Thailand's ebullient capital is many things, but it is not beautiful. True, there are many lovely things in it, but it can no more be considered comely than can Tokyo, a city it in some ways resembles. Among the reasons for this is that it is simply too vital for the kind of regularity that is said to lead to beauty.
Consider the regulated capitals such as Washington, Paris, Ottowa -- ordered, rational cities with beautifully planned vistas, architecture that speaks in stately, measured tones advising prescribed civic endeavor. Then turn to other capitals and notice the difference. Bangkok, in the words of its eminent resident-historian William Warren, "has a long history of shrugging off efforts at sensible planning, one that is, paradoxically, a major part of its appeal."
There have been a few attempts at city planning. King Chulalongkorn, impressed by the urban achievements he saw during a trip to Europe, returned and built a great boulevard, Ratchadamnoen, inspired by the Mall in London and the Champs Elysees in Paris. It is still there, but it and the surrounding Dusit area did not become a model for a new and better Bangkok.
Warren offers one of the reasons. "Most of the buildings are now used as offices for the government and the military, and the pavements are largely empty after dark." In contrast, the rest of the city is filled with vitality, often as nocturnal as not. Civic intentions, rules, regulations, all are defeated by this effervescence.
Old Bangkok had firmly established a pattern that no area would ever be just one thing -- even the upscale Sukhumwit district never became purely residential. "The grandest millionaire's mansion, with gilded gates and a vaguely Roman facade, may have an open-fronted noodle shop next door, and next to that a private hospital."
Older houses are constantly being transformed into restaurants. "Once, I went to dinner at a new Italian place and only after some time realized that I was sitting in the bedroom of someone I knew 20 years ago."
Warren, first arriving in the city in 1959, early witnessed the fate of attempts at civic respectability. "Taxi drivers were technically required by law to wear a hat, which they usually hung over the rear-view mirror."
It is just such naturalness that makes Bangkok such an invigorating and vital place. And it is this that still offers the foreign resident or visitor the authenticity of Thailand, that distinctive combination of the conservative and the progressive, the traditional and the innovative, both mixed with a natural pragmaticism that is completely winning.
Warren gives us examples. There remains the sincere reverence for the royal family. Even though King Chulalongkorn long ago proposed that crouching and crawling should give way to standing and walking, "even in today's democratic society, it is rare to see any Thai head above that of the monarch, and if total prostration is no longer common, there is still a good deal of crawling in the presence of royalty."
There remains a touching fidelity to Thai standards. In this land where the pachyderm was revered, the report of the first Thai mission to London remarked of its audience with Queen Victoria that "her eyes, complexion, and above all her bearing, are those of a beautiful and majestic white elephant."
Hence, too, the still-felt rancor at the traducement of King Rama IV in "The King and I" in all of its various versions. "Thais have long been angered by the injustice that has resulted in a belief that he was a somewhat comic barbarian who kept a harem and learned the rudiments of civilized behavior from a virtuous schoolmarm."
At the same time, there is a great unchanneled energy that pragmatically avails itself of the new and the novel, which puts personal survival first, and which finds many a way into a better life. There are many reasons for such a perceived paradox, and Warren writes about one of them.
"One reason, I think, that much of Bangkok has so little visual charm and such a generally functional atmosphere is that it is really a southern Chinese creation." Chinese came early to what was then Siam and assimilated in a very successful manner. "A result of this has been the steady decline of anything purely Thai. Except for the Buddhist temples and the Grand Palace hardly a single classical Thai structure remains": in contrast, say, to a typical village of central or northern Thailand.
Warren lists some of his observations. The high walls that surround private houses, the taste for ostentatious display, "the indifference to community affairs (any proposed group effort to clean up a neglected public street or polluted canal is regarded as eccentric if not downright lunatic), the tendency to shout even in casual conversations and (on a more positive note) the drive and energy behind most successful businesses -- all of these are Chinese, not Thai."
One of the qualities of Bangkok, then, is this successful amalgam of contrary means -- one stiffening the other, one refining the other. Warren's is the first book, I believe, to make this a part of the definition of the city. With his very adroit use of historical sources, his straightforward view, his wit and his lucid style, he has written the best book available about one of the most winningly contradictory cities in the world.
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