Bangkok (Lonely Planet) - Andrew Burke [19]
Bangkok’s oldest residential and business district fans out along the Chao Phraya River between Phra Pin Klao bridge and Hualamphong station. Largely inhabited by the descendants of Chinese residents who moved out of Ko Ratanakosin to make way for royal temples and palaces in the early 19th century, Thais refer to the neighbourhood as Yaowarat (for the major avenue bisecting the neighbourhood) or by the English term ‘Chinatown’. One of the most atmospheric streets in this area is Th Plaeng Nam, where several Chinese shophouses, some nearly a century old, can be found.
In the 19th century, Chinese architecture began exerting a strong influence on the city. In Talat Noi (Little Market), a riverside neighbourhood just south of the older Yaowarat, Chinese entrepreneur Chao Sua Son founded a market where larger riverboats could offload wholesale goods to city merchants. Chao Sua Son’s house (Map) still stands, a rare example of traditional Chinese architecture in Thailand.
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BANGKOK BUILDINGS WORTH BUILDING
Much of today’s Bangkok is faceless concrete, but a handful of structures stand out for their grace, age or uniqueness.
Bangkok Bank (Map; cnr Soi Wanit 1 & Th Mangkon, Chinatown) Thailand was never colonised, but you'd be forgiven for thinking so at the sight of this handsome Thai-European building located deep in Bangkok’s Chinatown district.
Sala Chalermkrung (Map; 66 Th Charoen Krung, Chinatown) This theatre, dating back to 1933, is one of the few surviving examples of Thai Art Deco.
Chao Sua Son’s House (Map; Talat Noi, Chinatown) Possibly the only remaining, courtyard-style traditional Chinese house in Bangkok; located near San Jao Sien Khong.
Thai Wah II (Map; Th Sathon Tai, Sathon) This 60-storey, wafer-thin tower with a giant hole through the centre is probably better known as the Banyan Tree Hotel. You can see it up close via a drink at the hotel's rooftop Moon Bar.
Sukhothai Hotel (Map; Th Sathon Tai, Sathon) Designed by American architect Edward Tuttle, the Sukhothai’s design gracefully straddles 13th-century Thailand and the contempory western world.
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Talat Noi is a cultural and geographic bridge between the almost exclusively Chinese area of Yaowarat to the immediate north and the almost exclusively Western – historically speaking, if not in present-day Bangkok – district of European trading houses and embassies to the immediate south. A portion of Talat Noi was given over to Portuguese residents, who in 1787 built the Holy Rosary Church (Map), the capital’s oldest place of Christian worship. Originally assembled of wood, after an 1890 fire it was replaced with brick and stucco in the Neo-Gothic stucco style. Today the interior is graced with Romanesque stained-glass windows, gilded ceilings and a very old, life-sized Jesus effigy carried in the streets during Easter processions.
South of Talat Noi at least two or more miles of the Chao Phraya riverside was once given over to such international mercantile enterprises as the East Asiatic Co, Chartered Bank, British Dispensary, Bombay Burmah Trading Co, Banque de l’Indochine, Messrs Howarth Erskine, as well as the Portuguese, French, Russian, British, American, German and Italian embassies. For the era, the well-financed architecture for this area – known then, as today, as Bang Rak – was Bangkok’s most flamboyant, a mixture of grand neoclassical fronts, shuttered Victorian windows and Beaux Arts ornamentation. Some of these old buildings have survived to the present. All have been obscured by more modern structures along Charoen Krung Rd, so the best way to appreciate them as a group is from the river itself, by boat.
Thais began mixing traditional Thai architecture with European forms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as exemplified by Bangkok’s Vimanmek Teak Mansion, the Author’s Wing of the Oriental Hotel (Mandarin Oriental;), the Chakri Mahaprasat next to Wat Phra Kaew,