Thursday 15 May 2008 10am
Strangers in a Strange Land: Europeans and Americans in Bangkok from 1850 to 1950

Bangkok was a challenging place to live for most Europeans and Americans. How did they cope – those Strangers in a Strange Land? This lecture sheds light upon aspects of foreigner life in Bangkok from 1850 to 1950.

Fewer than a dozen westerners lived in Bangkok prior to the Bowring Treaty of 1855, most of them missionaries. By1904 the population of Bangkok was estimated at about half a million people. 400 of them are listed together in the Bangkok Directory of that year, a group comprised of Europeans, Americans, Japanese and Koreans.

The Oriental Hotel was the meeting place for almost every foreigner who traveled to Bangkok, as well as the social center for the local foreign community. At the annual Christmas Dance in 1935 a local artist painted a panoramic frieze of Alpine scenery along the walls of the large dining room and a specially laid floor turned the lawn into an open-air ballroom for two hundred guests. On weekends garden front of the hotel was the scene of circuses, marionette shows, Thai boxing and cricket. On Monday nights the Siamese Navy Band played western music, an event that “saved many a one a fit of the blues,” a westerner reported.