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Boats on the canal in Bangkok, circa 1965. Long-term expats recall a time when the Thai capital was a low-cost paradise. Photo: Getty Images

When a beer in Bangkok was 50 US cents: low-cost, low-rise laid-back city of old has given way to a metropolis of high-rises and high prices

  • Expats who arrived in Bangkok in the 1960s and ’70s recall living on a shoestring and feeling spoiled in a city that was laid-back and a lot smaller than today
  • Since then the Thai capital has grown bigger than London, and lot more expensive, and much of Old Bangkok has been bulldozed for malls, condos and office towers
Thailand

Dean Barrett, an American mystery writer, sits in an English-style tavern that is one of his remaining old haunts in Bangkok, sipping a black Russian cocktail as he ponders the curious quirks of fate.

“My story is very simple,” says Barrett, a lanky 78-year-old with a moustache and a mischievous smile. “I love Chinese culture and history. But I’m sitting here and not at some American university as a professor.”

The reason is that, in 1965, the Connecticut native enlisted in the US Army so he could learn Chinese at a military-run language institute in California. “Having trained me as a translator for a year, the army put me on a plane to Bangkok,” he says. “All I knew was that it was in Southeast Asia.”

No sooner had Barrett, aged 23, landed in the Thai capital in 1966 than his plan to devote himself to China studies began to unravel. “I got off the plane and saw a Thai woman for the first time, and that was the end of the great China scholar I wanted to be,” he says with a laugh.

Dean Barrett is an American novelist and Vietnam war veteran. Photo: Tibor Krausz
Barrett served as head of a local team for the Army Security Agency, the US military’s signals intelligence branch, as part of a top- secret surveillance operation during the Vietnam war (1955-1975). His task involved listening in on Chinese troops via antennas erected near Bangkok’s old international airport as Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) got under way.

“It was mostly crazy stuff, like one unit telling another: ‘We’re more loyal to Mao than you are.’ They were fighting each other. It was amazing bull,” he says.

A view over the Temple of the Emerald Buddha (lower right) and the Ministry of Defence (upper left) in Bangkok, circa 1960. Photo: Getty Images

It wasn’t the clandestine work that captivated him, though, but life in a spirited, exotic city with its freewheeling atmosphere and its old-world charm.

Hugging the banks of the Chao Phraya River, quaint communities with zigzagging alleyways sprawled. The riverfront was home to weathered embankments, rickety piers and hulking silos.

Here and there, paddies, orchards and grazing grounds interspersed an urban landscape. Many locals lived in simple wooden huts on stilts with mosquito nets. “You were still in Old Asia here back then,” he recalls.

An image of the Chao Phraya River in the 1960s. Photo: Getty Images

There wasn’t yet a tall building in sight to diminish the horizon and reduce the city’s skyline to today’s straggly thicket of towering high-rises. Only the spires of Buddhist temples rose above the landscape.

“Our barracks had five floors and our colonel’s office was on the top. I could look out from there and see across the city,” Barrett remembers. “There were only three lifts in the whole town.”

That laid-back tropical town of around 2.5 million inhabitants, as Bangkok was then, is no more. As the city’s population has expanded to some 11 million and grown to the size of London at nearly 1,600 sq km (618 square miles), much of the old Bangkok which enchanted foreigners like Barrett has disappeared beneath mushrooming encrustations of steel and concrete.

Skyscrapers dominate the skyline in a part of Bangkok. Photo: Tibor Krausz

Hundreds of skyscrapers crowd the city, several rising above 300 metres (980 feet). Many towering structures have been completed in just the past few years and many more are under construction. Neighbourhoods of traditional dwellings and family-run shophouses have largely given way to modern shopping malls, office towers and condominiums.

Few cities have changed so much and so fast as Bangkok, according to Colin Hastings, an Englishman and another long-term expat who, was also 23 when he first landed in Thailand in 1974.

“When I got here, Bangkok was still tiny,” he says. “In my lifetime, the skyline has changed dramatically. The city has become this massive forest of tall buildings.”

Large buildings now block the view from the top floor of a low-rise in northern Bangkok that housed US Army officers during the Vietnam war era. Photo: Tibor Krausz

Hastings, a native of London, wound up staying in Thailand the way many other long-term expats have done – by chance. A budding journalist working on Fleet Street, he set out that year with friends on an overland hippie trail from England to Australia. Thailand was meant to be a mere way station en route after sojourns in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

“Thailand was completely different from anything else I’d seen before,” recalls Hastings, 69, who publishes a long-running expat lifestyle magazine called The Big Chilli.

“I felt I’d stumbled upon a magical kingdom. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful and unspoilt Phuket was back then,” he adds, referring to the southern Thai resort island that is now heavily developed.
Colin Hastings is a long-term Bangkok expatriate from London. Photo: Tibor Krausz

In this exotic land, he could lose himself in Bangkok’s burgeoning nightlife scene, and hang out at the city’s bars, clubs and sporting venues patronised by members of a close-knit expat community comprised mostly of Americans and Britons.

To Hastings, it felt like being shipwrecked in paradise. “You were really isolated out here,” he says. “To get in touch with anyone back home, you had to write aerogrammes [air letters]. When you picked up a phone to make a local call, you had to wait for a line. It could take ages.”

Foreigners with limited means lived on a shoestring and still felt spoiled. “You could get a bowl of noodles for three or five baht,” Hastings says. “A very nice breakfast cost US$1. A beer cost US$0.50.”

A view through the broken windows of a room in an abandoned old building in Bangkok where US Army officers once worked. Photo: Tibor Krausz

On cost-of-living indexes in Southeast Asia today, Bangkok ranks as the second-priciest city, after Singapore.

“Life in Thailand, for most Americans here now, is significantly more expensive than a similar life would be in, say, Dallas or Miami,” argues Jake Needham, a lawyer turned novelist from Houston, Texas, who has made Bangkok his home for three decades.

For old-timers in the Thai capital, going down memory lane can be a fraught experience for another reason: their favourite lane may well have long been converted into high-rises or refashioned beyond recognition.

On cost-of-living indexes in Southeast Asia today, Bangkok ranks as the second-priciest city, after Singapore. Photo: Getty Images

A few years ago, the decades-old low-rise in a busy business hub where Hastings had his publisher’s offices was demolished to make way for a gleaming 38-storey office tower, currently under construction. “We’ve gone from a big office to a smaller office to a room about as big as a table,” says the Englishman, who now works out of another old building down a small cul-de-sac nearby.

Barrett, who spent nearly two decades in the 1970s and ‘80s living and working in Hong Kong while returning to Bangkok frequently, has seen almost all his old haunts in the Thai capital disappear.

The most galling for him has been the loss of Washington Square, a time-worn entertainment venue popular with Vietnam war veterans that had bars with names including Texas Lone Star Saloon. It was closed down years ago and a luxury mall is rising in its stead, next to two other similar malls already there.

Barrett was working on a mystery series featuring a hard-boiled American detective based in Washington Square, but he managed only two books. “There was going to be a third, but my detective lived above Texas Lone Star Saloon, so his whole world was suddenly gone,” he fumes.

Barrett stands in front of what was then the barracks for US Army soldiers in Bangkok. Photo: Tibor Krausz

One old edifice of his own world has endured, however: his army barracks. Arranged in a horseshoe shape around a courtyard, the three nondescript ’50s-style flat buildings, once repurposed to house American soldiers like him, languish unused and neglected in a compound flanked by hotels and condominiums in northern Bangkok.

The ground is littered with leaves and other detritus. In the courtyard, where a basketball court and a swimming pool stood, there are improvised vegetable plots with greens growing in car tyres packed with soil.

The vacant interiors of the old low-rises, which were revamped into love motels after the Americans left, are covered in grime. An eerie air of decay haunts them. The Thai caretaker, whom Barrett befriended in the 1960s, still lives here, but he is sickly and bedridden inside his gloomy home.

The former barracks for US soldiers in Bangkok languish unused and neglected in a compound flanked by hotels and condominiums. Photo: Tibor Krausz

Barrett clambers up to a top-floor balcony from where he used to gaze out to an inviting panorama. His view is blocked by towering constructions in a teeming metropolis.

“I have deep memories of this place,” he observes. “I’m glad it’s still here.”

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