22 Walks in Bangkok - Kenneth Barrett

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that this tiny building is a place of worship is the traditional row of taps outside for the washing of hands and feet. Originally the building had belonged to (yes, you have guessed correctly), Tat Bunnag. It had been used as a warehouse, and next door, boarded up and crumbling away, is a splendid colonnaded building that must have been the offices. The Persian ancestor of the Bunnags, Sheikh Ahmad, had been a Muslim, and many of his descendants had held high office for Islamic affairs in Siam. The Bunnag line had become Buddhist, but clearly there were strong family connections because when a group of Muslims arrived from the Indian city of Surat in the time of Rama IV, Tat Bunnag had handed over this property for them to use as a mosque. The Indians were traders but some became skilled translators in the Bunnag business. One of them was named Ali Bai Nana. Everyone knew him as Clerk Ali, but he had ambitions beyond translating, and he rose to become one of the wealthiest members of the Indian community, the founder of the powerful Nana family. His descendant Lek Nana owned part of the land on which the Princess Mother Memorial Park was laid out, and the family today own huge plots of land on Sukhumvit Road, where the name is given to the district that is served by the BTS Skytrain Nana station.

      Crossing a bridge over the small canal that runs through here to connect with Klong Somdet Chao Phraya takes us under the concrete span of Pokklao Bridge to, just a few metres further on, the green girders of the far more aesthetically pleasing Memorial Bridge. Opened in April 1932, the name commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Chakri dynasty, although in Thai it is simply named after Rama I, King Buddha Yodfa, and is known as Saphan Phra Phutta Yodfa, or colloquially, Saphan Phut. The designers and builders were a British company, Dorman Long, who also built Sydney Harbour Bridge and who remain in business to this day. Work began on 3rd December 1929. A riveted steel truss structure, using 1,100 tons of structural steel, the bridge has three spans. The two outer spans, each of 74.9 metres (246 ft), are fixed. The centre span, measuring 61.8 metres (202 ft 11 ins) and 7.3 metres (24 ft) above the water at its highest point, is a bascule span, composed of two separate parts, each of which could originally be tilted upwards to allow tall vessels or ceremonial river processions to pass underneath. The bascule arms turned on fixed trunnions and were balanced by 450-ton cast-iron weights hanging inside concrete piers on both sides of the river. An electric motor operating the gearing could raise the two bascule leaves in less than five minutes, and a petrol engine was on standby in case the power supply failed. The operator sat in a cabin on the east pier, with an electrical cable on the riverbed connecting the gearing in each pier. Another cabin was located on the opposite bank for the sake of design symmetry, but the only mechanism controlled from there was the safety locking gear. Sadly, this ingenious mechanism, designed by a British engineer named Frederick Thompson and manufactured by Thomas Broadbent and Sons of Huddersfield, is no longer in use. When the Pokklao Bridge was being built in 1983, ending the possibility of tall ships sailing any further upriver, the two bascule sections were permanently connected and hold-down tendons and bearings installed to dampen any movement. As the entire lifting gear is contained inside the piers and is not visible from the shore or the river, the curious-minded, strolling along the pedestrian walkway to try and see how the mechanism worked, will find little to enlighten him.

      At the foot of the bridge is Wong Wian Lek, the smaller of the two Thonburi traffic circles. Or at least, this is where it used to be. With the opening of the Pokklao Bridge and its access roads, the circle was cut in two and its landmark clock tower moved east towards Somdet Chao Phraya Road, where there is still the Wong Wian Lek Market. From here operated a bus service over the bridge to business areas such as Chinatown and the Indian district of Pahurat. The terraced houses alongside the road connecting to the bridge were of two storeys, with a tin roof, and many of them survive today. In the vicinity of the circle there were shops and parking areas for horse-drawn carriages and cycle rickshaws waiting to take people over to the Bangkok side. The food shops along the footpath meant that the area was a busy and colourful one, especially at night. In the years between the opening of the bridge and the start of World War II., bands played here on Saturday and Sunday evenings and the circle, with its buses bringing in passengers and moving them out, must have been very pleasant, especially compared to the impersonal roar of today’s traffic over the bridge. Wong Wian Lek Market, however, still retains its garden atmosphere and is a noted place to buy Buddha amulets, while on the other side of the bridge approach road there is a small and pretty garden ringed all the way round by a handsome wrought-iron fence painted in fire-engine red.

      Miniature mansions for the departed, set into the candle-wax mountain at Wat Prayoon.

      Take a closer look at this fence, and it is seen to be fashioned in the shape of lances and arrows and that its arched sections bristle with axes and swords. The fence was ordered from Britain in the time of Rama III, the payment being in sugar cane equal to the weight of the fence, and it was originally for part of the Grand Palace. The king, however, decided he didn’t want it. That left the minister of the treasury, Dit Bunnag, with an awful lot of fence. He was, however, building a temple on land he had previously used as a coffee plantation, and when Wat Prayoon was completed a home was found for the fencing. There was so much of the stuff that it was used to enclose the entire compound, and the locals were quick to dub the temple Wat Rua Lek, or Iron Fence Temple. When the Memorial Bridge was built a slip road was cut through the compound and this distinctly un-Buddhist design was partly replaced with a less militant fence for the temple entrance, although there is a remnant leading from the gateway to the pagoda, an enormous white structure that towers 61 metres (200 ft) and forms a clearly visible landmark from the opposite side of the river. Designed in the shape of a bell, Wat Prayoon’s pagoda was the first in Bangkok to be built in Sri Lankan style. The interior fencing divides the temple grounds into two distinct halves. The buildings on the south side are all in traditional Thai style. In the ordination hall can be found a 5.79 metre (19 ft) tall Buddha image named Phra Buddha Nak, which was brought to Wat Prayoon from a temple in Sukhothai in 1831, and which is one of a pair, the other being in Wat Suthat Thepwararam on the other side of the river. The buildings on the north side of the iron fence are mostly in Western architectural styles, including a single-storey structure with beautiful stained-glass windows that was built in 1885 as a gathering place for members of the Bunnag family. Monks and novices also used the building for studying the Dharma, but in 1916 the Thammakan Ministry, the forerunner of the Ministry of Education, changed it into a public reading room, and it thereby became the first public library in Thailand.

      In the temple grounds is a monument depicting three up-ended cannons, built to commemorate a huge gunpowder explosion during the fireworks display staged to mark the temple’s official opening on 13th January 1837. Dr Dan Beach Bradley, one of the first Protestant missionaries allowed to work in Bangkok, recorded that thousands of people had turned out to watch and that many injuries were caused when a cannon exploded. Bradley, who was a medical doctor, was summoned to treat a monk’s injured arm, amputating it at the shoulder in what was the first case of a Western surgical procedure used during this era. Possibly it was the fireworks accident that led to the twenty-six large octagonal water basins, bearing various designs such as dragons, trees, bamboo and flowers, that were imported from China and installed around the pagoda. Similar basins can be found at the ancient royal palace of Gu Gong in Beijing, where they were intended for extinguishing fires, rather than sacred purposes. The lion figures were also brought from China. If you see children trying to pull the crystal ball out of the male lion’s mouth, it is because they have been told that if they can do so, the ball will turn to pure gold. For all its other distinguished qualities, Wat Prayoon is best known for a whimsical structure tucked into the corner of the grounds nearest the river, where it can be found by passing under an arch bearing the name Khao Mor, or Mor Mountain. Inside this enclosure is a pond with fish and turtles, and rising out of the water is an artificial mountain that was designed by Dit Bunnag to resemble the wax of a melting candle. The mountain is a shrine, with caves and niches occupied by Buddha images and miniature buildings, along with monuments to the departed. A set of steps leads to the top of the mountain where a bronze pagoda is situated. Locals call this place Turtle Mountain, and bring their families to feed banana and papaya to the turtles.

      The Portuguese had been the first Europeans to settle in Siam, arriving in Ayutthaya shortly after they captured Malacca in 1511, shrewdly

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