Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ing, right down to the original colour specifications of cream walling and green window
frames, and there is a pleasant coffee shop on the premises.
Baan Maliwan, now the offices of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisa-
tion, was built in 1917 to a design by the Italian architect Ercole Manfredi. Originally the
home of Prince Naris, a son of Rama
IV
, Baan Maliwan, as with other houses on the river-
front side of Phra Arthit Road, has its main entrance facing the river, water transport as
recently as this period still being a conventional way of accessing Rattanakosin Island. A
little further along on the same side of the road is the building housing
UNICEF
, the United
Nations Children's Fund.
UNICEF
had transferred its Far East headquarters from Manila
to Bangkok in March of 1949. For almost ten years the organisation had its offices in the
Ministry of Public Health building, but when more space was needed the Crown Property
Bureau provided the present site, a compound known as No 19. There are actually three
buildings on the compound: a mansion built in the early part of the twentieth century on
one side, a nasty 1970s box on the other side, and in the centre, what is referred to as
the Middle Building, a former royal palace. Built during the second half of the nineteenth
century it is European in style, with shuttered windows and half-moon transoms of fili-
greed wood above the doors and windows to allow cooling air to circulate. There is a long
veranda at the front, overlooking the river and also designed for ventilation, but pleasant
though the breezes were, they were not conducive to the stability of office paperwork. In
a memoir from those times, an official recalls seeing a big sheaf of pink, yellow and blue
papers that had blown out of the window and were floating down the river “looking like
pretty lotus flowers, lost forever”. Meetings also had to compete with the noisy arrival of
squealing pigs being unloaded at a small dock below, bound for the market. Eventually, air
conditioning made the palace viable as an office. The palace had also been for a few years
the residence of Pridi Phanomyong, who had been a member of the coup that overthrew
the absolute monarchy, had become Minister of Foreign Affairs and then Minister of Fin-
ance, and during the war had been one of the leading figures in the anti-Japanese Seri Thai
movement. In 1944 he had become regent for the young Rama
VIII
, who was studying in
Switzerland, and in 1946 during a time of great political turmoil he became prime minis-
ter. A few weeks later the young king, now back in Bangkok, was found shot dead in his
bedroom in the Grand Palace. Pridi resigned, but he was a highly controversial figure, ru-
mours being spread that he was part of a conspiracy involved in the king's death, and when
a coup ousted the government late in 1947, armoured cars arrived in front of Pridi's resid-
ence. When the troops entered they found he had already left, hiding out with supporters
and then a week later spirited out of the country by British and American agents to Singa-
