Hanging by a thread
There are many ways to get to Ban Khrua, a dense thicket of low-rise houses in the heart of the Thai capital, Bangkok. But none is as satisfying, or as steeped in the city’s lore, as walking the back alleys from ultra-modern Siam Square to the canal that forms the community’s southern flank. As you cross a footbridge, motorised ferry boats slice through the murky waters, and a sour tang rises from the waves that slap the railed concrete banks.
On the opposite side, a jumble of two- and three-storey houses squat under a blistering sun. Some have seen better days: their tin roofs are flaking rust and their walls are missing wooden slats. Slimy refuse clings to the side of open sewers that drain into the canal. The walkways are so narrow that passers-by can reach out and touch the houses on either side with both hands.
To call this a slum would be a mistake, however, as its original settlers were granted royal title to the land. It would also ignore the remarkable history and enduring resilience of those who live and work along its lanes.
A family trade
Inside his workshop, Nipon Manuthas holds out a spool of bottle-green thread. ‘We choose all the dye, to get the right colour,’ he says, gesturing at a stack of folded silks behind his desk. His voice is muffled by the constant thudding and clacking of three wooden handlooms operated by his female weavers. Their bare feet pump the pedals that alternate the vertical threads, while a wooden rocket holding the coloured spools is passed by hand horizontally across the loom. The resulting lengths of woven silk are sold to bespoke tailors all over Bangkok who cut them into dresses, shirts and suits.
Nipon inherited the business from his mother, Suree, who died in 1997, aged 84. In 1947, she was one of the weavers whose chequered sarongs caught the attention of James Thompson, a US spy turned entrepreneur. At the time, Ban Khrua was the only place in Bangkok where silk was still woven by hand. Thompson was excited by the lustrous cloth and by the discovery of an intact weaving community. ‘Jim saw the silk in the market and asked, “Where does this all come from?” I told him, and off he went,’ recalls William Warren, a friend and biographer of Thompson.
At the time, Thailand’s silk industry was in a state of decline owing to changing tastes and competition from imported, man-made textiles. Many silk weavers had been forced to give up the trade.
The secret to Ban Khrua’s enduring tradition, it turned out, was its unusual history. Its founders were ethnic Cham Muslims from Cambodia and Vietnam who fought for the Thai crown during the late 18th century. In return, they were given a plot of land east of the new capital, Bangkok, where they built a mosque and dug a canal that connected them to the river. Muslim prisoners taken from wars with rival kingdoms in Southeast Asia were also packed off to Ban Khrua, whose name translates as ‘Muslim family village’.
By the early 20th century, the city had swallowed the village, but it remained a Muslim enclave in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country. This isolation bound
its residents to their community and its traditions, including silk weaving.
Seizing on the post-war demand for luxury goods, Thompson set off for New York with samples from Ban Khrua. The revival of Thailand’s silk trade had begun, and with it the legend of the spy-turned-businessman. Thirty years later, Thompson, then aged 61, went for a walk in the jungle while on holiday in Malaysia. He never returned.
Thompson’s disappearance in 1967 ended a bull run for the Muslim weavers of Ban Khrua. Over the next decade, his company switched silk production to other locations and eventually opened a modern factory in northeast Thailand that today produces 1.5 million metres of silk a year, much of it for home furnishings. Many of the old weaving families sold their looms or moved on, convinced that the glory days were over.
Nipon, however, has kept the faith, and is the last of the old Muslim weavers in Ban Khrua. What keeps him going is his stubbornness and thrift, rather than a romantic dream of past glories, when every home had a loom and Thompson’s famous guests – Robert Kennedy, Indonesia’s President Sukarno – came knocking. ‘I want to stay here in the community. Silk is my life,’ he says, a smile breaking out on his otherwise lugubrious face. He plans to hand over the business to his UK-educated daughter when he retires in five years.
At two small factories near his modest home, Nipon has a dozen teak handlooms operating six days a week, with brief holidays during Ramadan and Thai New Year. The female weavers are paid by the yard and can earn 20,000 baht (£315) a month, equivalent to junior office workers in Bangkok.
It’s a family affair: his wife and sister-in-law operate the spinning machines that transfer dyed yarn onto spools, ready to be woven into the bold patterns that Nipon favours, some copied from the pages of foreign fashion magazines. He speaks English and German, having studied for a business degree in Hamburg when he was in his 20s.
It was on the site of his workshop that he was born in 1949, one of ten children. As a child, Nipon watched Thompson on his daily trips to Ban Khrua to check on the dyeing and weaving of his silks. When Thompson bought a plot of land on the opposite bank of the canal during the 1950s, the family donated their teak house to him. Dismantled and floated across by boat piece by piece, it became a pantry and later a showcase for a collection of antique ceramic bowls.
Today, it’s the first room that tourists enter on their guided tour of Thompson’s tropical-chic, Thai-themed house. But Nipon, who has a framed photo of himself standing with his children in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, says that he’s never bothered to go and see it. That doesn’t surprise Warren, who remembers how the first flush of prosperity from silk weaving transformed the community. ‘They were desperate to get rid of it and build a Western-style house,’ he says with a chuckle.
A community in flux
Ban Khrua is still evolving, shaped by the social and economic forces that have remade Thailand since the days when Thompson began his silk business. Back then, nine out of ten households were Muslim. Today, the majority of residents – around 70 per cent – are Buddhists from northeast Thailand who have moved to Bangkok in search of work.
Success in the silk business allowed Muslim weavers to move to plusher surroundings and send their children to universities, opening the door to government jobs and a middle-class lifestyle. Friday prayers at the Jam ul Khoy Riyah mosque draws a crowd of more than 200 men, many of them white-collar Muslims who work nearby but live far away.
Thailand’s Muslim population is estimated at between five million and seven million, out of a total of 64 million. A minority in Bangkok and other Thai cities, Muslims are in the majority in the three southernmost provinces that border Malaysia. In this danger zone, a simmering rebellion against Thai rule flared into a deadly insurgency in 2004 that, to date, has taken more than 2,000 lives. The conflict hasn’t spread to Bangkok, however, and there is no sign of Islamic extremism in Muslim enclaves such as Ban Khrua.
Instead, the threat to the community has come from Bangkok’s city planners. In 1988, a construction firm was contracted to build a new highway with an exit road through Ban Khrua to a luxury mall in Siam Square. Five thousand families living along the route were told their houses would be bulldozed. It was a fate that had befallen other old districts as rapid economic growth put a premium on space in the capital.
But this time the builders met their match in a clannish community that used every trick in the book – public rallies, legal appeals, civil disobedience – to stop the road. Muslims argued that their ancestral graveyards shouldn’t be disturbed and that families were bound to the land by their tradition of burying their newborn babies’ placentas under their birth houses.
What incensed residents was the idea that Ban Khrua was an eyesore in the way of progress. ‘People saw this area as a slum. But actually we were given the land by the king. It’s not just a place where people put up shacks. We have a right to this land,’ says Manatsanan Benjacharongchinda, who runs a silk-dyeing factory next door to Nipon’s.
In 2001, after 13 years of fighting, the planners finally conceded defeat. Although the highway was eventually built, there was no exit road through Ban Khrua.
To residents such as Manatsanan, a stooped chain-smoker, it was a welcome reprieve. Now 66, he began working in a factory aged 11, using the chemical dyes that Thompson had introduced to Thailand. Today, his teenage son helps him to dunk knots of raw silk on U-shaped tubes into bubbling cauldrons of dye. But Manatsanan won’t be handing the family business on to his children. ‘There’s no next generation,’ he says with a deep sigh. ‘I’m the last one.’
The mood is darker in the lanes further back from the canal, where migrant families cram into rickety houses. Ngoen Niyom keeps her door bolted shut, and her grandson is kept busy by a Playstation hooked up to a giant television. Her family worked as weavers for Thompson, and her university-educated daughter now has a good job at the airport. But Ngoen, 75, fears for the safety of her grandson, who crouches on the tiled floor, bathed in the TV’s flickering glow.
The reason is the drugs – mostly methamphetamine, known in Thai as the ‘crazy drug’ – she says are hawked outside. But Ngoen is fighting back. She opens a closet and pulls out a microphone on a stand. It’s wired to 30 speakers outside that she uses to ‘name-and-shame’ anyone seen dealing in her neighbourhood. ‘I tell them, “We know it’s you. Please stop and cooperate,”’ she says.
Still, she isn’t giving up on Ban Khrua, and nor is her daughter, who spends weekends there. ‘It’s convenient here. It’s right in the centre of Bangkok. So people want to come back,’ she tells me.
Quality service
It’s 38°C outside as Nipon leaves his house, a bundle of silks tucked under his arm. He crosses the muddy graveyard where his grandparents are buried and climbs into his silver pick-up truck. As we crawl in stop–start afternoon traffic, Nipon takes a call from an Italian customer who wants a sample next week for a range of ladies shoes. Today’s sales call, however, is at a shopping plaza by the venerable Oriental Hotel, where Thompson lived and ran his business in the early years.
I ask Nipon why he doesn’t send a delivery bike instead. He shakes his head of thinning black hair. ‘If I have a new design, I can show it and say, look, this is beautiful,’ he says. But when we reach the tailor’s inside the air-conditioned plaza, Nipon quickly hands over the bundle and collects his money: 9,900 baht for 30 metres of material. ‘I’m busy today, so much to do,’ he mutters.
After he leaves, I ask the shop’s owner, Wilaiwan Anusapa, why she buys from weavers such as Nipon. She widens her eyes and reaches for a length of crimson-red silk, which shimmers under the shop lights. ‘People want hand-woven silks,’ she tells me. Many of her other suppliers – tiny, family-run companies – also trace their roots to the old weaving clans, a thread that links a proud community by a canal to the catwalks of the West. ‘Ban Khrua has the best silk. Look, you can see the quality.’
The Thai Silk Company
Jim Thompson founded the Thai Silk Company in 1948. Among its original shareholders were the contract weavers of Ban Khrua, whom Thompson insisted
take a slice. ‘He believed that if you want to start something, start small and try to involve the people as much as possible. The shareholding was his idea,’ says William Booth, managing director of the company, who began working for Thompson in 1964.
By the time of his disappearance in 1967, Thompson oversaw a company with US$1.5million in annual sales. ‘In the beginning, we were just waiting for him to come back,’ recalls Booth. He never did, however, so the new managers began to shift production by expanding outside Bangkok. One reason was the difficulty of doing business in Ban Khrua without the personal touch of the ‘Big Boss’. ‘When he disappeared, the confidence was lost,’ says Surindr Supasavasdebhandu, a 50-year veteran of the company. ‘Nobody else could build this kind of faith.’
By the mid-1970s, the company had stopped buying silk from Ban Khrua. In 1980, it opened a factory in Pak Thong Chai, northeast Thailand, where it produces branded silks on hundreds of machine looms and handlooms. A nearby mulberry farm supplies silk worm cocoons – the raw material for silk. Last year, total revenues were more than 2,600 million baht (£41million), yielding 433 million baht net profit.
This overhaul would have appalled Thompson, who despised modern factories, says William Warren, his biographer. Thompson wanted to turn the company over to his beloved weavers, he explains . ‘He was very idealistic,’ says Warren with a sigh.
But the success of the silk company and the Jim Thompson brand – his house in Bangkok attracts 170,000 visitors a year – has been good for the weavers of Ban Khrua. Their shares have climbed in value and pay handsome dividends. Nipon Manuthas says that his late mother’s shares pay out around one million baht a year.
Photographs by Luke Duggleby
October 2007
On the opposite side, a jumble of two- and three-storey houses squat under a blistering sun. Some have seen better days: their tin roofs are flaking rust and their walls are missing wooden slats. Slimy refuse clings to the side of open sewers that drain into the canal. The walkways are so narrow that passers-by can reach out and touch the houses on either side with both hands.
To call this a slum would be a mistake, however, as its original settlers were granted royal title to the land. It would also ignore the remarkable history and enduring resilience of those who live and work along its lanes.
Start the slideshow (10 pictures)
A family trade
Inside his workshop, Nipon Manuthas holds out a spool of bottle-green thread. ‘We choose all the dye, to get the right colour,’ he says, gesturing at a stack of folded silks behind his desk. His voice is muffled by the constant thudding and clacking of three wooden handlooms operated by his female weavers. Their bare feet pump the pedals that alternate the vertical threads, while a wooden rocket holding the coloured spools is passed by hand horizontally across the loom. The resulting lengths of woven silk are sold to bespoke tailors all over Bangkok who cut them into dresses, shirts and suits.
Nipon inherited the business from his mother, Suree, who died in 1997, aged 84. In 1947, she was one of the weavers whose chequered sarongs caught the attention of James Thompson, a US spy turned entrepreneur. At the time, Ban Khrua was the only place in Bangkok where silk was still woven by hand. Thompson was excited by the lustrous cloth and by the discovery of an intact weaving community. ‘Jim saw the silk in the market and asked, “Where does this all come from?” I told him, and off he went,’ recalls William Warren, a friend and biographer of Thompson.
At the time, Thailand’s silk industry was in a state of decline owing to changing tastes and competition from imported, man-made textiles. Many silk weavers had been forced to give up the trade.
The secret to Ban Khrua’s enduring tradition, it turned out, was its unusual history. Its founders were ethnic Cham Muslims from Cambodia and Vietnam who fought for the Thai crown during the late 18th century. In return, they were given a plot of land east of the new capital, Bangkok, where they built a mosque and dug a canal that connected them to the river. Muslim prisoners taken from wars with rival kingdoms in Southeast Asia were also packed off to Ban Khrua, whose name translates as ‘Muslim family village’.
By the early 20th century, the city had swallowed the village, but it remained a Muslim enclave in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country. This isolation bound
its residents to their community and its traditions, including silk weaving.
Seizing on the post-war demand for luxury goods, Thompson set off for New York with samples from Ban Khrua. The revival of Thailand’s silk trade had begun, and with it the legend of the spy-turned-businessman. Thirty years later, Thompson, then aged 61, went for a walk in the jungle while on holiday in Malaysia. He never returned.
Thompson’s disappearance in 1967 ended a bull run for the Muslim weavers of Ban Khrua. Over the next decade, his company switched silk production to other locations and eventually opened a modern factory in northeast Thailand that today produces 1.5 million metres of silk a year, much of it for home furnishings. Many of the old weaving families sold their looms or moved on, convinced that the glory days were over.
Nipon, however, has kept the faith, and is the last of the old Muslim weavers in Ban Khrua. What keeps him going is his stubbornness and thrift, rather than a romantic dream of past glories, when every home had a loom and Thompson’s famous guests – Robert Kennedy, Indonesia’s President Sukarno – came knocking. ‘I want to stay here in the community. Silk is my life,’ he says, a smile breaking out on his otherwise lugubrious face. He plans to hand over the business to his UK-educated daughter when he retires in five years.
At two small factories near his modest home, Nipon has a dozen teak handlooms operating six days a week, with brief holidays during Ramadan and Thai New Year. The female weavers are paid by the yard and can earn 20,000 baht (£315) a month, equivalent to junior office workers in Bangkok.
It’s a family affair: his wife and sister-in-law operate the spinning machines that transfer dyed yarn onto spools, ready to be woven into the bold patterns that Nipon favours, some copied from the pages of foreign fashion magazines. He speaks English and German, having studied for a business degree in Hamburg when he was in his 20s.
It was on the site of his workshop that he was born in 1949, one of ten children. As a child, Nipon watched Thompson on his daily trips to Ban Khrua to check on the dyeing and weaving of his silks. When Thompson bought a plot of land on the opposite bank of the canal during the 1950s, the family donated their teak house to him. Dismantled and floated across by boat piece by piece, it became a pantry and later a showcase for a collection of antique ceramic bowls.
Today, it’s the first room that tourists enter on their guided tour of Thompson’s tropical-chic, Thai-themed house. But Nipon, who has a framed photo of himself standing with his children in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, says that he’s never bothered to go and see it. That doesn’t surprise Warren, who remembers how the first flush of prosperity from silk weaving transformed the community. ‘They were desperate to get rid of it and build a Western-style house,’ he says with a chuckle.
A community in flux
Ban Khrua is still evolving, shaped by the social and economic forces that have remade Thailand since the days when Thompson began his silk business. Back then, nine out of ten households were Muslim. Today, the majority of residents – around 70 per cent – are Buddhists from northeast Thailand who have moved to Bangkok in search of work.
Success in the silk business allowed Muslim weavers to move to plusher surroundings and send their children to universities, opening the door to government jobs and a middle-class lifestyle. Friday prayers at the Jam ul Khoy Riyah mosque draws a crowd of more than 200 men, many of them white-collar Muslims who work nearby but live far away.
Thailand’s Muslim population is estimated at between five million and seven million, out of a total of 64 million. A minority in Bangkok and other Thai cities, Muslims are in the majority in the three southernmost provinces that border Malaysia. In this danger zone, a simmering rebellion against Thai rule flared into a deadly insurgency in 2004 that, to date, has taken more than 2,000 lives. The conflict hasn’t spread to Bangkok, however, and there is no sign of Islamic extremism in Muslim enclaves such as Ban Khrua.
Instead, the threat to the community has come from Bangkok’s city planners. In 1988, a construction firm was contracted to build a new highway with an exit road through Ban Khrua to a luxury mall in Siam Square. Five thousand families living along the route were told their houses would be bulldozed. It was a fate that had befallen other old districts as rapid economic growth put a premium on space in the capital.
But this time the builders met their match in a clannish community that used every trick in the book – public rallies, legal appeals, civil disobedience – to stop the road. Muslims argued that their ancestral graveyards shouldn’t be disturbed and that families were bound to the land by their tradition of burying their newborn babies’ placentas under their birth houses.
What incensed residents was the idea that Ban Khrua was an eyesore in the way of progress. ‘People saw this area as a slum. But actually we were given the land by the king. It’s not just a place where people put up shacks. We have a right to this land,’ says Manatsanan Benjacharongchinda, who runs a silk-dyeing factory next door to Nipon’s.
In 2001, after 13 years of fighting, the planners finally conceded defeat. Although the highway was eventually built, there was no exit road through Ban Khrua.
To residents such as Manatsanan, a stooped chain-smoker, it was a welcome reprieve. Now 66, he began working in a factory aged 11, using the chemical dyes that Thompson had introduced to Thailand. Today, his teenage son helps him to dunk knots of raw silk on U-shaped tubes into bubbling cauldrons of dye. But Manatsanan won’t be handing the family business on to his children. ‘There’s no next generation,’ he says with a deep sigh. ‘I’m the last one.’
The mood is darker in the lanes further back from the canal, where migrant families cram into rickety houses. Ngoen Niyom keeps her door bolted shut, and her grandson is kept busy by a Playstation hooked up to a giant television. Her family worked as weavers for Thompson, and her university-educated daughter now has a good job at the airport. But Ngoen, 75, fears for the safety of her grandson, who crouches on the tiled floor, bathed in the TV’s flickering glow.
The reason is the drugs – mostly methamphetamine, known in Thai as the ‘crazy drug’ – she says are hawked outside. But Ngoen is fighting back. She opens a closet and pulls out a microphone on a stand. It’s wired to 30 speakers outside that she uses to ‘name-and-shame’ anyone seen dealing in her neighbourhood. ‘I tell them, “We know it’s you. Please stop and cooperate,”’ she says.
Still, she isn’t giving up on Ban Khrua, and nor is her daughter, who spends weekends there. ‘It’s convenient here. It’s right in the centre of Bangkok. So people want to come back,’ she tells me.
Quality service
It’s 38°C outside as Nipon leaves his house, a bundle of silks tucked under his arm. He crosses the muddy graveyard where his grandparents are buried and climbs into his silver pick-up truck. As we crawl in stop–start afternoon traffic, Nipon takes a call from an Italian customer who wants a sample next week for a range of ladies shoes. Today’s sales call, however, is at a shopping plaza by the venerable Oriental Hotel, where Thompson lived and ran his business in the early years.
I ask Nipon why he doesn’t send a delivery bike instead. He shakes his head of thinning black hair. ‘If I have a new design, I can show it and say, look, this is beautiful,’ he says. But when we reach the tailor’s inside the air-conditioned plaza, Nipon quickly hands over the bundle and collects his money: 9,900 baht for 30 metres of material. ‘I’m busy today, so much to do,’ he mutters.
After he leaves, I ask the shop’s owner, Wilaiwan Anusapa, why she buys from weavers such as Nipon. She widens her eyes and reaches for a length of crimson-red silk, which shimmers under the shop lights. ‘People want hand-woven silks,’ she tells me. Many of her other suppliers – tiny, family-run companies – also trace their roots to the old weaving clans, a thread that links a proud community by a canal to the catwalks of the West. ‘Ban Khrua has the best silk. Look, you can see the quality.’
The Thai Silk Company
Jim Thompson founded the Thai Silk Company in 1948. Among its original shareholders were the contract weavers of Ban Khrua, whom Thompson insisted
take a slice. ‘He believed that if you want to start something, start small and try to involve the people as much as possible. The shareholding was his idea,’ says William Booth, managing director of the company, who began working for Thompson in 1964.
By the time of his disappearance in 1967, Thompson oversaw a company with US$1.5million in annual sales. ‘In the beginning, we were just waiting for him to come back,’ recalls Booth. He never did, however, so the new managers began to shift production by expanding outside Bangkok. One reason was the difficulty of doing business in Ban Khrua without the personal touch of the ‘Big Boss’. ‘When he disappeared, the confidence was lost,’ says Surindr Supasavasdebhandu, a 50-year veteran of the company. ‘Nobody else could build this kind of faith.’
By the mid-1970s, the company had stopped buying silk from Ban Khrua. In 1980, it opened a factory in Pak Thong Chai, northeast Thailand, where it produces branded silks on hundreds of machine looms and handlooms. A nearby mulberry farm supplies silk worm cocoons – the raw material for silk. Last year, total revenues were more than 2,600 million baht (£41million), yielding 433 million baht net profit.
This overhaul would have appalled Thompson, who despised modern factories, says William Warren, his biographer. Thompson wanted to turn the company over to his beloved weavers, he explains . ‘He was very idealistic,’ says Warren with a sigh.
But the success of the silk company and the Jim Thompson brand – his house in Bangkok attracts 170,000 visitors a year – has been good for the weavers of Ban Khrua. Their shares have climbed in value and pay handsome dividends. Nipon Manuthas says that his late mother’s shares pay out around one million baht a year.
Photographs by Luke Duggleby
October 2007
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