Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
community of nuns of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, who live under their vows of
silence and prayer.
If you cut through to Sala Daeng Road you will find the Salesian Sisters Foundation,
which provides Mass and other services in Italian and Spanish. On Sala Daeng Soi 2 stands
the Bangkok Christian Guest House, owned by the Foundation of the Church of Christ in
Thailand. Protestant missionaries had first arrived in Bangkok in 1826 through the Amer-
ican Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who had initially sent Karl Gutzlaff,
followed by a group led by the Reverend Jesse Casswell and then, arriving in 1834 as a
missionary physician, Dr Dan Beach Bradley. American Baptists arrived in 1833. In 1840
the American Presbyterian Mission sent two missionaries, the Reverend William P Buell
and Mrs Seignoria Buell, and out of this had grown the Presbytery of Siam Mission, which
was very active in establishing schools, hospitals and churches in Bangkok and other parts
of the country. The Church of Christ in Thailand was founded in 1934 by the merger of
several Protestant groups, mainly Presbyterian congregations along with the Lutherans
from the German Marburger Mission, and is today considered to be the largest Protest-
ant church in Thailand. After World War
II
., the Church of Christ had purchased land
between Silom and Surawong roads, renovated some wooden buildings that stood there,
and inaugurated the Bangkok Christian Hospital in 1949. The hospital today stands on
the same site and is one of the largest general hospitals in Bangkok. One of its build-
ings is named the Moh Bradley Building, after Dr Bradley. The Bangkok Christian Guest
House provides accommodation for a steady stream of missionaries, social workers, aid
providers, medical personnel and ngo personnel passing through Bangkok.
he
BNH
Hospital, formerly known as the Bangkok Nursing Home and which stands
beside Christ Church, has no religious affiliation but evolved out of the British community
at the time the church was being planned. In 1897 there had been a meeting between com-
munity members and the British Resident Minister George Grenville, held at the British
Legation, to discuss the founding of a hospital modelled on contemporary British practice.
A proposal was put to Rama
V
, who endorsed it and instructed officials to supervise the
founding of the hospital as a non-profit organisation: the monarch also provided an an-
nual grant of 960 baht. The Bangkok Nursing Home was a modest affair, located in rented
accommodation near its present site and staffed by two nurses sent out from the Colonial
Nursing Association in London in 1898. In 1901 the Bangkok Nursing Home Association
raised a loan of 50,000 baht and purchased the plot of land on Convent Road on which
the hospital now stands. A charitable non-profit institution, and one that has undergone
