Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
maintained a status in the country, the community being an integrated part of Siamese
society.
In 1809, in the year that Rama
II
ascended the throne, and with Bangkok taking shape
as a great and prosperous city, a missionary named Father Pasquale Gallo obtained per-
mission from the king to build a cathedral. Designed by a French architect and built
with materials imported from France and Italy, the cathedral was completed in 1821 and
named Assumption to commemorate the passing of the Virgin Mary to heaven. As Chris-
tian missionaries began arriving in Bangkok in considerable numbers from the middle
of the nineteenth century, the community around Assumption grew. Early in the twenti-
eth century the cathedral was rebuilt, being largely funded by a Catholic Chinese philan-
thropist named Low Khiok Chiang, a Teochew immigrant who founded a trading com-
pany named Kiam Hua Heng, on Charoen Krung Road. One of his early ventures was
the import of Singer sewing machines, which had been invented by an American named
Isaac Merritt Singer in 1851 and which a few years later appeared in Siam, when Anna
Leonowens arranged for a machine to be brought in from Singapore and presented to
Rama
IV
. So successful did Singer become after Kiam Hua Heng took on the distributor-
ship in 1889 that it was spun off into a separate company and remains on Charoen Krung
Road today as a publicly listed company and a leading retailer of electrical appliances.
Groundwork for the new cathedral started at the beginning of 1910 and work was com-
pleted in 1918. Extensive repairs had to be undertaken when Allied bombs fell in the area
during World War
II
.
Assumption Cathedral, centre of a large Catholic community on the bank of the river.
Tall and rectangular, the cathedral is constructed of red brick, a striking contrast
to the stucco-clad eighteenth century churches in Bangkok. The architectural style is
Romanesque, with a symmetrical structure that has two 32-metre (104-ft) towers flanking
the entrance, the pitched roof of the nave between them reaching a height of 25.6 metres
(83 ft). The corners of the building are reinforced with limestone bricks, the white stone
forming a contrast with the glowing red of the bricks, and the semi-circular arches over
