The Boy Travellers in the Far East, Part Second / Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey to Siam and Java; With Descriptions of Cochin-China, Cambodia, Sumatra and the Malay Archipelago

by Thomas Wallace Knox

IN THE FOREIGN PART OF BANGKOK.

"The hotel stands on the bank of the river, and you can step from a boat directly to the veranda of the house. The river is the Broadway of Bangkok, and all the travelling to and fro, or the greater part of it, is done on the water. In this part of Bangkok is where the foreigners live, and their houses are scattered along the banks for at least a mile. Nobody wants to live where he would be without a front on the river, as it would be just like living off from the street in an American city. The merchants have their warehouses so that goods can be rolled from boats directly inside the doors; but the houses where people live are set back a little, and have a good large yard in front and all around them. They have plenty of trees in the yards, and the houses look very pretty; and as the verandas are wide, there is an abundance of shade. Most of the houses are of two stories, and built of stuccoed brick; and a good many of the floors are of brick or stone. Wood is not very durable in this climate, as the air is moist and rots it; and, besides, they have certain kinds of insects that eat it full of holes, and make it turn to powder. Some woods decay much faster than others, and they have one kind called teak, that the insects never attack.

"As I look from the veranda where I am writing I can see half a dozen ships anchored in the river below here, and as many more up above. Most of them belong to Siam, as we can see by the flag; and there are two or three German ships, one English, and one American. The Siamese flag is red, and has a white elephant on it; we are in the country of the White Elephant, and don't intend leaving until we have seen the sacred beast. I am told that the white elephants at the king's palace have fine stables and lots of attendants, and that they are worshipped and petted till they are quite spoiled in their dispositions.

"We have hired a boat by the day, and it is to be kept for our use as long as we stay here; just as we might keep a carriage in another country. There is a little cabin where you have to stoop as you go in; and there are cushioned seats for four persons, and windows with sliding lattices all around. It takes four men to row it—two on the bow, and two on the stern—and they all row with their faces the way the boat is going. The boat is quite comfortable, and we enjoy it very much.

"The people make use of the river for all sorts of business. It is the great highway for transporting merchandise, and for promenading on the water; and it is the place where people go on shopping excursions. A great many of the houses are built on rafts of bamboo-poles, and they rise and fall with the tide. The raft is somewhat larger than the house, and forms a platform all around it; and when you want to go in at the front of a house, you have only to bring your boat along-side the raft and step off. The bamboo seems almost to have been designed by nature for the purpose of making these rafts. You know it is hollow, and very light, and that it has joints at regular intervals. Now each joint forms a water-tight compartment, and the wood will resist the water for a very long time, so that a bamboo raft has no chance of sinking. Perhaps it was the bamboo that gave the Chinese the idea of building ships in water-tight compartments, as Marco Polo says they did six hundred years ago. Who knows?

"As you go along the river you see the fronts of the houses open towards the water, and if they have anything to sell it is put where it can be seen, exactly as it would be in a shop on Broadway. The houses are divided generally into only two rooms—the men occupying one, and the women the other; and the Siamese rarely make houses of more than one story. The reason is that they wish to avoid having anybody walking over their heads, which is considered an indignity. It is said that when the city was first built along the banks of the river there was a great deal of cholera, on account of the bad drainage, and many people died. The king then gave orders for the people to build on the river itself, which would make the drainage perfect, and thus improve the public health. The order was obeyed, and from it we find the floating houses that seem so curious to us. There are not far from fifteen thousand of these houses and shops, and they are strung along on both sides of the river for several miles, altogether. Then there are many houses built on piles, to overhang the water, just like those we described at Saigon.

"One of the books we have with us tells us that Bangkok is called 'The Venice of the East,' and I can easily understand why. Venice is full of canals, as you know, and so is Bangkok. They run off from the river in all directions, and you can go almost anywhere by them when the tide is up. This is why nearly everybody has a boat, as it would be difficult to go about without one. You see boats of all sizes, from a little dug-out, just large enough for one person—and a small one at that—up to the great house-boat, or barge, that will hold twenty or more. The people spend a good deal of their time on the water, and very often in it; for they swim like otters, and are not at all disturbed when one of their boats overturns with them. This afternoon, when we were out on the river, a steamboat passed us. It did us no harm, though we tossed around for a moment; but there was a small skiff close by that was filled with water by the swell from the steamer. Two boys were in it, and as the skiff went down under them, they took hold of it with their hands and swam to the shore. They soon had the water out of it, and paddled off as merrily as ever.

"Where the largest of the canals branches off there is a pretty dense collection of houses, and this continues for quite a distance. The streets are irregular, and not very wide or clean; perhaps the most of the people living in this quarter are Chinese, and they are not very particular about dirt. Most of the shops are kept by Chinese, and they have a great number of gambling-houses, for which they pay a fixed sum to the government. Gambling is a monopoly, and so is the sale of intoxicating spirits; the licenses are sold by the government, just as an American city gives a man a license to sell liquor when he pays the sum agreed on. The Chinese that come here are just as great gamblers as they are at home, and they are just as fond of smoking opium.

"The city is said to contain half a million inhabitants, and it is little more than a hundred years old. It was founded in 1769, when the Siamese capital (Ayuthia) was captured and plundered by the Burmese. The king lives here, and the royal palace is well worth seeing. We are going there to-morrow, or perhaps next day, and we are going to see some curious temples. There are lots of temples in Bangkok, and the city contains not less than twenty thousand priests of the Buddhist religion. We will tell you more about the priests and the temples in another letter."