One early morning in July just after sunrise, I watched as Thai monks in saffron robes glided serenely around a ‘soi’ with a pack of stray dogs trailing from behind, before disappearing at the next bend.
I could not make out what that moment presented to me, but I found myself suddenly thinking about the Buddhist cycle of karma while wandering around the backstreets of Bangkok.
Then I thought about my cat and felt uneasy. I had entrusted the creature to the hands of another being while I blithely sailed off for the entire summer. I am told that karma keeps a better record than any airline does.
Should my cat decide to paw the great wheel of causes and consequences, would I, in the afterlife, find myself amongst the stray dogs I encountered only moments earlier? Either waiting for the next benevolent passer-by or eagerly scratching at my own fleas.
As joss sticks were lit at the nearby temple and scented incense drifted through the courtyards, my thoughts turned to another subject as I pondered whether places could also be reborn.
Not rebuilt or reconstructed, but reborn in the way Buddhism sees life itself. Every ending, a new beginning. Where existence is never final. It transforms, transitions and returns only to inhabit another form or shape. Loss is rarely absolute.
A flower offered at a shrine withers and is replaced with a fruit the next day. A tree falls and its parts are repurposed to build a spirit house. A lane of roadside hawker stalls turned into one giant shopping complex. The river empties itself out to sea and returns to nourish the rice fields up north with rains each season. Politicians go, shed their skins and plot a comeback by the next election on a new glistening promise. Boys become ladies, teak wood houses to steel, canals into highways and anything in between is waiting for another rebirth.
In a country where impermanence is welcomed instead of mourned, transitions are celebrated more often than scorned, as it is often the case elsewhere; it seems Bangkok has lived many lives.
My past travels to Thailand’s capital revealed a city trying to outrun its own memory. I stumbled upon endless loops of mega construction one after the other. On every visit, a new glass tower appears, a stretch of elevated rail line materializes, another neighborhood is gentrified and cranes become a permanent feature in the city’s dizzying skyline.
On my recent trip to Bangkok, I came looking for its old self, convinced that I may have arrived a little too late. One gradually feels that the old city has vanished beneath the weight of its own futuristic ambition. Coming across The Siam, my doubts dissipated as I witnessed a surviving refuge of how Bangkok remembers itself fondly.
In Search Of The LOST WORLD
Travelers of finer sensibilities and pilgrims have come searching for the lost Bangkok. To find it, one does not rely on the power of imagination or go far beyond into the bowels of the city, one just simply follows the river upstream, where the swell and the current mellow, and the mighty Chao Phraya begins to hum an ancient tune.
It is here in the quiet and historic enclave of Dusit, that I found myself stepping into The Siam hotel. In Google’s terminology, it is a luxury 5 star hotel. In a practical sense, it may well be. But calling it such, falls short of what this architecture of rebirth represents.
“I do think that life is about experiences and memories,” tells Krissada Sukosol Clapp, the Thai movie star and the brainchild of The Siam hotel.
“If The Siam could provide a beautiful memory for someone, maybe for having revealed a bit of Thai history and our way of life, even if it’s just a brief thought after a year or two down the line…then I know that my job was done.”
If not shooting a film or writing a new album, he occupies himself by coming up with a whole new list of pieces from his collection to be displayed at the hotel which he does twice a year.
“There are over 1,000 memorabilia at The Siam and, absolutely, I will look out for them until the day I die. I will take care of every piece the best I can until a new owner arrives (sounds like a Patek Philippe ad I know).”
As someone who studied anthropology, it is easy to understand why Krissada has a soft spot for connecting culture both past and present, people and places, as well as fragments of social history along with objects receding from collective memory.
One is also inclined to reasonably think that he, as his second nature, is a collector in the purest sense of the word—not merely of worldly accoutrements, but the textured stories of a vanishing world.
“You gotta respect history, who comes before us.”
The Siam, the way it appeared to me, is a keeper of a sacred passage, the watchful guardian of time where the spirit of old Bangkok has been gathered, tended, remembered, embraced to take a new form before its next cycle of rebirth.
“We are only in transition, just passing through. I’m outta here in 30 years but the antiques will live forever. Well…that is until someone careless breaks them and then they’ll join me in the afterlife!” he quips.
The Thais have a way of infusing fun and joy into all aspects of life. It’s called sanuk. It seems only natural for a country whose inner essence is linked to Buddhism.
A guest arrives expecting typical riverside accommodation. But walk through its corridors or around the galleries, idle along its courtyards or terraces and one stumbles into vintage maps and newspaper clippings worn by time.
In one corner are maritime relics, religious sculptures sitting side by side with tribal pieces and antique cameras that have once captured the world through inquisitive lenses. Further afield and scattered throughout the property, Chinese porcelain from a dynasty long gone, colonial curiosities, museum-quality artifacts, vinyl records and Sukosol Clapp family’s personal possessions. An amalgamation of oddities to say the very least, the discarded and the beautiful being looked after, given safe spaces to thrive and rescued from complete disappearance.
Each is its own fragment of an unfinished narrative. Nothing is out of place or seems lost. Every object has simply been reborn in quieter forms occupying the land that Krissada’s late grandfather took ownership of in 1960.
The riverside estate sits at arm’s length with the country’s royal family compounds and century-old temples that open toward the river where Thailand’s history arrived before it came by road. This is the Bangkok that rarely appears on maps.
The more I venture into the hotel, it becomes apparent that unlike other hotels that emerged from a conventional hospitality blueprint, this property came about as something far more personal: part obsession and part argument against forgetting.
Take its Choin Thai restaurant, which comprises three traditional teak houses originally built in 1959 by Jim Thompson, the American man of mystery whose career in Bangkok began in the shadows of the OSS (a.k.a CIA in modern times), before surrendering to the enchantments of the old city.
Guests partake breakfast under the shade of the very same teak houses and savor definitive Thai dishes for dinner watching river taxis making a splash as barges drift by in slow motion.
Come dusk, they climb up to the second floor and mingle with Thailand’s high society, wandering writers and diplomats nurse their woes and nostalgia at the upstairs Gatsby-inspired Deco Bar & Bistro with live performances during a jazz night.
One might say that jazz seems geographically unrelated to the city’s deep cultural heritage but any ‘farang’ and self-exiled expats who have stayed long enough in the country are well aware that the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej was an accomplished jazz saxophonist fueling the appetite for national sophistication. Krissada’s mother, Kamala, a famous jazz singer herself and the much-admired Sukosol family siblings known for their affinity for music and preservation aspects of Thai heritage, have long occupied a singular place within the country’s cultural landscape.
Under the velvety glow of Art-deco lamps and resolute restraint from a mocktail, there I was imagining a scene where Jay Gatsby would emerge anytime now and I was fast becoming the wide-eyed Daisy Buchanan. A few more tipples ‘sans alcool’, still no Jay Gatsby or the ghost of F.Scot Fitzgerald to be seen.
Instead, I have spotted Bill Bensley’s proudly maximalist candor and creation. The American interior designer and Bangkok-based artist who helped Krissada bring his hotel vision to life conjuring an atmosphere that every traveler might find themselves uttering one of Daisy Buchanan’s famous lines: “I’m p-p-paralyzed with happiness”, as in the 2013 The Great Gatsby movie.
The Siam has a habit of not showing off luxury, but rather assuming it. Every room, spacious as they come, is treated like a theatre set. The large bed takes center stage with objets d’art, curated and thoughtfully put together as props. Then there are the dedicated butlers always ready to spring into action whether booking a spa or session with the hotel’s resident Sak Yant tattoo master. The only hotel in Bangkok to have one in its property in addition to the boxing ring that doubles as a Muay Thai training pad.
During my last day at the hotel, I took the complimentary shuttle boat service with no port of call in mind. I watched communities take part in the everyday ritual and the many lives thriving along the city’s left and right banks. Temple roofs shimmer and from time to time, attendants peer from a noble’s shaded veranda.
Further down stream, under the concrete bridges that link the other half of the city, long-tail boats cross paths with luxury yachts leaving a wake that may have witnessed Ayutthaya’s fall and Bangkok’s ascent as Siam’s modern capital. The new world whizzed by and the old, lost Bangkok, receded in sight.
The Thais have a way of infusing fun and joy into all aspects of life. It’s called sanuk. It seems only natural for a country whose inner essence is linked to Buddhism. At The Siam, it felt very “sanuk”.
My phone pinged and the lady that was looking after my cat had just sent a photograph. In it, was my cat happily submitting to a pampered brushing. It looks like my cat’s karmic reckoning may have to wait for another day. Sanuk.
There are few places in the world that preserve intimate dialogue between the past and present and even fewer that allow travelers to take part in the conversation rather than observe. Some exist in plain sight while others are concealed by the river’s ancient currents.
The young skipper motioned to me and in a very Thai way, folded his hands as if to pray and said, ‘last stop.’ From a distance, I could hear the faint sound of bells marking a new cycle and the rebirth of another day in the Buddhist passage of time. ✍🏻
Get to know Bangkok and beyond. Start your Thai journey and adventure:
>> By The River Chao Phraya, I Sat Down and Mused
0 Comments