PREFACE

By Lawrence Osborne, author of Bangkok Days and The Glass Kingdom.

Read the full preface below the photo.

“Bangkok looks like it’s been Photoshopped,” Philip Cornwel-Smith writes in a chapter devoted to the subject of ‘Colour.’ “No pink could be that shocking, no gold that yellow. The glare of the sun dials up the brilliance, and casts deep blinding shadows.” It would have been an apposite opening for this entire book, a brilliant and polychromatic look at Bangkok done in a way that no other writer has attempted. Consider the multitude of chapters and themes. There is a section called ‘Flow’ devoted to walking, cycling and ‘Custom Transit.’ There is one devoted to ‘Roots’ which considers Isaan migrant art and regional rites, and one given over to ‘Sound’ in which our writer mulls the questions of birdsong and Bang-Pop. From the strangeness of panoramas and Kudi Jeen to the nature of suffering and its assuagement through Healing Tubs and ‘Body Collectors,’ he turns Bangkok into a vast tapestry of meditations on the nature of cities.

Since writing Very Thai in 2005 Cornwel-Smith has become the city’s preeminent mythographer in the English language. Who else but an outsider would be able to muster such an eternally-bemused concentration when trying to unravel the meanings of things which he didn’t absorb unconsciously as a child? “By night,” he writes in the same chapter on Colour, “the white-balance must be set to ‘fluorescent’. ” The city’s signature hue, he tells us, is green, after the god Indra, while formal transit has “more jazzy stripes than Paul Smith socks.” This makes for many a surprise.

So begins a charming and unexpected detour into the mythology and symbolism of colour, an element which we long-time residents see every day but which we either don’t understand or cannot decode for ourselves. So it is with every chapter, whether it be on scent, taste, design, the nocturnal life, transport, flowers, the supernatural, or merely the perplexing enigmas of backpackers. The city is re-seen, re-imagined as a vast complex of signs which requires the informal encyclopedia which he has written.

I didn’t know, for example, that Bangkok post-boxes are red because of the British, nor that coloured stacking chairs are an urban icon featured at the Thai pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. I did know that black was the colour of Rahu, god of the eclipse, that the ubiquitous Bangkokian taste for “a yellowish alloy of gold” comes from the Chinese and that the days of week are associated with the colours of Vedic astrology. But I didn’t know that Thais prefer the “mintier tones” of Fuji film over the “warmth of Kodak moments” or that in the late 20th century, “female officewear favoured synthetic dyes and dual-tone clashes as eye-popping as the chorus lines of folk music concerts.” What one feels unconsciously, Cornwel-Smith puts into a fine and sensual prose that provides the reader with a little ‘discovery.’

He is not afraid to speculate large. During the above-mentioned meditation on ‘Flow,’ he observes of the city’s maddening movements in their constant (and confusing) ebb: “The commotion is not just on the surface. In an ancient creation myth, thep (angels) released the elixir of life by Churning the Sea of Milk. Krungthep’s liveliness comes from constant churn; it reflects the fact that the city is structurally unstable at deeper levels. Things that most countries consider permanent, shift with surprising ease in Bangkok.”

This is both fanciful and true, something again that one feels subconsciously, and yet it is not something that would occur to one automatically. Very Bangkok is filled with such bright gems, as if the writer had decided to deliberately imitate and evoke the glittering ‘dragon-scale’ ceramic armour of Wat Pho, with hundreds of little pieces assembled to form a whole. As it turns out, this is an ideal method for combining whimsy, erudition, a sensual precision of language and a deep interest in Bangkok’s almost-forgotten historical past. “Memory gaps,” he writes in his section devoted to ‘Memory’, “are one cause of Bangkok’s many mysteries, which get glossed over or spawn multiple theories.” And this same chapter, subtitled “Remembering to forget,” begins with this marvelous miniparagraph: “The last Lao flute maker of Thonburi folds his wrinkled limbs under an anglepoise lamp and drills into a bamboo tube gripped by his feet.”

Of all cities, Bangkok is perhaps the hardest to re-imagine in terms of its past, because so much of that past has been atomised by what Cornwel-Smith calls “auto-amnesia.” We all know that old houses, sometimes beauties, are regularly demolished because they are thought to be inhabited by ghosts. But the malady is deeper even than that. Against this willful collective destruction of the past – which sits oddly with a professed love of ‘Thainess’ – it is possible that at this point only the written word can serve as a bastion. Very Bangkok, I think, sets out to be just that. And as such, a future reader, living in his or her air-conditioned nightmares, might well turn to it to find out what hand-made flutes, mangosteen-coloured taxis, street food and spirit doctors were all about.