22 Walks in Bangkok: Exploring the City's Historic Back Lanes and Byways

22 Walks in Bangkok: Exploring the City's Historic Back Lanes and Byways

Kenneth Barrett

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0804843430

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Take a series of unforgettable strolls down the back lanes of historic Bangkok!

Bangkok, Thailand is one of the world's greatest cities and a leading tourist destination, visited by millions each year. But it can be a bewildering place also. First-time visitors, not knowing what to expect, encounter endless boulevards connected by a vast maze of tiny side streets. A stroll down any of these lanes can reveal fascinating surprises—beautiful palaces and mansions, shophouses and shrines, restaurants and markets.

This user-friendly Thailand travel guide helps you discover hidden gems found throughout the city by presenting each neighborhood as a distinct village—explaining how it evolved, and describing its historic landmarks in detail. Travel book author Ken Barrett is a long-time Bangkok resident and experienced journalist, and he introduces the important temples, churches, shrines and mosques in loving detail, sketching their history and distinctive features. The reader is skillfully guided through the old neighborhoods of Bangkok from the center to the periphery, along narrow lanes and byways rarely seen by foreigners.

22 Walks in Bangkok leads the visitor on a unique journey of discovery and enables you to appreciate this fascinating city in new and exciting ways.

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shareholder. Needing more room, he moved into a rented house on Sathorn Road, and then built a small frame-house opposite Lumpini Park. When that became too small, Thompson began searching around for another plot of land, and eventually purchased the plot on the side of the canal. It had once been part of a large estate where an aristocratic family kept a summer palace, but the land had long been parcelled off and sold. Thompson built, or possibly to be more correct, assembled his house here,

Chalerm Lar 56, and it was built in 1908, the name commemorating the fifty-sixth birthday of Rama V, who had built a bridge every year since 1894, out of his own funds, to mark his birthday. It is the fifteenth of the seventeen “Chalerm” bridges built during the king’s reign, the series ceasing with his death, although Rama VI followed the policy for a number of years with the Charoen series, until he ran out of places to build them. Thereafter the king donated birthday funds to hospital

prisoners of war, who were brought down from a holding camp at Bang Kaew in Phitsanulok Province to meet their fate. Quite why Taksin chose the temple for this purpose is unknown. There is, however, nothing to mark the temple’s former notoriety. The original building no longer stands, having been demolished by Rama I, who then had the present structure erected. Off to the side of the temple a royal crematorium was built (it was Siam’s first funeral facility built of concrete) and used until the

enlarged, and decreed that it should be used for cremations and funeral rites. Rama III decided to build a replica of Ayutthaya’s Chedi Phu Khao Thong, the Chedi of the Golden Mountain, in the temple grounds and thus symbolise the city’s standing in Buddhist cosmology. As with the original, it was to be a massive structure, an artificial hill that could be seen from all parts of the city. The records have it that the chedi was to be fifty fathoms in dimension, and the king asked for donations of

looking for support to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and was travelling through Southeast Asia attempting to raise funds, but at that time Zheng was supporting the Chinese emperor, and Sun had little success amongst the Chinese in Bangkok. Chinese secret societies, collectively known in Siam as Hongmen, had started to form in the early days of Bangkok and were influenced by the Chinese fraternal organisation known as Tiandihui, which had originated earlier during the Qing period. By the time Sun

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