Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
admired to this village. Ban Krua had been transformed after he discovered them, in the
late 1940s, for the community became his main silk production site, supplying silk thread
and pigments, and creating patterns and designs. The canal water was still clear in those
days, and was used for the washing and dyeing of the thread.
Thirty years ago there was a tiny ferry that plied from the watergate of Jim Thompson's
house across the canal, a toothpick-thin canoe that could hold only two people and the
oarsman: the clumsy foreign visitor would grip the sides of the boat in terror lest he be
pitched into the water. These days the longtail boats that blare their way along the canal,
their sawn-off truck engines causing a backwash that slaps furiously against the walkway,
have made this small service an unviable one and a small footbridge crosses the water just
a few metres from the house. In essence, the village has changed little since Thompson's
time. Old timber houses face out across the water, little shops sell sweets and drinks, and
washing hangs everywhere. Along the walkway the houses are so tightly packed it is not
easy to see how to enter the village. The alleys are so narrow that often only one person can
pass at a time, and some are cul-de-sacs, leaving the visitor with the embarrassing possib-
ility of blundering into someone's living room. One of the easiest routes is the alley direc-
tly opposite the Thompson House watergate, for it leads to the green-painted mosque in
the centre of the village. Anyone searching for gracious old teak houses is, however, going
to be disappointed: the village had originally been built with whatever could be found, and
even in the wider back-alley that forms the outer boundary of the village, where there are
some bigger and more substantial homes than those by the canal, the design is, at best,
prosaic.
Along the waterfront I found a small open-fronted shop with several colourful bolts of
silk in a glass case, and when I asked where the silk came from I was told there are weaving
sheds in Soi 9 and Soi 11. The
sois
aren't marked, but I was directed to a narrow open-
ing between the houses. I almost had to squeeze my way in, but I soon heard the familiar
clickety-thud-clickety-thud of a loom. Through a doorway I spied an elderly gent hanging
hanks of newly dyed black-and-scarlet silk over a pole to dry, and stepping past him (no
one seems to mind you invading their privacy) I saw a mediaeval sight, a lone worker in a
courtyard toiling over a steaming cauldron of dye, dipping the raw hanks into the liquid.
Taking great care not to slip on the stone floor of the courtyard, and thus possibly emer-
ging from the village a startlingly different colour to when I entered, I progressed into a
low room where a solitary girl sat at an ancient wooden loom, weaving the most beauti-
ful shimmering silk. The girl smiled pleasantly at me as she worked the treadle with her
feet, and operated the warp with a piece of cloth dangling from the overhead part of the
