Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Muslim Restaurant, on the corner of Charoeng Krung and Silom, which has been here for
at least seventy years. Having been founded by Hajee Maidin Pakayawong, a goat butcher
at the market, fresh goat meat is the speciality, with goat biryani and goat liver masala
high on the list of favourites.
During the first half of the twentieth century, this was a pleasant part of Bangkok in
which to live. Silom Road still had its canal and was lined with rosewood trees. From 1925
a tram ran alongside the canal to Rama
IV
Road, itself still with a canal, and then past the
green expanse of Lumpini Park and up to Pratunam, for those who wanted to visit the
market there, or they could disembark at the top of Silom and catch a tram to Hua Lam-
pong, where there were two railway termini. Although the tram was discontinued in 1962,
and the Silom canal filled in not long after, there is still the opportunity to see what life
must have been like by visiting the home that has been turned into a private museum, the
Bangkokian Museum.
Charoen Krung Soi 43 still retains faint traces of the classy residential neighbourhood
it was before World War
II
., when a small canal used to flow along here, and houses oc-
cupied large compounds. One of these belonged to the family of Waraporn Suravadi, who
still lives on the compound but has turned three of the buildings into a museum display-
ing everyday objects used in the first half of the last century. Waraporn, who was born in
1939, says her family has owned the compound since her great-grandfather's time.
To one side of the compound is a single-storey shophouse. Many families built shop-
houses on their land, which is why you so often find splendid old houses buried behind
commercial property. Waraporn has converted this into a gallery that holds mainly kit-
chen utensils and domestic equipment, such as a sewing machine and a charcoal-heated
iron. There is a kitchen range powered by charcoal, and a rice miller that is so large and
heavy it is mounted in a frame and worked by a pulley. Some items have simply disap-
peared from society, such as the snuffinhaler with a mouthpiece you use to blow the snuf-
fup your nose. By the door is a crumbling stack of once-smart leather suitcases, formerly
the possession of Waraporn's mother's first husband, Dr Francis Christian. Dr Christian
was an Indian by birth, who had gone to Dublin to study medicine. The couple had met
in Penang. They returned to Bangkok, and Dr Christian decided to set up a practice. A
traditional wooden house was built to the rear of the compound in 1929, intended as a
clinic, but the doctor died before seeing his first patient. He was only forty years old. he
house now forms a second gallery, with many of the good doctor's possessions still intact,
including his large framed surgeon's certificates.
