The Three Corner World

October 27, 2019 Leave a reply

Researching the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach led me to investigate her family’s silk business. Her grandfather, Robert Schwarzenbach, was nicknamed “the silk king” and was the biggest silk producer in the world at the close of the nineteenth century, with branches of the family firm in Switzerland, Milan, New York, Buenos Aires and France. One of the French factories was in Huningue, just across the border from me here in Basel. It’s a region called the Dreiländereck, a tripoint, trijunction, triple point, or tri-border area where three countries meet – France, Germany and Switzerland. This afternoon I crossed the border and walked around Huningue to see if there was anything left of Robert Schwarzenbach the silk king, but precious little emerged.

Huningue is right on the border with Basel, handy if you want to employ cheaper factory labour. It’s also between the river, and the Canal de Huningue, a branch of the Canal du Rhône et Rhin, a water network which would have been useful for a cloth factory. From the above 1901 postcard, we can see that the factory was opposite the train station, now a pharmacy. The branch line has in the interim century shut down and the tracks are covered in weeds but the former train station still has the same basic shape and mansard roof with dormer windows.

The “Wohnhaüser” – employees’ houses – depicted in the inset of the above postcard are still there on rue de Belfort, tarted up a bit but looking somewhat worse for wear, and with characteristic Alsatian bombe wrought iron balconies of the Art Nouveau period. The magnificent trees lining the road have gone, though, and new building work is underway where the factory buildings used to be.

Former “Wohnhaüser- or employees’ houses – of the Schwarzenbach silk factory, Huningue.

This part of Huningue is built over the underground remains of the old star-shaped fort, a smaller version of the one at Belfort, testifying to the strategic importance of Huningue in this corner of France abutting Switzerland with Germany across the Rhine. The storerooms under the fort kept provisions in case of a siege – powder for cannon, fodder for horses, lard for the humans. The fort was built by Vaubin under Louis XIV between 1679 and 1681. A rue Vaubin still runs down to the river.

Fortification of Huningue, Encyclopaedia Brittanica

A notice at the entrance to the underground storerooms fleshes out the history. Rue du Rempart, rue de la Poudrière, and a big grassy empty area on Google Maps are all that’s left above ground of the former fort. By my estimation, the location of the tall factory chimney in the above postcard must have been right above the northern point of the old fort. The center of the fort is the present-day Place Abbatucci, named for a Corsican-born general in the French Revolution who died at Huningue.

A View of the Rhine river at Huningue, with Basel in the background, 1680.

Between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the First World War, Huningue was part of the German Empire. Between the world wars it reverted to France, which I presume is when the Schwarzenbach factory was demolished. It was taken by Germany again in 1940 until the end of the Second World War. The imposing fort was always a sore point with the Swiss, especially so since a part of it (marked K above) was across the river too close to Basel territory for comfort. Old maps show an island there, and a village had been cleared to construct the fortifications. During three sieges of the city, in 1796-1797, 1813-1814, and 1815, the Swiss demolished the part of the fort on the other side of the river and the connecting bridge, as can be seen in the commemorative watercolour below.

French evacuation, 1797, Huningue fort across the river, watercolour by Christian von Mechel (Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Graphische Sammlung und Fotoarchiv).

The Rheinpark Restaurant which occupies the site of the fortifications on the German side of the river has maintained the star-shaped design of the original fort – so perhaps it was built on solid older foundations. Where the pontoon fording bridge used to be, allowing troops to transport supplies, there is now the Passerelle des Trois Pays or the Dreiländerbrücke or the Three Countries Bridge – the longest single-span pedestrian bridge in the world at 248 meters. It replaces the pedestrian pontoon bridge on the same location which was bombed by the Allies in 1944.

The old fording bridge between Huningue and Weil am Rhein, bombed by the Allies in 1944.

I went back to Huningue the next day and had a tagine with dates and almonds and some fine Algerian wine (Coteaux de Mascara, which I’d last drunk in 1978-79) for lunch, in La Couscoussiere (highly recommended). Then I headed off across the pedestrian bridge over the river.

The old fortification wall unearthed at Huningue.

On the French side a big landscaping project is well underway, developing the river park and uncovering the retaining wall of the fortress – surprisingly made of brick. Somehow I had imagined stones. The capping stones were that red sandstone used in many public buildings – cathedrals, churches, town halls – in Baden and along the Rhine.

An infographic of the future riverside park at Huningue, with the old fortress walls clearly uncovered.

On the German side there was little trace of the fortifications in the dirty little park by the river. It too is slated for development in a fit of entente cordiale. A Chinese restaurant sits on the old fort foundations and that modern appeasement – the shopping mall – dominates the former island. My guess is that the foundations of the fort are under the mall, in the car park.

Boundary stone No. 1 on the German-Swiss border at Weil am Rhein.

Along the river and round the back of the mall I spotted a magnificent boundary stone, dating from 1817, marking the German-Swiss border. On the other facet of the stone is marked No.1. It sports the coat of arms of the Grossherzogtum Baden, the Grand Duchy of Baden. Jewish refugees sometimes attempted to swim across to Switzerland from here during the war.

The fortifications at Huningue, 1797, drawing by Charles Pinot & Christian von Mechel

The Schwarzenbach factory was established in Huningue, therefore, when it was under German control between 1871 and 1918, and the Germans were favourable to Swiss involvement in industrial expansion. So perhaps the paucity of remains of the factory is because it was established on the German watch and obliterated when the town reverted to France. In the postcard below you can clearly see the extensive size of the factory, the line of the Rhine river and the range of the Black Forest across the way in Germany. The new houses obliterate the earlier factory which covers over the former fort: the battle for memory is on.

Postcard of Huningue train station and the Schwarzenbach silk factory, 1917.

Flier for the Schwarzenbach silk enterprise at the height of its fame.

Katherine Mansfield in Switzerland

September 18, 2019 Leave a reply

The New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield spent seven months in Montana, Switzerland, in 1921, seeking to escape the heat of the south of France and undergoing the fresh air treatment for tuberculosis for which Montana had become famous. In a letter from Menton to the painter Dorothy Brett, Mansfield wrote: “All our flags are pinned on Switzerland. Meadows, trees, mountings [sic], and kind air. I hope we shall get there in time …” Mansfield was beginning to be aware that time was running out for her even as she tried to imagine a more long-term future. Responding to her plan to take a chalet above Sierre, her husband, John Middleton Murry, wrote back: “I simply long to spend a year – two years – a lifetime of years with you at Sierre. It sounds & looks divine. I know I shall be terribly happy there. I’m all for a little chalet.”

Chalet des Sapins, Montana.

The English doctor who attended Mansfield in Montana suggested that she rent the Chalet des Sapins, belonging to his mother. Nestled in a forest of pine trees, it was where the writer had her last sustained period of creativity, during the summer and autumn of 1921. Here she wrote a suite of stories, republished as The Montana Stories, which have assured her posterity. Jennifer Walker, in Elizabeth of the German Garden: A Literary Journey, describes the setting:

It was comfortably furnished and arranged on three storeys. Katherine wanted to occupy the top storey so that she could see over the treetops, down across the valley and look at the views of the mountains all around. During the daytime, the birds came and perched on her balcony and took breadcrumbs. At night, the clear moonshine would stream in through the window. She found that her soul was at peace in this place; she could begin again to write. Despite relapses and constant fatigue, the next seven months were the most productive of her life.

Part of the gardens at the back of the Hotel Bellvue, Sierre

She spent her days in Montana on the large balcony adjoining her room, admiring the view she was too invalid to explore, and writing stories set for the most part in her native New Zealand. She had been brought up with the help of servants and an allowance from Daddy, supplemented by handouts. A measure of independence from family had given her the habits of the inveterate hippy: inviting herself to country houses, using friends and acquaintances as means, for favours, treating her school friend, Ida, as a lady’s maid. She was nineteen before she learned to peel potatoes. The Swiss woman hired to do the peeling in Montana was called Ernestine, a name given to a character in one of the writer’s last stories. Mansfield’s husband had lecturing and editing commitments in London and their decade-long relationship, often fraught and dependent, was under strain. By June 1921, Ida Baker, always on hand to fill the gap, moved into lodgings in the village when Murry was in residence. It was a curious though working set of relationships at the chalet:

They read and wrote, sitting on their balconies as birds flew past, bright pots of flowers beside them and the forest and mountains all around. Katherine wrote to Brett that they had no intention of returning to England for years; here were woods and streams and the sound of bells in the air, golden sunshine with only occasional days of white mist, nights of planning future travel and future homes.

Mansfield had been drawn to free love, and styled herself a “New Woman” with “advanced views”, without quite joining the ranks of the suffragettes. She was what the writer Hermione Lee describes as “sexually reckless and socially excitable”. As the war advanced, however, declining health had taken the shine off Mansfield’s recklessness.

… built for Elizabeth von Arnim. Only her writing chalet, lower right, still exists.

Mansfield’s cousin and a writer of renown, Elizabeth of the German Garden, had a splendid chalet nearby at Bluche-Randogne. She climbed the hill every couple of days or so, to visit her cousin, bearing bunches of flowers and the fruits of the summer to Mansfield’s door:

We exchange Chateaubriand and baskets of apricots and have occasionally lovely talks which are rather like what talks in the after-life will be like, I imagine … ruminative, and reminiscent – although dear know what it is really all about.

The things of life were slipping out of Mansfield’s reach, as they have now slipped from living memory, and she fixed them in her stories: high tea with sardines, the primus stove, antimacassars, photos behind tissue paper, poor girls’ clothes stitched from rich girls’ cast-offs. In Mansfield’s late stories, collected in The Garden Party (1922), and written for the most part in Montana, there is a strong sense of an ending: “Life! How many there were! There were three dozzing at least. And she held hers up to the light.” By August 1921 Mansfield was writing the short story “At the Bay”. It follows the inhabitants of a row of beach bungalows over the course of twenty-four hours, borrowing the modernist device of squeezing human life into a day’s progress. Mansfield summed up her masterwork as:

full of sand and seaweed, bathing dresses hanging over verandas, and sandshoes on window sills, and little pink ‘sea’ convolvulus, and rather gritty sandwiches and the tide coming in. And it smells (oh, I do hope it smells) a little fishy.

She had read, reread and liked James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and parts of Ulysses (1922) that had appeared in The Little Review, and was able to get past what others, particularly in the Bloomsbury set, thought of as Joyce’s vulgarity. When Mary (Elizabeth of the German Garden) returned from London in the new year, Mansfield and Murry were still in residence at the Chalet des Sapins. Mansfield’s moods could be volatile, her marriage was riven with resentments and in her desperation for a cure she was beginning to consider occult treatment in Paris. Mary visited, bearing gifts, and praised Mansfield’s “At the Bay” which had appeared in the interim in the London Mercury, describing it as “a pretty little story”.

Bellevue Hotel, Sierre, with the vines in the garden clearly visible, and the adjoining English chapel.

After a stay at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Montana, suffering from pleurisy, Mansfield with Ida in tow this time, settled into the Hôtel-Château Bellevue in Sierre. The lease on the Chalet des Sapins had run out. No doubt it was fumigated. Murry stayed up in Randogne, coming down to visit them at weekends and to play billiards in the hotel. Mansfield recalled learning to play at the Prime Minister of New Zealand’s residence. It was a hot summer and the hotel was cool and well appointed, in a building dating back to the 17th century. At the time of the Grand Tour, an English chapel had adjoined it, as was the case in a number of Swiss resorts at the time. Mansfield’s room was towards the back, facing the sloping vineyards and the train tracks that led across the Simplon and south into Italy.

The former Hotel Bellevue in Sierre, now the Hotel de Ville.

But that enchanted hotel was more exquisite than ever. The people so kind and gentle, the waving branches outside the windows, a smell of roses and lime blossom. After a very powerful wash and an immaculate lunch – how do the glasses and spoons shine so? – I lay down and went to sleep and Jack went out.

In late July she wrote her only short story with an identifiable Swiss background, “Father and the Girls’, perhaps anticipating the visit of her father and two sisters whom she would meet for the final time in London at the end of summer. Father is frail and elderly and the two girls are his minders, on a European tour that seems to be running out of steam:

Now a wisp of white smoke shone and melted. Now there was another, and the monster itself came into sight and snorting horribly drew up at a little, toy-like station five minutes away. The railway ran at the bottom of the hotel garden which was perched high and surrounded by a stone wall. Steps cut in the stone led to the terraces where the vines were planted.

The view across the tracks from the back of the former Hotel Bellevue in Sierre.

Mansfield begins the story with a character named Ernestine, no doubt in homage to Ernestine Rey who had cooked for her and Murry up at the chalet. Daughter Edith looks out the hotel room window and sees “a whole, tiny landscape bright as a jewel in the summer heat.” It was the Valais, with the Weisshorn and the Matterhorn in the distance. The three characters seem to flit through the interior of the hotel like ghosts, revenants, insubstantial. They haunt the shadowy interior rather than being out in the sun. They abjure a five minute walk for a carriage ride from the station. The daughters “had reached the age when it is as natural to avoid mirrors as it is to peer into them when one is young…”.

The view north to Montana from Sierre.

Shortly after abandoning this story, Mansfield wrote her will, faced the prospect of an irreparable split in her marriage and must have known that her Swiss interlude had come to a close. She glanced at the mountains that had made her illness more bearable and where she had written her best work. “Have you noticed how very smug those mountains look that are covered with snow all the year round. They seem to expect me to be so full of admiring awe.”

All trace of Chalet des Sapins, where Katherine Mansfield had written and enjoyed the mountain air, has been obliterated by the Hotel Helvetia Intergolf. The village perched facing the sun has grown into one of Switzerland’s wealthiest and most fashionable resorts. “How hard it is to escape from places,” Mansfield wrote. “However carefully one goes they hold you – you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences.”

Bangkok Flâneur

August 9, 2019 2 Replies

Getting ready for dinner, somewhere off Charoen Krung. Photo Padraig Rooney

My Bangkok flâneur credentials stretch back over four decades and come with a bit of bravado. I lived in the city for six years in the 1980s and have been here at least twice a year since then; it’s where my better half lives and works. In that far-off decade I freelanced for newspapers and magazines, and taught English at Chulalongkorn University so long ago I’ve had time to hone the anecdotes and smooth the rough edges. There were stints of kindergarten teaching and editing work in the Japanese embassy. Like all “old hands”, a phrase with a peculiarly post-colonial feel, we think our handle on things is the right one, backed by experience and even, maybe, expertise. Entrenched views tend to become more so over time, but happily, places and people evolve. Times change, cities too. And young fools make old fools. Bangkok is a city I’ve let go over time, and wish it well for its no doubt troubled and complex future. So much for the credentials.

Sathorn Kindergarten, reading hour, 1985

Wandering around these past few days, visiting libraries and malls, has given me the pulse of the city. Bangkok is big, brash and noisy and it’s important to have bolt holes of quiet. My flânerie will include a couple of typically millennial coffee spot and design outlets – all that instagrammable stuff – because they’re in evidence. What photos don’t convey, particularly photos designed to sell, is the soupy, steamy air quality (currently ranked 9th in the world for smog, with Chiang Mai, the kingdom’s second city, not far behind) but also the sheer noise of the city where some ten million people live cheek by jowl.

I joined a journalism friend at the start of my flânerie for a visit to Zudragma Records, a vinyl shop just off Sukhumvit at Soi 51 Wattana (BTS Thonglor Station). Its a repository for all things Thai music of the rooted sort, as well as Asian music, any music that’s under-represented in the larger outlets. The vinyl is vintage, well sourced and screams authenticity, retailing at 800Bht. (25CHF / 23€ / 26$) and upwards. The neighbouring Studio Lam hosts podcasts, a radio station, music events and a bar, all showcasing “the heaviest luk thung and molam on the airwaves”, both musical styles well worth checking out. I’d been to Zudragma Records before and always wonder why there are hardly any customers buying the vinyl. Like a lot of speciality shops (and I’d include English language bookshops) it mystifies me how it keeps afloat in a sea of noise.

The Siam Society, Asoke, Bangkok

Founded in 1904, The Siam Society on Asoke has been a fixture of a certain kind of ex-pat and residential life for over a century. Under royal patronage, its purpose was “to encourage research and information gathering on art, history, culture and natural sciences of Thailand and neighbouring countries”. The library is a pleasure, their stacks and reading room overlook a rare green space in this part of town. It’s a library for all things Thai, Siam, South-east Asia and neighbouring countries, in English and Thai but also other languages. The colonial ones of the area – Portuguese and French – are represented. The teak wood trim and the subtle odour of old travellers accounts make the place redolent of a gentlemen’s club. Virtually all the authors conserved in the library are male, though most of the readers in the reading room were female when I visited. Those of us who carry in our heads a library of this part of the world will sink into this most welcoming space. D.A.R. Wood tells us what it was like to be a Consul in Paradise, up in Chiang Mai at the turn into the 20th century. Portuguese shipping accounts mix business and exoticism. Joseph Conrad sails through. Teak wallahs blithely recall the good old days of chopping down trees with impunity – plus ça change.

Chit (Jit) Phumisak, songwriter, activist, writer (1930-1966)

But I was on the hunt for a book by Jit (Chit) Phumisak’s โฉมหน้าศักดินาไทย (Chom Na Sakdina Thai) or The Real Face of Thai Feudalism, a radical text from this most elusive of Thai political theorists and philologists. He was allegedly executed by government henchmen in May 1966, under the dictatorship of Sarit Thanarat, shortly after Jit’s release from jail. That “allegedly” is carefully placed in the previous sentence. An inflammatory presence, therefore, even in death, and a test of any library’s liberal credentials. There is no copy of his most thought-provoking book on Thai shelves – at least publicly. A slim biography of Jit’s life and times, in Thai with illustrations, was available in Kinokunia bookshops. On the cover there is a photo of Jit in the infamous Lard Yao jail, dubbed Lard Yao University because it was a hive of reading, translating and discussion. His big philological treatise on the ramifications and meanings of the word “Siam” across several South-East Asian languages and cultures is available in academic bookshops. The Siam Society Library on-line catalogue lists three copies of the Thai Feudalism book, but I could find none on the shelves, nor were they listed as being borrowed. Hmmm.

Interior of the neo-classical Neilson Hays Library on Suriwong Road

Another quiet bookish corner about ten minutes from home in Bangkok is the Neilson Hays Library on Suriwong Road. It’s an exclusively English library, founded in 1869 by the Bangkok Ladies’ Library Association, and housed in a pleasant neo-classical colonial building designed by Italian architect Mario Tamagno. He is also responsible, with Annibale Rigotti, for the Ananda Samakhom Throne Hall and the Hua Lampong Railway Station. The library is right next to the British Club and the quiet, cool coffee shop in the courtyard is fed by the same kitchen as the club. They do a full British and I can recommend the healthy breakfast. I remember a reading and signing in the library by Paul Theroux some time in the Eighties. And hanging round the British Club pool, drinking gin and tonic, after a morning teaching kindergarten. The library itself is well-stocked with fiction and biography, and I was glad to see a run of old Nabokov books in hardback in their mylar covers. Once I’ve done with teaching, I imagine spending a good deal more time in this recently restored library.

A run of Nabokov editions on the shelf of the Neilson Hays Library.

My journalist friend had recommended I check out the newly located Thailand Creative Design Center library, exhibition space and workshops on the 6th floor of the post office building on Charoen Krung Road. I’ve blogged about this Bauhaus brutalist building before here, with its Art Deco details. When I visited this time there was a school group being told about its history, sitting cross-legged on the floor in rows, in school uniform. I was both amused and dismayed to see, having chaperoned my fair share of school excursions, that half the kids were on their phones, scrolling and texting, while the teacher tried to interest them. Been there, done that.

Upstairs in the TCDC, there was an atmosphere of studied calm in the large library. The stacks are stocked with those ubiquitous large format books, copiously illustrated, pricey, that predominate in the shops but are hardly ever bought. They appeal to the visual-minded but also to the Instagrammer imagination, full as they are with photos of wannabe spaces, designer lofts, perfect tropical gardens and a minimalist, Scandi-inspired aesthetic. This aspirational aesthetic is all over bo-bo (bohemian bourgeois) Bangkok at the moment.

There was a fine, small exhibition upstairs, titled Invisible Things, featuring everyday objects from Thailand and Germany, which the curators deem to illustrate typical elements of each culture. The exhibition, supported by the Goethe Institute, is co-curated by Philip Cornwel-Smith, author of Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture, a book I like for the refreshingly low level of gravity it exerts on the notion of culture; culture understood as filtering up from below rather than handed down from above. Cornwel-Smith is investigating “what gives a thing cultural meaning” and his selection of a street sign, a boundary marker, a day bed, Snake brand prickly heat talcum powder, a graduation photo, all reflect everyday aspects of Thai culture. German everyday objects include an Aldi bag, a portable bar-b-q etc.

Having moved from the rarefied heights of the up-market Emporium on Sukhumvit, the TCDC has come down to Bangkok’s oldest street – Charoen Krung. The staff I spoke to were a little ambivalent about the move downtown, away from the business and mall hub that runs along the main Sky Train line. This move comes with what could be termed gentrification aspirations. “We’re making an effort to make the Charoen Krung neighbourhood truly liveable and great for people from all walks of life,” says Charintip Leeyavanich, TCDC’s policy and development manager. The overall plan involves optimising public spaces along the river – currently embassy compounds (Portuguese and French) and hotels seem to hog most of the riverfront, testifying to the history of the area. So good luck with beating a path through all that. There are moves to improve infrastructure and footpaths to provide easier access to public transport – which in this part of town is the river and its boats and ferries, but also shiny new MRT stations. Apisit Laistrooglai, the director of the TCDC, wants to turn the area into Bangkok’s first “creative district”.

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One of the staff at the TCDC recommended I have a coffee at the nearby Warehouse 30, an open-space retail centre – I struggle to find a term to designate this repurposed suite of seven 1940s buildings with original roof beams, a great wooden floor half-filled with designer shops, coffee shop, vinyl shop, pricey restaurant and open-plan multi-use fora. It’s the new face of gentrification, oriented to young consumers in a certain income bracket, with bien pensant environmentally-conscious ideas and a hipster vibe, Bangkok style. The Independent newspaper calls the area “Bangkok’s answer to Brooklyn“. Maybe. I was alternately bored out of my tiny mind and fascinated looking at Thai hipsters, minus the facial hair, prancing about a place I wanted to call a go-down, where rice, coir, teak might formerly have been warehoused.

Warehouse 30, repurposed by Duangrit Bunnag, one of Thailand’s leading architects.

The coffee was good, but more or less at Zurich prices. The green waffle was equally pricey, long in arriving, and consisting mostly of air bubbles. Wi-fi was so-so. The design clutter showcased new Thai talent, with some nice things, but a lot of stuff that belongs in notions shops. The aesthetic has been picked up from the Tate Gallery shop, or the Vitra Design outlet across the border from me in Weil-am-Rhein. One particular strand of this design ethic is to take kitchenware from the Straits Chinese culture – tiffin boxes, enamelled containers that grandma might have used, and to streamline it and bring it out in porcelain or stoneware: to give it a more up-market, ironic look. This design upscaling becomes a metaphor for the whole gentrifying venture, perhaps even the hipster lifestyle: authenticity at a price, commodified for a new generation. Do it with vinyl, do it with coffee, do it with industrial buildings. If you think of how the Victorians and the Arts and Crafts movement re-imagined the gothic, or the way the punk aesthetic quickly went mainstream, you’ve got the idea.

I sat there with my coffee, my green waffle, the so-so wi-fi and looked around at the young designers and the hipsters in 500$ shoes and realised I was the oldest person there.

I walked home along the sois (backstreet lanes) between Surawong Road and Sri Phaya, where there is a good deal of vibrancy and hardly any cars. A Muslim community, halal restaurants, street food, an open sewer under the Expressway flyover which I notice is not on Google Maps. The day was soupy-muggy with the occasional breeze and rain in the offing. The air quality in downtown Bangkok is one of the worst in the world. I was thinking about gentrification and a word my journalist friend had used: “rentocracy” – referring to the rentier economy following on from the enclosures in English history. In Bangkok, rentocracy is about land ownership – numerous princelings granted royal concessions of plots at some distance from the palace. The princelings become landlords. The Royal Household Bureau owns large swathes of downtown Bangkok, in the way that the Prince of Wales lives on rents from his estates, or the Duke of Cornwall owns Cornwall. Chulalongkorn University, my old alma mater, now that it no longer gets government support, is busy turning its valuable land holdings to the west of Lumpini Park and on towards Sam Yan into malls and condos and other high-income real estate. Consequently, shop houses, mom and pop stores and low-rise services are given their marching orders, emptied and razed. The bohemian bourgeois, the condo owners, the banks, hotels and high-end retail move in. The coffee’s better but it costs. The Chula students wander from mall to mall, eating sushi and looking at the designer wear.

There’s a little museum back there on Soi 43 called the Bangkokian Museum, in a couple of early twentieth century houses set in a garden. It’s charming and green and there’s a real sense of the history of the area coming from it. Entrance is free.

Finely designed kitchenware at the Bangkokian Museum

I ended my trot around libraries and bookshops at Central Embassy, a mall new to me. It’s built on what used to be the plot owned by the British Embassy, which seems to have brexited elsewhere. The top floor of the mall is another of those open-plan shops called Open House. Same retail mix of coffee, bookshop, design library and designer bric a brac. There is what’s called a “high-ceilinged library lookalike”, a Movenpick ice cream stand (go, Switzerland, go!) and an “Eating Deck Zone”. Gamefied versions of bookshops, where most people seem to be browsing but hardly anybody buying. Shelves of McMindfulness. Restaurants that are called something else, using language to suggest that you are at home in the back yard – the deck – or on a space station in a Tarkovsky movie – the Zone. Shelves of royal hagiography. Incongruous mix but no match, such as Sam Beckett sharing shelf life with Crazy Rich Asians – the latter clearly a winner in this space.

Sam Beckett meets the Crazy Rich Asians

For some reason there was a whole run of New York Review of Books on the shelves, most translated from other languages, so I picked up copies of Anna Segers’ Transit and Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx. I read Tolstoya’s short stories years ago and liked them. Segers was part of the German diaspora to Mexico at the start of the Second World War, and wrote Transit there. I also found a first hardback edition of John Berger’s Once in Europa, not cheap at 950Bht. (30CHF / 27€ / 30$). The exact same Berger edition will set you back 13€ on AbeBooks – so not a bargain up in Central Embassy, by a long shot. It has been interesting to look comparatively at the cost of coffee, books and vinyl in hipster Bangkok. Purchasing doesn’t seem to be the point.

View of the former British Embassy compound, Bangkok.

There’s a fine view, for now, down onto the old British Embassy compound at the back. There was some sort of destruction going on. I hope they preserve the buildings and greenery, where there used to be a fair every year – cake stalls, fish ‘n’ chips, Pimms by the jugful, Marmite galore – but I doubt the green space will survive. Look your last. Watch that space.