Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
above them. The hotel remains essentially unchanged to this day, a pleasantly rambling
and unhurried setting that is not unlike a small town in itself.
Convent Road is a leafy lane at the top end of Silom, with some old eating-houses on
the corner, a decent Irish pub, a very attractive conversion of an old timber house into
a French restaurant named Indigo, and several other outstanding restaurants and night-
spots. Wander further along this road, however, away from the lights of Silom, and we are
into a hushed Christian world.
On 3
rd
June 1861, a meeting of non-Roman Catholic Christians, most of them British,
had been held at the British Consulate to consider the possibility of building a church. The
Catholic Church already had several places of worship in Bangkok, and indeed a resident
bishop. The Protestants had nowhere to gather except in one of the houses of the Amer-
ican missionaries. The meeting resolved to ask Rama
IV
for a suitable piece of land, and
the king rapidly responded with the offer of a parcel of riverbank just to the south of Wat
Yannawa, part of which was owned by the Siamese government and part being leased by
the Borneo Company. Funded by a combination of local subscriptions and a grant from
the Treasury in London, the Protestant Union Chapel was opened on 1
st
May 1864.
The years passed, and by the end of the century the congregation, which by now had its
own full-time chaplain, had outgrown the modest premises. Further, the chapel's neigh-
bour, the Bangkok Dock Company, which had come into existence a year after the church,
was an extremely noisy one, and the ships on the river were a continual disturbance to the
solemnity of the services. The new roads were opening up what had been rural areas and
creating suburbs, and no one now relied on the river and canals for transport. In 1903 the
Church Committee approached Rama
V
, asking for permission to sell the land that had
been gifted by the king's father, and use the funds to purchase a new site and erect another
church. Again, the king's reply was prompt and kind, not only giving his permission but
also presenting another site, nearly three times as large, on Sathorn Road. The letter from
the king said that the site measured 2
sens
and 10
wahs
on the north and south sides, and
2
sens
on the east and west sides, giving an area of about 2,000 square
wah
, “free from
disturbing influences, and eminently suitable for establishing a place of worship”. The let-
ter gave permission for a church to be established on the land, with the provision that the
rights granted did not include the right to use the premises for the internment of the dead.
As the Protestant community already had its own burial ground on Charoen Krung Road,
the burial rights did not arise. The king's letter was dated 7
th
April 1904. On 19
th
July, Mr
J S Smyth, “Long Jimmy”, a local architect, submitted plans and a model of a new church
that he said could be built for the 57,000
ticals
offered, and said that he would supervise
