A World Apart

The author offers glimpses of life in the capital a hundred years ago.

Bangkok Then & Now

By Steve Van Beek

Published by Wind and Water Ltd

Available at Asia Books, Bt975

Reviewed by Manote Tripathi

The Nation

 The past may be a foreign land to most of us when it comes to Bangkok at the turn of the 20th century - understandable given the lack of documentation that survives. But American writer and film-maker Steve Van Beek is no stranger to those days. He offers enticing glimpses of life in the capital a hundred years ago in "Bangkok Then and Now", just released in a third edition.

 The picture is focused through four lenses: a well-researched text on Bangkok's history, photographs old and contemporary, news stories from 1900 and 1901 editions of the "Bangkok Times" and maps of featured key locations.

 Van Beek's approach is stereoscopic. From the National Archives he's unearthed rarely seen black-and-white photos of Bangkok taken from the late 19th century. These are displayed alongside images of the same locations taken a century later. The result is a powerful depiction of the changes that western modernity has wrought over the last century.

Rather than a comprehensive history of the city, the book sketches the birth of modern  Bangkok from a European viewpoint. Much of the information is gleaned from documents of westerners based in the city around a century ago. Unlike Thai sources, which tend to reflect history from above (the elite), these foreign flaneurs, like van Beek himself, were intrigued by the life of the street. And they had cameras.

 The author has done a great job matching the old locales pictured with their vastly changed modern equivalents. Van Beek took it upon himself to hunt down the public squares, intersections, bridges, old shophouses, canals and tram tracks pictured in the grainy black-and-white photos, spending days at a time trekking through Bangkok's "labyrinthine streets and lanes". Aided by serendipitous discoveries and chance encounters with helpful Thais, the targeted landmarks began to emerge.

 Being Bangkok's highest point in the 19th century, Phu Khao Thong - the Golden Mount near Pan Fah Bridge - became the most popular spot for capturing a bird's-eye view of the city. In one photo, taken in the 1880s, the view looking north from atop the man-made mount reveals two canals converging right at the mount's base. Straddling the canals is a village of wooden houses with tall trees and boathouses. The famous Rajdoemnern Avenue is nowhere in sight - it didn't exist until 1900. Van Beek's own photograph of the same spot in 1999 reveals rows of concrete residential structures lining both sides of the roads that have replaced those canals.

 Another striking reminder of old Bangkok's waterborne lifestyle is the shot of the Grand Palace taken a century ago from across the Chao Phya River in Thonburi. The riverine highway is pictured jammed with clipper ships, ocean-going steamers, rice boats and sampans, some flying red flags resplendent with the image of a white elephant, Siam's national flag at the time.

 The picture of old Bangkok that gradually emerges is of a gigantic sheet of rice paddies, with creases of urban development alongside pockets of wilderness. Water is everywhere, and the Chao Phya flows in the background through page after page.

 The teeming activity on the river, the city's lifeblood, pays testimony to the country's thriving commerce throughout the 1800s. In Van Beek's own words, it was Siam's highway to the world. It also offered links to northern towns like Chiang Mai, a week-long journey by boat.

 From the 19th century onwards, old Bangkok was both the centre of royal power and commerce, and home to the Chinese and European communities that grew up along New Road.

 Paved roads began to appear around 1900, when a few hundred crawling cars shared the byways with electric trams, rickshaws, bullock carts, omnibuses, galloping ponies and bare-breasted pedestrians. The photos show no sign of traffic jams, though the problem of footpaths overrun by merchants does seem to date from that period.

 "The lower classes make use of the pavement as annexes to their houses and shops," one foreign visitor complained.

 Then, as now, Bangkokians were nothing if not fun loving: here, they're pictured whiling away afternoons in gambling dens, smoking opium or playing chess. We see Thai-style bars set up in huts or shacks and bookshops lining back streets. Their upmarket equivalents were to be found on New Road, the European quarter. It's easy to pick out details in many of the photos' backgrounds - the air must have been cleaner then, as the author observes.

 The new boulevards set the stage for class consciousness. The elite, travelling in style in sumptuous Victorian carriages, wore suits and bowlers while ordinary Thais and immigrants (including Burmese and Lao) went topless or wore sarongs. You identified yourself as rich by wearing a suit or western-style hat. Or you could tote a camera and perhaps stroll into a stylish bar on that fashionable New Road.

 In this de-cluttered version of the city, wats and government offices are set back from roads and canals. Our own Bangkok of concrete blocks, power-line spaghetti, murky canals and stray dogs is still decades away in the future.

 As the century progressed, ribbons of trees were swept away as the roads were widened. Bangkok's transformation from a wooden city to a concrete jungle has continued apace, with "the pillars for the Skytrain turning hallowed streets into tunnels".

 But the before-and-after contrasts aren't just confined to his book; van Beek is fascinated by a modern Bangkok in which those concrete Skytrain tunnels share space with tree-shaded streets like Phrachan Road near Thammasat University.

 Still, anyone who thumbs through these pages will find it hard not to pine for the good old days.