When a beer in Bangkok was 50 US cents: low-cost, low-rise laid-back city of old has given way to a metropolis of high-rises and high prices

Expats who arrived in Bangkok in the 1960s and ’70s recall living on a shoestring and feeling spoiled in a city that was laid-back and a lot smaller than today

Since then the Thai capital has grown bigger than London, and lot more expensive, and much of Old Bangkok has been bulldozed for malls, condos and office towers

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Boats on the canal in Bangkok, circa 1965. Long-term expats recall a time when the Thai capital was a low-cost paradise. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 5:15am, 11 Jan 2021Updated: 5:18am, 11 Jan 2021

Dean Barrett, an American mystery writer, sits in an English-style tavern that is one of his remaining old haunts in Bangkok, sipping a black Russian cocktail as he ponders the curious quirks of fate.

“My story is very simple,” says Barrett, a lanky 78-year-old with a moustache and a mischievous smile. “I love Chinese culture and history. But I’m sitting here and not at some American university as a professor.”

The reason is that, in 1965, the Connecticut native enlisted in the US Army so he could learn Chinese at a military-run language institute in California. “Having trained me as a translator for a year, the army put me on a plane to Bangkok,” he says. “All I knew was that it was in Southeast Asia.”

No sooner had Barrett, aged 23, landed in the Thai capital in 1966 than his plan to devote himself to China studies began to unravel. “I got off the plane and saw a Thai woman for the first time, and that was the end of the great China scholar I wanted to be,” he says with a laugh.

Dean Barrett is an American novelist and Vietnam war veteran. Photo: Tibor Krausz

Barrett served as head of a local team for the Army Security Agency, the US military’s signals intelligence branch, as part of a top- secret surveillance operation during the Vietnam war (1955-1975). His task involved listening in on Chinese troops via antennas erected near Bangkok’s old international airport as Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) got under way.

“It was mostly crazy stuff, like one unit telling another: ‘We’re more loyal to Mao than you are.’ They were fighting each other. It was amazing bull,” he says.