatown shop-house, Tep Bar started welcoming reside bands, specializing in teams that make trendy Thai music on conventional devices. Alongside the west financial institution of the Chao Phraya River, a historic dock and warehouse had been reopened as Lhong 1919, a hangout with artwork retailers, eating places, and an exhibition on the venue’s restoration.
The pattern isn’t unique to the oldest sections of town. The Home on Sathorn, first a personal residence and later the Russian embassy, is now a restaurant and occasion house. Final 12 months noticed the growth of Benjakitti Park on a downtown plot of land as soon as utilized by the state-owned tobacco monopoly. The park’s new part makes use of wetland vegetation to cleanse water fed from close by canals, and the previous manufacturing facility buildings have been transformed into sports activities amenities.
No recap of the remaking of Thailand’s previous might be full with out mentioning Bupphesanniwat, or Love Future, a vastly profitable cleaning soap opera that follows a girl whose consciousness is transported into the physique of a Seventeenth-century courtier. Now Love Future pilgrims flip up by the busload on the ruins of Ayutthaya, the moated historical capital, to be photographed in interval costume.
I by no means did study to learn from Kaew Kap Kla. As a result of I used to be at a world college, the place English was predominant, my proficiency in Thai stalled for years. With a Thai-Chinese language mom and an American father, my background excluded me from straightforward identification with these fictional kids. After I did study to learn, it was by way of Japanese Doraemon comics, which, as a result of I first encountered them in translation, I believed had been Thai. Doraemon will not be fully cat or robotic, not fully of our time or his personal, and perhaps modern Thainess is like that, not fully one factor or one other.
One in every of Doraemon’s chaotic devices is a handkerchief that may make new issues previous or previous issues new, with a logic that has by no means made sense to me. Bangkok, with its roads laid out alongside canal routes, with its juxtaposition of fashionable and excessive tradition, of luxurious shops and open-air markets, is a metropolis of unreconciled contradictions. However in permitting its previous to be buried and constructed over, Thailand has additionally created the vibrancy and dynamism of its current — simply because the foundations for the capital’s first roads had been constructed with earth dug from these early canals.
Greatest Time to Go to Beat the Crowds
Humidity is at its highest throughout the monsoon months, from June by way of September. However the low season additionally means guests will doubtless discover discounted lodging and may simply get in to top-rated eating places and fashionable websites. Simply be ready to pivot: Downpours might affect boat service and island entry, and even trigger resort closures.
A model of this story first appeared within the December 2024/January 2025 difficulty of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Go With the Circulate.”