Though the streets of Bangkok are crowded with vehicles of every description—ramshackle and disreputable rickshaws, the worst to be found in all the East, drawn by sweating coolies; the boxes of wood and glass on wheels, called gharries, drawn by decrepit ponies whose harness is pieced out with rope; creaking bullock carts driven by Tamils from Southern India; bicycles, ridden by natives whose European hats and coats are in striking contrast to their bare legs and brilliant panungs; clanging street cars, as crowded with humanity as those on Broadway; motors of every size and make, from jitneys to Rolls-Royces—the bulk of the city's traffic is borne on the great river and the countless canals which empty into it. Bangkok has been called, and not ineptly, the Venice of the East, for it is covered with a net-work of canals, or klongs, which spread out in every direction. In sampans, houseboats and other craft, moored to the banks of these canals, dwells the major portion of the city's inhabitants. The city's water population is complete in itself and perfectly independent of its neighbors on land, for it has its own shops and dwellings, its own markets and restaurants, its own theaters, and gambling establishments, its own priests and police. When you go to Bangkok, I strongly advise you to hire a sampan and visit the floating portion of the city after nightfall. The houseboats are open at both ends and you will see many things that the guidebooks fail to mention.
The Oriental Hotel, the banks, the shipping offices, the business houses, and all the legations save only the American, are clustered on or near the river in a low-lying and unattractive quarter of the town. But follow the long, dingy, squalid highway known as the New Road, a thoroughfare lined with third-rate Chinese shops and thronged with rickshaws, carriages, bicycles, motors, street-cars, and Asiatics of every religion and complexion, and you will come at length into a portion of the city as different from the mercantile district as Riverside Drive is from the Bowery. Here you will find broad boulevards, shaded by rows of splendid tamarinds, lined by charming villas which peep coyly from the blazing gardens which surround them, and broken at frequent intervals by little parks in which are fountains and statuary. There is a great common, green with grass during the rainy season, known as the Premane Ground, where military reviews are held and where the royal cremations take place; a favorite spot in the spring for the kite-flying contests in which Siamese of all classes and all ages participate. Fronting on the Premane Ground are the not unimposing stuccoed buildings which house the Ministries of Justice, Agriculture and War. Not far away is the new Throne Hall, a huge, ornate structure of white marble, in the modern Italian style, its great dome faintly reminiscent of the Capitol at Washington. From the center of the spacious plaza rises a rather fine equestrian statue of the late king, Chulalungkorn, and, close by, the really charming Dusit Gardens, beautifully laid out with walks and lagoons and kiosks and a great variety of tropical flowers and shrubs and trees. But, most characteristic and colorful of all, a touch of that Oriental splendor which one looks for in Siam, is the congeries of palaces, offices, stables, courtyards, gardens, shrines and temples, the whole encircled by a crenelated, white-washed wall, which is the official residence of King Rama VI.
There are said to be nearly four hundred Buddhist temples within a two-mile radius of the royal palace, of which by far the most interesting and magnificent is the famous Wat Phra Keo, or Temple of the Emerald Buddha, which is really a royal chapel, being within the outer circumference of the palace walls. I doubt if any space of similar size in all the world contains such a bewildering display of barbaric magnificence, such a riot of form and color, as the walled enclosure in which this remarkable edifice and its attendant structures stand. From the center of the marble-paved courtyard rises an enormous, cone-shaped prachadee, round at the bottom but tapering to a long and slender spire said to be covered with plates of gold. It certainly looks like a solid mass of that precious metal, and at daybreak and nightfall, when it catches the level rays of the sun, it can be seen from afar, shining and glittering above the gorgeously colored roofs of the temples and the many-tinted lesser spires which surround it. Close by the gilded prachadee is the bote or chapel used by the king, surmounted by a similar spire which is overlaid with sapphire-colored plates of glass and porcelain, while a little distance away stands the temple itself, its gilded walls set with mosaics of emerald green. Flanking the gateways of the temple courtyard are gigantic, grotesque figures, fully thirty feet in height, carved and colored like the creatures of a nightmare. They represent demons and are supposed to guard the approaches to the temple, being so placed that they glare down ferociously on all who enter the sacred enclosure. Other figures in marble, bronze, wood and stone, representing dolphins, storks, cows, camels, monkeys and the various fabulous monsters of the Hindu mythology, are scattered in apparent confusion about the temple courtyard, producing an effect as bizarre as it is bewildering. It is so unreal, so incredibly fantastic, that I felt that I was looking at the papier-maché setting for a motion picture spectacle, such as Griffith used to produce, and that the director and the cameraman would appear shortly and end the illusion.
The interior of the main temple is extremely lofty. The walls and rafters are of teak and the floor is covered with a matting made of silver wire. At the far end of this imposing room an enormous, pyramidal shrine of gold rises almost to the roof, its dazzling brilliancy somewhat subdued by the semi-obscurity of the interior. Wat Phra Keo is unique amongst Siamese temples in containing objects of real value. Everything is genuine and costly, as becomes the gifts of a king, though it must be admitted that certain of the royal offerings which are ranged at the foot of the shrine, such as jeweled French clocks, figurines of Sèvres and Dresden porcelain, and a large marble statue of a Roman goddess, are of doubtful appropriateness. Ranged on a table at the back of the altar are seven images of Buddha in pure gold, the right hand of each pointed upward. On the thumb and fingers of each hand glitters a king's ransom in rings of sapphires, emeralds and rubies, while from the center of each palm flashes a rosette of diamonds. High up toward the rafters, at the apex of the golden pyramid, in a sort of recess toward which the fingers of the seven images are pointing, sits an image of Buddha, perhaps twelve inches high, said to be cut from one enormous emerald—whence the temple's name. As a matter of fact, it is made of jade and is of incalculable value. Set in its forehead are three eyes, each an enormous diamond. The history of this extraordinary idol is lost in the mists of antiquity. Tradition has it that it fell from heaven into one of the Laos states, being captured by the Siamese in battle. Since then it has been repeatedly lost, captured or stolen. Its story, like that of so many famous jewels, might fittingly be written in blood.
It is the custom in Siam for every man to spend a portion of his life in a monastery. This rule applies to everyone from the poorest peasant upward, the king and all the male members of the royal family having at some period worn the yellow robe of a monk. This curious custom is, no doubt, an imitation of the so-called Act of Renunciation of Gautama, the future Buddha, who, at the age of twenty-nine, moved by the sufferings of humanity, renounced his rights to his father's throne and, abandoning his wife and child, devoted the remainder of his life to religion. Just as every American boy is expected to go to school, so every Siamese youth is expected to enter a monastery, the stern discipline enforced during this period accounting, I have no doubt, for the docility which is so noticeable a part of the Siamese character. While I was in Siam I was the guest one day of the officers' mess of the crack regiment of the household cavalry. Though my hosts, with few exceptions, spoke fluent English, though several of them had been educated at English schools and universities, and though the conversation over the mess table was of polo and racing and big game shooting and bridge, I learned to my astonishment that every one of these debonair young officers, with their worldly manners and their beautifully cut uniforms, had at one time shaved his head, donned the yellow robe of a monk, and begged his food from door to door. In view of the universality of the custom, it is small wonder that Siam has ten thousand monasteries and that 300,000 of its inhabitants wear the ocher-colored robe.
The periods of time which men devote to monastic life are not uniform. Some spend between a month and a year, others their entire lives. Some enter the monastery in their youth, others in middle age or when old men. But they all shave their heads and don the coarse yellow robe and lead practically the same existence. Each morning, carrying their "begging bowls," they beg their food at the doors of laymen. They come quietly and stand at the door, and, accepting the offerings, as quietly depart without expressing thanks for what is given them, the idea being that they are not begging for their own benefit but in order to evoke a spirit of charity in the giver. During the dry season it is the custom of the monks to make long pilgrimages for the purpose of visiting other monasteries. Each of these itinerant monks is accompanied by a youth known as a yom, who carries the simple requisites of the journey, the chief of which is a large umbrella. Traveling in the interior one frequently meets long files of these yellow-clad pilgrims, with their attendant yoms, moving in silence along a forest trail. When night comes the yom opens the large umbrella which he carries, thrusts its long handle into the ground, and over it drapes a square of cloth, thus extemporizing a sort of tent under which his master sleeps.
To visit Siam without seeing the royal white elephants would be like visiting Niagara without seeing the falls. The elephant stables stand in the heart of the palace enclosure, sandwiched in between the palace gardens and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Each animal—there were only three in the royal stables at the time of my visit—has a separate building to itself, within which it stands on a sort of dais, one hind leg lashed with a rope to a tall, stout post painted scarlet and surmounted by a gilded crown. Much as I dislike to shatter cherished illusions, were I to assert that the elephants I saw in the royal stables were white, I should be convicting myself of color-blindness. The best that can be said of two of them, is that they were a dirty gray, about the color of a much-used wash-rag. The third, had it been a horse, might have been described as a roan, the whole body being a pale reddish-brown, with a sprinkling of real white hairs on the back. All three animals were, in reality, albinos, having the light-colored iris of the eye, the white toe-nails, and the pink skin at the end of the trunk which distinguish the albino everywhere. As a matter of fact, "white elephant" is not a correct translation of the Siamese chang penak, which really means "albino elephant." But most foreigners will continue, I have no doubt, to use the term made famous by Barnum.
Though the albino elephants are never used nowadays save on occasions of great ceremony, being regarded by the educated Siamese with the same amused tolerance with which an Englishman regards the great gilt coach, drawn by eight cream-colored horses, in which the king goes to open Parliament, the ordinary elephant is of enormous economic value to the country, being a combination, as it were, of a motor truck, a portable derrick, and a freight car. Almost anywhere in the back country, where the only roads are trails through the jungle, one can see "elephants a-pilin' teak in the sludgy, squdgy creeks" or being loaded with merchandise for transport into the far interior. Indeed, the traveler who wishes to take a short cut from Siam to Burmah can hire an elephant for the journey almost as easily as he could hire a motor car in America. It is a novel means of travel, but a little of it goes a long way. A good working elephant is a valuable piece of property, being worth in the neighborhood of $2,500., but the prospective purchaser should remember that the possession of one of these giant pachyderms entails considerable overhead, or rather, internal expense. De Wolf Hopper was telling only the literal truth when he sang in Wang of the tribulations of the peasant who had an elephant on his hands: