INTRODUCTION

How does Bangkok sound, smell, taste, look, move and feel?

On the west bank of the river at Thonburi, the hubbub of Prannok Market funnels into a typical soi (lane) so tight its awnings almost touch. Motorbikes trundle through a path narrowed further by the shophouse residents putting out tables for selling portions of piquant curry or packets of sweet squidgy bread. Wending past seafood restaurants, cheap apartments and a communal washing machine, the soi opens into a rare public space at the pier of Wat Rakhang. This ancient royal temple is named for its bells, which tinkle in the riverside breeze. There you can take in the most historic panorama of the Chao Phraya River. It’s the prime vantage point to ponder the metropolis explored in this book.

A quarter millennium ago, the founder of today’s Thai capital enjoyed this same view. The teak stilt house where Chao Phraya Chakri once lived still stands at the side of the temple. Through its trapezoid windows, he gazed east across the river from the short-lived capital of Thonburi to the Teochiu Chinese settlement at Bangkok. There in 1782, Chakri would found his new dynastic capital and rename it Krungthep, the City of Angels. 

In place of the Teochiu seafarers’ shrine – shifted downstream to today’s Chinatown at Sampeng – Chakri built his golden-spired Grand Palace. Its crenellated walls were for two centuries fringed by the raft houses of an amphibious city pulsating with market trade. Today they’re fringed by tourists, who make Bangkok the most visited city in the world.  

 The river is why this city exists. Silt-swollen waters deposited the alluvial delta on which it was built. Riverine trade was the reason it became a customs post and grew into a wealthy port. For centuries, Bangkokians lived above waterways that linked every citizen by boat and supported a water-based culture. It’s an invented landscape, sculpted over eons. This stretch of river is actually a flood-widened canal, cut in 1542 to shorten the journey around the ear-shaped meanders of what are now Khlong’s Bangkok Noi and Bangkok Yai – the canals of Little Bangkok and Big Bangkok. 

The pontoon at Wat Rakhang Pier bobs in wash from the incessant boat traffic that ploughs back and forth. Cross-river ferries dodge commuter expressboats, hotel shuttles and longtail tour boats that dart down the remaining canals of this one-time ‘water city.’ After decades of car-biased planning had turned Bangkok’s back on the waterways, the river is once again a fast way to move around this traffic-jammed city. Come nightfall, dinner cruisers bombard the old riverside with the bass of their open-air discos and their contours outlined in piped LEDs. 

Upstream, cars shunt to a standstill along the Rama VIII Bridge, its suspension cables arrayed like a golden harp. Downstream looms the original Thonburi landmark, Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, where King Taksin founded a new Siamese capital in 1767 after the fall of Ayutthaya. Near its five slender towers, the first tunnel under the river links the new and old capitals through mass rapid transit into a hi-tech megalopolis. The Chao Phraya just about remains a natural habitat. At temple piers, thrashing catfish gulp the pellets sprinkled by sightseers. A rising tide returns vegetal islets of water hyacinth back upstream, with white storks perched on the buoyant weed. An eight-footlong monitor lizard swims past, propelled by muscular tail-swishes. Its forked blue tongue darts out to taste the flavours of the mudbrown estuary. These waters have witnessed the tides of history. In the 1893 Paknam Incident, French gunboats anchored here to threaten Siam, which narrowly averted colonisation. In 1951, the then prime minister swam to the riverbank from captivity aboard the navy’s flagship, RTNS Sri Ayudhya, which was sunk by the army during one of Bangkok’s many coups d’etat. In 1976, demonstrators fled to this shore from a massacre at Thammasat University by swimming across its treacherous mainstream. This landscape of layered historic meaning is now being shorn of its diverse old communities and streamlined into a glorified monument park for mass tourism and national spectacle.  

 The river quietens after 10pm, but in peak hours it takes a momentous event to quell this aquatic hubbub. In 2002, no boats were allowed on the river one rush hour, so that an audience on the terrace of the Oriental Hotel could hear José Carreras sing arias in the black velvet air. In 2003, all traffic in the city centre, including on the river, was stopped for the APEC inter-governmental summit. 

The river goes uncannily silent in auspicious years for the occasional Royal Barge Processions and rehearsals, for which Wat Rakhang has the clearest view. Eerie chants of boat songs sung by the naval rowers precede the flotilla of 55 gilded barges, with prows carved into mythical beasts: the Supannahong swan, the naga serpent, Hanuman the monkey general astride a canon. Barge rehearsals are like a backstage reveal, minus the embroidered canopies, gold-piped scarlet tunics and the peacock feathers used by the cox to signal. With the oarsmen propelling the undecorated barges in sport-hued T-shirts, you can see the effort and structures that are obscured by costumed pageantry when the King rides the Supannahong to deliver robes to the monks of Wat Arun. 

Surveying the scene from the Wat Rakhang pier is a giant statue of its legendary former abbot, Luang Phor Toh. Born when the city    was six, Toh is renowned for advising kings and making Thailand’s most prized amulets. While the intent of Buddhism is to overcome sensory urges, the contrarian Toh taught that sensory knowledge can be a source of insight. For Bangkokians, nothing matters more than to ‘gain face,’ for the self, this city, or the nation. While a face mirror fuels the ego, Toh urged us to use a krajok hok dan – a six-panel mirror. As well as the front, it reflects less flatteringly from the back, the left, the right, below and above, so we get multi-faceted views of our true nature. Toh also paired each reflection to a sensory organ: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and heart-mind. To understand reality, we need all our faculties to perceive every angle. This book aims to be a krajok hok dan for Bangkok. 

Inspiration for the cover comes from a Western version of a six-sided mirror: the kaleidoscope. Each time you shake or turn a kaleidoscope tube, the translucent shapes inside form a fresh pattern, only illuminated from within rather than reflected out. Bangkok is both a city of inward enlightenment, and of outward dazzle, but not straightforward reflection. That’s why I’ve sought to provide a reflective guide. 

Multiple perspectives are vital, because Bangkok is a story with an Official Version – plus many other versions that often lack voice. ‘Thainess’ is best understood as an ideology, a set of values about what should be, so using it as a description blurs distinctions between things considered proper to present, and improper things that should be hidden. This city’s held in tenuous balance between its informal impulses and the forces of formality. But it’s more nuanced than simply chaos versus order, for informal Bangkok has hidden order, while formal Bangkok is often a cause of the chaos. 

This formal/informal juxtaposition is embodied by Luang Phor Toh. An advisor to kings, he’s blessed with a memorial. To the public, he’s a monk magician best known for exorcising Bangkok’s infamously lovelorn ghost, Nang Nak, whose jealous spirit Toh then sealed in a jar. She, and he, are worshipped at another temple downstream in what’s now the suburb of Phrakhanong. The canalside shrine there is profuse with offerings of dresses and dolls, plus mechanical devices for making merit with donated coins. Conscripts flock there for Nak’s blessing, while fortune tellers read the devotees’ moles, and gamblers rub powder into wood to divine lucky numbers for the lottery. Which is Bangkok’s real character? 

Wat Rakhang stands in Wang Lang, an area named for a long vanished palace that’s now associated with its restaurants of fiery Southern Thai food. Southerners live in one the neighbouring enclaves, nearby migrants from the north, Isaan (northeast) and China, who each maintain ethnic traditions as subcultures under the national identity of ‘Thainess.’ Morning and evening, the area buzzes with markets and streetlife in an expression of how Bangkok’s informal and formal cultures coexist. 

 Central to this dilemma is to gauge how ‘Bangkokness’ differs from ‘Thainess.’ This is a city with a split personality, a past life, and hidden histories. The capital is the epitome of Thainess – which it imposes on the indigenous cultures of the regions – and its antithesis, with urban qualities of its own. So much of what people see as typical Thainess is actually the Bangkok version. In that sense Thainess is Bangkokness. 

To deduce what’s going on, it helps to be specific about labels. Thais use the formal term, Krungthep, which is loaded with allusions to sacredness under its Hinduised origin myth. Its former name Bangkok was kept for international use. I mostly refer to Bangkok due to that foreign familiarity – and for another reason. As ‘Bangkok’ is a word from the indigenous culture, it feels better suited to discussing the streetlife, subcultures and everyday ways. ‘Krungthep,’ being the prestigious title, makes it hard to differentiate the city’s informal lifestyle. When I refer to Krungthep, it’s to explain something about the formal culture. Likewise, I refer mostly to ‘Thailand’ and ‘Thai,’ but use ‘Siam’ and ‘Siamese’ when explaining the pre-modern era. 

Bangkok can’t shake off some very stubborn reputations, whether lurid or precious. Those clichés get hardened by the hyper ways the city gets portrayed through exoticism or hagiography or innuendo. Over 25 years of living here, I’ve encountered many Bangkoks: formal and informal, traditional and indie, high society and slum. In a land that micro-manages how it’s seen, this book treats those multiple angles as valid. Very Bangkok, like the intensifier ‘very’ in its name, brings undercurrents to the fore. Bangkok is all these things, but with added sugar, plus extra chilli. Bangkok is extremely very. 

You can dip into Very Bangkok at any point, as its chapters (marked in bold) deal with self-contained topics. In sequence, the book’s three sections echo the stages of familiarity with a place. Upon first impression, Bangkok affects us on instinctual levels, so the first half of the book, SENSES, conveys our bodily experience of the city. Delving deeper reveals how the city works, so the core of the book, HEART, goes into the citizens’ values, networks and lifestyles. In reflection upon the nature of this place, the closing section, FACE, unpacks how locals and outsiders interpret and represent Bangkok. 

Senses

Bangkokians live with startling juxtapositions that outsiders struggle to process. Unpacking those contradictions is harder than re-stating clichéed judgments that Bangkok is chaotic, bizarre or inexplicably Oriental. Nor is all of it made clear by official Thainess, which is more a set of instructions on how to behave, rather than a ’secret decoder ring’ for Bangkokness. To ‘read’ what makes Bangkok unique, we need to make sense of our senses. 

 We think first of the ‘big five’ senses that Aristotle listed: ‘Sound,’ ‘Smell,’ ‘Touch,’ ‘Taste’ and sight, the last of which I have recast as the more culturally engaged act of ‘Looking.’ Modernity, especially the 2-D online world, is overly visual and diminishes other senses. Thainess places heightened credence on wider sensory input, as we experience Bangkok through food, massage, herbalism and tonal language. Buddhists believe that the Dharma can be spread not just by scripture and murals, but also through sound by chiming bells, through scent by aromatic offering garlands, and through light by glinting mirror-tile mosaics. 

Luang Phor Toh’s six-panel mirror adds a sixth sense: ‘mind’, which in Thai shares the word jai with ‘heart.’ Hundreds of words and phrases using jai show how Thais think with their ‘heart-mind.’ Out-of-body sensing is part of Bangkok’s character, from kinship and face to karma and past lives, as featured in the ‘Sacred’ and ‘Supernatural’ chapters, as well as the surrender of the senses under ‘Trance.’ I also consider other spiritual outlooks, from ‘Neo-Hindu’ to ‘Muslim-Thai.’ 

 Our senses don’t stop at six. Our bodies have 21 sensory receptors. Bangkok dramatises those such as ‘Colour,’ ‘Balance,’ ‘Direction,’ all of which are subject to particular Thai beliefs. I also touch on the topics of Bangkok’s constricted ‘Space’ and constant ‘Flow.’ If it seems like everything’s going on at once; that’s because when it comes to ‘Time,’ Bangkokians go by many clocks and calendars, as well as ‘rubber time.’ While the city’s embrace of the ’Night’ has much to do with climate, many feel pulled by Bangkok’s most ecstatic sensibility: ‘Libido.’ All this is counterbalanced by an acute sense of pain, which locals consider through the Buddhist frame of ‘Suffering.’ Often Bangkok decisions boil down to one decider: ‘Heat.’ 

 Digital modernity is now imposing itself through many kinds of ‘Sensors.’ Meanwhile genteel elite Thais purge streetlife and nightlife in emulation of sensible, antiseptic Singapore, recoiling from activities that startle the senses: markets, mess, noise, sex, alcohol and staying up late. The rest of the city revels in that bounty of sensory pleasures. 

Heart

Outsiders might see apparent chaos, but Thais order their capital by hidden cultural levers. There’s no fixed set of rules, since even laws are subject to ingrained customs of the hierarchy: connections, beliefs and situational morality. Bangkokians tap a repertoire of mutually understood strategies that are appropriate to the given time and place to ensure ‘social sensitivity.’ 

 In ‘Thainess and the City,’ I explore the awkward position of gritty Thai urban realness within an official ideology that is courtly, religious and rural. Residents show much ambivalence about their hometown, but it’s 

 so tolerant of outsiders that even Western expatriates and Asian diasporas delight in ‘Becoming Bangkokian.’ Its sprawling patchwork of urban villages often juxtapose several ethnic and religious groups, tanakapowdered Burmese cheek by bearded Indian jowl. Many cities have ghettos, but Bangkok packs in four Little Indias, three Portuguese barrios, two Tiny Tokyos, at least five Mon villages, umpteen Muslim medinas, and so many Chinatowns in a hybrid Sino-Thai culture that they get their own chapter, ‘Stirfry.’ Meanwhile, ‘Roots’ shows how internal migrants maintain dual identities. 

 The heart of the Heart section is ‘Community.’ I consider what’s home for each level of status, from mansion, moo ban (housing estate) and condominium down to shophouse, slum and the homeless. While the elite get the most attention in the media, it’s the middle classes that shape today’s shift from traditional ’way of life’ to modern lifestyle. This plays out in the stalls and malls covered in ‘Market,’ which shows the drift from informal shopping to global online consumerism. 

 Within Bangkok’s seniority system, any subculture struggles to find space, whether the highly restricted ‘Youth,’ or the worlds of art, music, design and creativity. Bangkok’s aspiration to be a ‘Creative City’ struggles with older impulses towards patronage and tradition. 

Face

In this status city, being alert to ’saving face’ almost qualifies as a sense. Saving Bangkok’s face is a duty of all Thais, which makes the city receptive to Orientalist exoticism, but averse to its notoriety for sleaze. Visitors arrive with preconceived notions and marketed fantasies that don’t match the reality – a disjoint I explore in ‘Tourist Trappings.’ There is also a disconnect between that reality and the Thais’ image of themselves. As the chapter ‘Memory’ relates, highly selective nostalgia, monuments and notions of heritage are contested by efforts to revive hidden local histories. 

Bangkok had been a word-of-mouth city; in ‘Portrayals,’ I consider how it’s becoming a known city. Global attention can be flattering, but when the gaze turns critical, some claim that “foreigners can’t understand Thainess.” All the above makes Bangkok a great subject for art, film, songs and books, with its own genre of ‘Bangkok Noir’ and dystopian science fiction that imagines a flooded future. In conclusion, ‘Tides’ reviews the overarching themes of order and chaos, formal and informal, through the city’s main physical feature: the river. 

Though each of these senses, Bangkok remains full of surprises. The Bangkok Metropolitan Authority brands this the ’City of Life,’ while striving to remove too much unruly life from the streets. Bangkok’s DNA is both to celebrate and subdue the sensory spark that gives it life. 

A Book About Cities

This is also a book about cities, in which Bangkok is the subject. Thailand became majority urban the same year, 2012, that the world did, so cities are a hot topic. So many people have an interest in understanding how cities work, whether for architecture or design, business or tourism, services or security. Most cities are planned to functional need from ‘objective’ data, or are subject to ideology. Yet Bangkok feels like a mostly happy accident. It seems oblivious to Western aesthetics or systems you can measure – yet it became a world city anyway. 

It may seem unlikely, but some urbanists see in Bangkok’s accommodation of chaos a prototype of a larger world issue about how megacities might develop a ‘messy urbanism.’ Its unplanned sprawl appalls planners, but its gift for flexibility, and ability to morph offers potential coping mechanisms to intractable problems. Despite itself, somehow Bangkok works. 

This is the first comprehensive book on contemporary Bangkok. It took a decade to write and the city has changed radically even during that period. Witnessing this constant change, I have sought to future-proof the book by focusing on the underlying reasons Bangkok is this way. Even as the examples change, Bangkok’s internal dynamics stay consistent as it has morphed from backwater to ASEAN hub to the world’s most visited city. Whatever upheavals occur, it will remain the ultimate city of the senses. 

Translations

To interpret a foreign civilisation I must bridge chasms in custom and language. In the most forensic review of Very Thai, Mingkwan Charoennitniyom wrote her linguistics MA thesis on the myriad ways I’d transliterated 341 Thai terms. As an author, I was flattered; as an editor, I was mortified. It turns out that being inconsistent was helpful; one rigid methodology can’t convey the context and intent, so in this book I’ve given Mingkwan more grist for her mill and gone with whatever works. 

 In transliterating Thai spellings, I’ve largely repeated the Very Thai style, which favours flatter British

European sounds over twangier American vowels. However, I have tried to spell peoples’ names as they do, and to spell place names the most common way found in online maps and search engines. 

Where Things Are

The book has two maps. In the era of online mapping, there’s no point to include listings details, but it’s helpful to point out where mentioned places are located. The maps also note some areas and communities that have an identity, but which aren’t labelled as such on mainstream maps. The front cover fold covers the city centre, while the back cover fold spans the wider metropolis within the outer ringroad. The Greater Bangkok map is tilted with east at the top. That’s for the practical reason that the places mentioned happened to be in a north-south swathe and the cover fold is wide not tall. We aren’t used to seeing the city in that orientation, which jolts us from conventional perceptions. 

 Quotations and data come either from interviews with me, or publications that are listed under Sources. I also include a Bibliography and Acknowledgements of those who’ve helped this book come to fruition. Sorting the city by sense and theme means that many generic topics don’t have dedicated chapters. Some crop up in boxed text, such as markets, nightlife, art, film, music, fashion, gays, design, Chinatown, transit, backpackers, and many of Bangkok’s ethnicities. 

The index also serves as a glossary of Thai terms, and contains some reference data, like dates of reigns and eras. For further information, reviews, and news of talks and events, visit the website www.verybangkok. co.