Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Nai Lert's cannon-shaped boundary marker outside the British Embassy.
Following the coup in 1932, the national radio station was moved to Sala Daeng, next
to the Paknam Railway station. Renamed Radio Bangkok, it had a new call sign, 7PJ, and
a 2.5kW transmitter. Tests were also carried out here on a shortwave transmitter, 8PJ, to
reach overseas. After World War
II
the government, which retained a monopoly on radio
broadcasting for many years, built larger and more powerful transmitters elsewhere. But
that radio mast poking up from the rubble on the corner of Wireless Road marks one of
the starting points.
Visitors staying in the Sukhumvit Road area, or travelling on main roads in other parts
of the eastern side of Bangkok, are bewildered by the fact that a railway line runs at ground
level through the city. The already clogged traffic comes to a complete standstill at the
clanging of a warning bell, the barrier is lowered, and a couple of minutes later a train of
seemingly several miles in length clanks its way between the waiting lines of traffic. The
railway line is for freight, and links the marshalling yards of Bang Sue, in the north of the
city, with the port and oil refinery at Klong Toei. It also marks very clearly, and as effect-
ively as a moat, where the old city ends and the new one begins: for Sukhumvit Road, vis-
ible beyond the railway barrier, is an exuberant arterial highway that forms the main hotel,
shopping and tourism district, and which beyond the suburbs runs along the eastern sea-
board to eventually end 400 kilometres (248 miles) away in the province of Trat, on the
Cambodian border.
The Saen Saeb and Bang Kapi canals were dug to the east of the city in the time of
Rama
III
, with the former being the main waterway for agricultural produce and military
use, while the latter flowed along what are now Ploenchit and Sukhumvit roads and con-
nected a network of small canals, creeks and drainage ditches that stretched all the way to
Klong Toei. In the time of Rama
IV
, at the request of the newly-arrived Western traders,
the Hua Lampong canal was cut eastwards along what is now Rama
IV
Road to connect
the third moat to the river. The land through which these waterways passed represented a
rural idyll, with fields, orchards, rice paddies and villages threaded by the waterways.
With the building by Rama
IV
of Sra Pathum Palace, the eastern part of the city became
a popular residential area for nobility and high-ranking officials, with plots of land being
used to build country estates. When the Westerners arrived they pushed the city further
to the east by opening their embassies in the Wireless Road district, and setting up home
there. Nai Lert and an enterprising Indian Muslim named Lek Nana bought large plots of
land between the Saen Saeb and Bang Kapi canals, and began to develop them. The trail
