Nose against the glass

I set out to see some of old Bangkok. Joe was not due back from Chiang Mai for another day, the leg doctor had given me the A-OK, and I had just read William Warren's keen and flavorsome "Bangkok." This is a short history of the city by a careful historian and good raconteur, an American Southerner who moved to Bangkok on a whim in 1960 and got contentedly stuck here. Warren has written over 40 books on Thai culture, gardens, arts, crafts and cuisine. He knows his way around, and I let his book lead the way.

The sun was blazing down, so I carried a bottle of water and took my time. Much of my westward route toward the Chao Phrya river took me through areas of Bangkok that are generic new Asia: glass office towers, Honda dealerships, foreign embassies with small consulates and big trade missions. Except for the foreign flags, I could have been strolling along U.S. 1 in Fort Lauderdale or New Rochelle.

My more or less arbitrary destination was the Oriental Hotel. According to Warren, there's not much left of the original 1887 Victorian structure, just some remnants of the "authors' wing," where Somerset Maugham survived a bout of malaria in 1923. I like literary ghosts (Joe and I once tried unsuccessfully to have Lady Brett Ashley paged at the Crillon bar), and it was at Maugham's shrine where I wished to leave a metaphorical offering of some sticky rice and green papaya. I thought, too, that I might have lunch in the Oriental's handsome garden, which I had glimpsed from a river ferry back in January.

Over the first mile or two of my trek, I found lamentably few traces of old Bangkok. On Sathorn Road, a main avenue, I spotted one old Thai wooden house on stilts, surrounded by a high stucco wall topped with barbed wire---an admirable crank's attempt to stave off the inevitable. Down a few side streets there were rows of dilapidated two-story shops, examples of the concrete buildings of no architectural distinction that make up the bulk of the city's residential and commercial stock. Since the business and family lives in these buildings spill out onto the streets, and with food vendors set up and thriving in front of many of them, they do provide relief from the tedium of the bank towers.

On Charoen Krung (New Road), one of Bangkok's first business streets, built in 1861, I began to spot remnants of the old city. (Bangkok was a fishing village until 1782, when Rama I, the first Chakri Dynasty king, moved the Thai capital south from Ayutthaya, which had been destroyed by the invading Burmese.)

Paralleling the river, New Road is still the bustling business center it was a century earlier, when Chinese merchants introduced commerce to a still largely agrarian people. In Ian Buruma's "God's Dust," a Sino-Thai journalist insists to the author that "one hundred years ago the Thais knew nothing. The Chinese taught them how to weigh, how to buy, how to sell." The Chinese have been largely integrated into Thai society---sharing business ventures with the Thai elite, adopting Thai names---though today many of the gem, coin and antique shops along New Road are still Sini-Thai-owned, as are bank and insurance companies. (In a spasm of vaguely anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1930s, Prime Minister Phibun changed the country's name from Siam to Thailand.)

Few of the buildings along New Road appear to be 19th century, but some look early 20th---filthy old wood and stucco jobs with corrugated iron roofs, big louvered windows and balconies with ornate stained balustrades. Some of the office towers going up behind the early buildings try to echo their architecture. One of them, with about thirty stories worth of cramped, semi-circular neo-classical balconies, looks as if it is covered in boils.

I found the Oriental Hotel but never got in. Meeting me halfway up the flower-lined driveway was a hotel employee---wearing a jacket and tie I would describe as not so much natty as gnatty---who declared that the Oriental had a "dress code," and I would not be admitted wearing my knee-length shorts. This supercilious chap invited me to visit the hotel's clothing shop across the street, where I might purchase suitable attire. "Well, then, my good fellow, I suppose I shall just have to dine elsewhere, at a venue less absurdly pretentious!" is what I did not think to say. Instead, I said something like, "Nnff."

It's just as well. The new section of the Oriental looked like one of those comically overpriced TwelveSeasonsRegencyEightStarJudithKrantzSleptHere Reagan-Bush-era joints designed and operated for people who if they didn't stay in one of these places might begin to wonder who they were. And while I'm at it, the hell with Maugham, too. Last night I started reading his "The Gentleman in the Parlour," about his 1923 journey across Southeast Asia. It is observant but arch and above-it-all. Before we left home, Sheryl Julian, the Boston Globe food editor, provided Joe and me with an excellent four-point set of Rules to Write By. (Joe is working on something for Sheryl now.) Rule Number One (Maugham should have had Sheryl as an editor): "Don't be annoying."