Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to Wat Liab in 1910. The school is still known to students as “the long building” because
for many years it was the longest building in Siam. Near the main entrance is an image
of a many-armed elephant named Luang Phor Pu that is believed to house the protective
spirit of the place, known to one and all affectionately as “Grandfather”, and to whom the
students make daily offerings of garlands. The school emblem depicts a book with a ruler,
pen and pencil, a royal headdress and the initials of Rama
V
along with a bouquet of roses,
and a gracious rose design is woven in amongst the lettering on the school gates. Suan
Kularb, a male-only school, counts some of Thailand's greatest leaders in politics, law and
business amongst its former pupils. This immediate locality has evolved into something of
an educational district; Siam's first school of arts and crafts, Poh Chang College, opened
directly next door to Suan Kularb in 1913, where it flourishes to this day, while direc-
tly across Tri Phet Road is the Rajamangala University of Technology and also a sizeable
school belonging to Wat Liab. On the corner directly next to the temple stupa is a very
unusual three-storey building with broad verandas and orange-painted balustrades. Ori-
ginally the residence of Chao Phraya Rattanathibet and built in the latter years of Rama
V
,
it was for many years used by the Ministry of Education. This well-maintained building is
now home to the Agricultural Promotion Department.
There are several Indian communities in Bangkok, most notably around the junction
of Silom and Charoen Krung, where they are prominent in the jewellery industry, and
along the stretch of Sukhumvit Road from Soi 4 down to the 20s, where they invested in
land when the road was little more than an elephant trail and where they now have vast
property holdings. Nowhere, however, is there a greater concentration of Indian families
and businesses than at Pahurat, the square of land bounded by Pahurat, Chakraphet, Tri
Phet and Charoen Krung roads.
The Indians were not the first occupants of this area. When Bangkok was first estab-
lished, and the Chinese merchants moved a little way downriver to what is now Chin-
atown to make way for the new construction work, the area that was to become Pahurat
was stagnant, marshy ground. Around this time internal convulsions in Vietnam resulted
in a large migration of Vietnamese to Siam, and while the Christian immigrants settled in
the Portuguese Catholic community the Buddhists made this wilderness their home. For
a while it was known as Ban Yuen, the Vietnamese village, but in 1898 came a fire so dev-
astating that it completely cleared the land. A few years earlier, Princess Pahurat Manimai,
the first-born daughter of Rama
V
and Queen Saovabha Bongsri, had died at the age of
eight. The little girl had already been allocated properties under the royal patronage, and
these were donated by her grieving parents to the building of a new road, one of many that
