Two worlds collide at a Bangkok shanty town hunkered in the shadow of glitzy malls, five-star hotels and condominiums

Huddled next to a fetid canal where older residents used to swim, Baan Khrua is a jumble of shacks and decaying wooden houses in the shadow of wealth

Once a centre of silk weaving – thanks to American businessman Jim Thompson, who lived nearby – it fell on hard times and illegal drugs took root

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A man washes his face with a hose on the street in Baan Khrua, a shanty town in the centre of Bangkok in the shadow of upscale shopping malls, hotels and condominiums – built where orchards once stood. Photo: Tibor Krausz

Published: 5:15am, 8 Oct 2020Updated: 6:34am, 8 Oct 2020

Times have changed for Manasnan Benjarongchinda, a Chinese-Thai octogenarian known as Uncle Aood in the shanty town of Baan Khrua, in the heart of Bangkok.

He started making silk textiles when he was 13 and spent nearly seven decades dyeing, weaving and spinning threads. These days, he mostly whiles away the time in his cluttered, low-ceilinged home, which doubles as a showroom for his homespun fabrics.

Manasnan has lived all his life in this old house down a little alley in a mazelike warren of winding footpaths and tightly packed homes of wood, plywood, breeze block and cement, alongside a fetid canal that flows from the Chao Phraya River and is plied by long passenger boats with roaring diesel engines.

The elderly man rarely has visitors any more, so he wears only a traditional plaid sarong as he reminisces about the past. “When I was young we bathed in the canal and washed silk in it. The water was still clean,” he recalls. “There were orchards around here and children filched coconuts and rose apples from trees. But now it’s not like that.”

Manasnan Benjarongchinda, a Chinese-Thai silk maker, stands in his simple home beside a picture from around 1960 showing American businessman Jim Thompson outside the same house in Baan Khrua. Photo: Tibor Krausz

His community, in the northern part of a slum-like neighbourhood that sprawls along the waterway, has changed over the years, but the city around it has changed far more.

The entire opposite bank, once the site of those orchards, has been taken up by fancy hotels and upscale condominiums. At a nearby intersection, a Tesco Lotus superstore stands where an old street market once did.

Two worlds collide at a Bangkok shanty town hunkered in the shadow of glitzy malls, five-star hotels and condominiums

Huddled next to a fetid canal where older residents used to swim, Baan Khrua is a jumble of shacks and decaying wooden houses in the shadow of wealth Once a centre of silk weaving – thanks to American businessman Jim Thompson, who lived nearby – it fell on hard times and illegal drugs took root