The towering stupas and prang of Wat Phichaya, built with materials from China.
From here, too, is a view of Wang Lee Mansion, one of the few remaining walled Chinese courtyard houses that were once a feature of Thonburi and Bangkok. Wang Lee Mansion is not open to the public, and in fact is still a residence and a company compound. There is no alley through from Chee Chin Khor to the imposing gate of the mansion, so a return to Somdet Chao Phraya Road is necessary before entering the neighbouring Chiang Mai Road. The road is short and runs directly down to what was a harbour known as Huay Chun Long, which means “Steam Boat Pier”. There is a shrine here to the goddess Mae Tuptim, where Chinese sailors would pray for a safe passage across the ocean. Chinese operas are still performed from time to time in front of the shrine. On both sides of the road are godowns and shophouses belonging to Chinese merchants, and the entrance to the Wang Lee compound is busy with trucks and pickups. Tan Chu Huang, the founder of the Wang Lee business, was an immigrant from Shantou who arrived in Bangkok in 1871. He established a business in rice trading and milling, which eventually was to become one of the largest of its kind, with a rice mill here next to the pier and another four further downstream. Following his marriage to a Siamese lady of Chinese descent, he built Wang Lee Mansion beside the harbour in 1881. Designed in a U-shape around a central courtyard paved with flagstones brought from China as ballast, the house is still in the hands of the same family, and has recently been carefully restored.
Opposite to the Wang Lee Mansion is a lane leading to Wat Thong Thammachat, an Ayutthaya-era temple in a woodland glade that seems far removed from the booming traffic, despite being only five minutes away from the main road. The ubosot, with its neat red window frames and its neat red fence, sits in a well-tended courtyard with a red meeting hall behind. The lane will take the visitors round behind the temple, through a small area of old houses, and back out to Somdet Chao Phraya Road. Little can have changed in this locality over the past century.
A long, straight canal, Klong Somdet Chao Phraya, runs alongside this road. Appearing on late nineteenth century maps as Regent Canal, it led directly to a small island on which were three palaces, one of them belonging to Dit Bunnag, who had acted as regent for Rama IV and who was elevated to Somdet Chao Phraya, the highest title a commoner could attain, equal to royalty. Only the king and the king’s brother, who was appointed “second king”, a position invented by Rama IV but later discontinued, were higher. Alongside this canal too were mansions and even a zoological garden. One of the canal-side mansions belonged to another member of the Bunnag family, who were descended from a Persian merchant who had settled in Ayutthaya around the year 1600. Built in the last years of Rama IV’s reign, the two-storey mansion is a romantic blend of English Tudor and Moorish. When the Somdet Chao Phraya Hospital was built nearby, an annex for the psychiatric unit was built next to the mansion, and the old house taken over as the residence for the hospital director. Today, beautifully conserved, it acts as the hospital reception, while on the second floor is the Institute of Psychiatry Museum. Alas, Regent Island is no more the home of palaces: the surrounding canal was filled in to become Arun Amarin Road, and although there are a couple of gracious old houses behind high walls, the island is now fringed with standard mid-twentieth-century housing.
Not far from Regent Island and on the bank of the Somdet Chao Phraya canal is a glorious riot of white stupas. This is Wat Phichaya Yatikaram, an Ayutthaya-era temple that was greatly enlarged during the years 1829–1832, in the time of Rama III, by Tat Bunnag, the brother of Dit. The two brothers were so powerful in the court of Siam that they were known as the Sun and the Moon, and Tat also took the title of Somdet Chao Phraya. The temple architecture is heavily influenced by Chinese style, very much a characteristic of Rama III’s reign, when almost all of Siam’s trade was with China. The Bunnags owned junks, and most of the materials used in the construction of the temple were brought in from China, including the boundary stones that were carved by Chinese stoneworkers. Instead of the overlapping roof leaves and the finials of the traditional Siamese temple, the roof of the ubosot resembles the hood of a Chinese carriage, and the eaves are decorated with stucco flowers and dragons. At the main entrance of the ubosot is a painting of a Chinese warrior with a lion at his feet, a theme that is repeated on another door, where a dagger-wielding angel is subduing a lion. Two enormous white prangs tower over the compound, the largest of them housing four Buddha images looking out towards each of the cardinal directions. A bronze statue of Tat Bunnag is seated at the temple entrance, looking across the canal towards the river, the face modelled after a photograph taken of him in middle age.
A few years later, in 1850, Tat Bunnag completed Wat Anongkharam, on the opposite side of the road. The architectural style here is very different, the wiharn being built in the classic early Bangkok style that originated in the time of Rama I. The principal Buddha image, Phra Chunlanak, is from Sukhothai although it was installed as recently as 1949, a century after the temple was built. The image is in the “Subduing Mara” position, conquering evil, the right hand over the knee, the fingers touching the ground, the left hand remaining palm up in the lap. There are other Buddha images in the crowded temple compound, which also includes a school.
Wander down the quiet little lane that runs beside Wat Anongkharam, heading towards the river, and in this neglected corner of Klong San once lived the most famous of the temple school’s former pupils. The late Princess Srinagarindra, the Princess Mother, who was born in 1900 and passed away in 1995, was the mother of two kings: Rama XIII, who became king in 1935 at the age of nine, and died in mysterious circumstances in 1946, and King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX. Yet she was born a commoner, the child of a Chinese father and a Siamese mother, and she grew up on this very street, attending what was then the all-girls school at Wat Anongkharam, founded by an enlightened abbot who believed in the need for girls to have an education, not a generally accepted practice at that time. Her father was a goldsmith and the family lived in a modest rented house. In those days when Siamese were not required to have family names, the young girl was simply known as Sangwan. She went on to study nursing at Siriraj Hospital, further along the riverbank, and after graduating she was one of only two girls in that year to win a scholarship to study nursing in America. It was in the United States that she met Prince Mahidol, the sixty-ninth son of Rama V, who was studying medicine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The couple later returned to Siam, where the prince worked to form a public health system, but he died young, passing away at Sra Pathum Palace in 1929. In 1993, shortly before his mother’s death, King Bhumibol made known his wish to renovate the area around the Princess Mother’s childhood home to provide a public park. Her family home no longer existed but there were some similar buildings nearby, which the owners gladly donated. The Princess Mother Memorial Park is a lovely, leafy area of some one-and-a-half acres, sheltered by tall trees and with fragments of walls and crumbling arches embedded amongst the greenery. There are two house-sized exhibition halls, which display photographs and mementos from the Princess Mother’s life, and there is a reconstruction of her childhood home. This plot of land had once held the mansion home of another member of the Bunnag family, Pae Bunnag, who had been director general of the Royal Cargo Department during the reign of Rama V. Part of his kitchens still exist, now forming the Pae Bunnag Art Centre at the back of the park. To one side of the park, seated on a bench, is a life-size bronze statue of the Princess Mother, gazing across the greenery.
Leave the park by the rear gate and there is a small patch of wasteland and, behind that, sitting directly on the riverbank, one of Bangkok’s most florid Chinese shrines. Gong Wu Shrine has a long history, predating Bangkok and even predating the Taksin era. There are three statues here of Gong Wu. The smallest was brought to Siam by Hokkien traders around the year 1736, during the period of the Qing Dynasty Emperor Chen Long. Later, in 1802, the second Gong Wu statue arrived, and in 1822 a wealthy Chinese named Kung Seng renovated the shrine, installed a bell tower, and brought in a third statue. The Gong Wu Shrine has its own jetty, and from the end of this can be seen a small green onion-shaped dome at a neighbouring jetty. There is a small public garden between the two jetties, so the only way to find out what the dome belongs to is to walk around the garden and into a rather dusty little corner, where through an almost hidden gate is the courtyard of the Goowatin Mosque. This is, however, a very unusual mosque. The dome is mounted over the jetty, and