Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that ran alongside the Bang Kapi canal was paved as a two-lane road in 1940, as far down
as Soi 19. Beyond that, the way remained little more than a track. A large number of In-
dians began arriving in Bangkok in the 1940s, and they bought up plots of land along the
paved road and beyond, where they were able to erect inexpensive housing for themselves.
With Klong Toei now a modern port, road traffic increased.
Businesses began to move into the area, and the road that was known as the Paknam
Trail, as it led towards Paknam, at the mouth of the river, needed to be developed sys-
tematically. Canals were filled in, and new roads made. The patchwork of roads and trails
grew, evolving into an arterial highway that needed a name. Prasop Sukhum had been
the first Thai to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, travelling to the Un-
ited States in the early 1930s, and had been greatly influenced by the American style of
highway building. Returning to Bangkok, he started as an assistant engineer with the De-
partment of Sanitation and progressed to the position of chief engineer of the Highways
Department. He was responsible for much of the new infrastructure that underpinned
Bangkok, as the city developed and grew with astonishing rapidity after World War
II
., be-
coming a megacity whose continuing expansion seems to have no end. So successful was
Prasop Sukhum's career that the king bestowed upon him the formal title of Phra Pisan
Sukhumvit. There was an initial suggestion that the highway be named after Lek Nana,
who modestly declined, and so Mr Sukhumvit, in 1950, by a casual flip of history's coin,
became world famous for the road that leads eastwards out of the Sea of Mud, absorbing
the little farming and fishing villages and leaving the historic districts far behind to create
a different kind of Bangkok.