Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Treasury Department, and in 2005 a lease was agreed by a hotel development company to
turn this beautiful structure into a five-star hotel, which would also give the impetus for
the surrounding buildings to be restored as shops and restaurants. We can only wait, and
watch, and wonder.
The now sadly dilapidated Customs House once dominated the European riverbank.
The Customs House was built on land on which stood a small village named Ton Sam-
rong. In the 1830s an Indonesian trader named Musa Bafadel, who plied between Siam,
Malaya and Indonesia, decided to settle here. He had a son named Haroon, who prospered
and bequeathed his property to his own son, who built a mosque in his name. When the
Customs House was built, the Siamese government offered a strip of land to the rear of the
building in exchange for the land upon which the timber-built Haroon Mosque stood. The
mosque was dismantled and re-erected on the new site, where it stood until 1934, when
the son, Yusuf, by now very elderly, decided to replace it with a brick and lime structure.
Tucked away in a tiny enclave, with a distinctive green tiled roof and three miniature green
onion-shaped domes over the door, it has become a centre, not just for Thai Muslims but
for visiting Muslims from India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Burma and Indonesia. Food is pre-
pared and sold by the female residents of the Muslim community who live in the timber
houses here. here is a graveyard behind the mosque, the graves marked only by earthen
mounds, and in this garden-like setting a number of goats wander, nibbling on the veget-
ation and providing fresh milk to the community.
The French Embassy Residence is also on Soi Rong Phasi Kao, and like its Portuguese
neighbour, it is an unspoiled architectural beauty dating from 1860, and if anything even
more ornate. A three-storey timber structure, it has a two-storey front porch with an out-
door staircase on either side. Ornate fretwork runs around the eaves, and there is a ver-
anda on both of the upper floors. A high wall renders this perfectly conserved building
invisible, unless you are able to peep from the window of its next-door neighbour, The
Oriental.
