I Grew Up Alongside Bangkok’s Canals — Here is How Its Wealthy Historical past Connects to the Ahead-thinking Metropolis

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 the town at the moment, it’s simple 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 isn’t removed from water. Canals, or khlong, lace the land, as they’ve because the fifteenth century, once they had been used to convey water to rice fields, farmers to markets, and folks to at least one 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 would possibly discover taxi drivers kicking a sepak takraw, a woven ball, over a internet strung between phone poles, or be drawn to a road market, the place I’d get my sugar repair from rambutan and rose apple. 

Guests to Thailand can nonetheless discover that outdated lifestyle on a canal tour of the Thon Buri district. On a current Sunday afternoon, I joined a bunch of associates 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 identified 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 everyone in my era remembers studying on the impressionable age of six. It taught us how you can learn Thai whereas concurrently educating 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 at the moment’s metropolis dwellers, an authentically Thai expertise most likely isn’t a visit down Reminiscence Canal, however a day on the mall.

Lots of the waterways have now been stuffed in, paved over, or hidden from view. Thailand’s usually unhealthy monitor report of historic preservation implies that the substitute of the outdated by the brand new will not be unusual. A buddy lately lamented that in Thailand, not like Japan or India, we don’t have a tradition of sporting conventional costume aside from particular occasions. That is partly a results of the Thai courtroom, which adopted European customs and costume on the finish of the nineteenth century to seem extra “civilized” to Western powers. 

However much more up to date expressions of “Thainess,” just like the nation’s distinctive Modernist buildings (impressed by Brutalism however incorporating Thai motifs), are disappearing. A current instance: the closure of the Scala Cinema, Bangkok’s final stand-alone movie show. For its ultimate present, Scala screened Cinema Paradiso, the story of an outdated 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 excellent play. Now they, too, are gone.

However a metropolis that’s unhealthy at preservation can be proving to be good at reinvention. When it opened inside a renovated Chinatown shop-house, Tep Bar started welcoming stay bands, specializing in teams that make fashionable 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 the town. The Home on Sathorn, first a non-public residence and later the Russian embassy, is now a restaurant and occasion area. Final 12 months noticed the enlargement 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 crops 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 be taught 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 simple identification with these fictional kids. Once I did be taught to learn, it was by way of Japanese Doraemon comics, which, as a result of I first encountered them in translation, I assumed had been Thai. Doraemon will not be fully cat or robotic, not fully of our time or his personal, and perhaps up to date Thainess is like that, not fully one factor or one other. 

One in all Doraemon’s chaotic devices is a handkerchief that may make new issues outdated or outdated 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 widespread 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 in the course of the monsoon months, from June by way of September. However the low season additionally means guests will doubtless discover discounted lodging and might simply get in to top-rated eating places and widespread websites. Simply be ready to pivot: Downpours may impression boat service and island entry, and even trigger resort closures.

A model of this story first appeared within the December 2024/January 2025 subject of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Go With the Circulate.”