Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
oen Krung Road and who had become a trusted advisor to the king, has the largest and
most imposing memorial of them all.
On one of my recent visits as I stood contemplating the monument erected “In
Memory of the Deceased Members of Club Concordia”, a woman emerged from the small
chapel on the riverbank. Reassuring me that her dog wouldn't bite me, she apologised for
the length of the grass. She was in charge of routine maintenance, and having watched me
taking notes had probably assumed I was an official.
Namtuamtukwan
, she explained.
The ground was flooded every day now because we were in the rainy season, and the grass
could not be cut. I assured her I was just looking round, and she retreated behind her
chapel to await the dry season. The ground was indeed waterlogged. Anyone venturing of
the path would in all possibility sink down to prematurely join the sleepers under the long
grass. Doubtless, however, those laid to rest under these white stones have long since dis-
solved into the marshy water, their remains sucked into the river and born downstream,
over the bar and into the ocean.
Not far below the cemetery, Charoen Krung ends at Thanon Tok; the point where, as
the Thais, totally unused to the concept of roads, pointed out that had the road continued,
it would have fallen into the water. Although this was largely a residential district, there
was still plenty of commerce here. Thai Tobacco, its factory backing directly on to the
cemetery but now empty and its fate uncertain, was originally built to process tobacco leaf
sent down by river from the plantations around Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. There used
to be sawmills and woodyards down here, and there is an old-established fireworks fact-
ory still in existence. A Chinese undertaker has his business on a corner site, the opulent
walnut-wood coffins with their distinctive lotus-bloom shapes stacked up at the frontage
(I wouldn't be seen dead in one of those) and the surrounding buildings decorated with
feng shui mirrors to reflect the bad luck back at him. There are several small Muslim com-
munities, marked by the green domes of their mosques, and there is a large hospital.
The trams had rattled down this road all the way from the City Pillar to Thanon Tok,
the oldest and longest of all the Bangkok tram routes. The line had started out as a venture
by the indefatigable Captain Loftus, who in 1887, along with Danish naval officer Andreas
du Plessis de Richelieu, gained a royal concession to run horse-drawn trams along this
route. The concession was later transferred to a Danish company that electrified the line
in 1894, the first electric tramway in Asia and predating Copenhagen's own electric trams
by about ten years. The line was closed in 1963. A lone yellow tram now sits in front of
the offices of the Metropolitan Electricity Authority's Yannawa branch, close to where the
trams performed a U-turn. A restaurant named The View now occupies the site where the
