Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Ah, The Oriental. Nowhere better symbolises the European presence in Bangkok than
The Oriental. And as a modern-day symbol of Bangkok, The Oriental is one of the most
famous. Yet the origins of the hotel are obscure and modest. A seaman's hostel was built
on the site soon after the Western nations began mooring their ships along the river, but
the first record of this venture was a report of its destruction on 11
th
June 1865, when fire
burned down sixty-nine buildings “including the Oriental Hotel”, as the
BangkokCalen-
dar
reported. Nothing else is known until the 1870s, when two Danes, C Salje and F Jar-
ck, emerge as the owners of the rebuilt hotel, with an entry in the
SiamDirectory
of 1878
advertising what sounds like commodious accommodation, with “American Bar, Billiard
Saloon, Baths, Newspapers kept, Boats for hire, Table d'Hote, Breakfast 9 a.m., Tiffin 1
p.m., Dinner 7 p.m.” In 1881 Salje and Jarck sold the hotel to another Dane, Hans Niels
Andersen, who realised that Bangkok was becoming more than just a transit point for sea-
men and traders. He decided to build a new and very grand hotel, and commissioned a
local partnership of Italian architects, Cardu & Rossi, to design the place. When the new
Oriental opened on 19
th
May 1887, it was the first luxury hotel in Siam. There were forty
rooms, many of them, much to the alarm of the Thais, who have never been high-rise
creatures, located on a second storey. A bar that was big enough to hold fifty drinkers be-
came immediately popular, one of its earliest patrons being a young seaman named Jozef
Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, known to fellow imbibers as Polish Joe, and to posterity as
Joseph Conrad. He had arrived in Bangkok on 24
th
January 1888 to take command of the
barque
Otago
, the previous captain having died at sea, and although Conrad steered his
ship downriver on the 9
th
February, never having actually stayed at The Oriental, and nev-
er to return to Bangkok, his name has become indelibly associated with the hotel.
Another regular at the bar was Louis Leonowens, who by the early 1890s was making a
fortune in teak, and when he heard that Andersen was thinking of selling up and returning
to Denmark, formed a company with Franklin Hurst and bought the hotel for US$22,000.
The Oriental went from strength to strength. In 1903, with Louis leaving Bangkok and
heading back to England to expand his business (he died there during the flu pandemic
of 1919), it was sold again, but the new proprietor, F S Roberston, left town a few months
later in a flurry of unpaid bills, leading to a temporary closure. A brief succession of own-
ers followed, but in 1917 Siam was drawn into the war against Germany, and suddenly
business was not so good. Some of the gloss came of the hotel. A sniffy article in 1920
by a French writer named Henri Cucherousse (“a small place with forty bad, comfortless
rooms in an old building on the bank of the river…it must be ten years since the place had
a coat of paint”) hurt not just the pride of the owners but the pride of the foreign (or, at
