the largest of them housing four Buddha images looking out towards each of the cardinal directions. A bronze statue of Tat Bunnag is seated at the temple entrance, looking across the canal towards the river, the face modelled after a photograph taken of him in middle age.
A few years later, in 1850, Tat Bunnag completed Wat Anongkharam, on the opposite side of the road. The architectural style here is very different, the wiharn being built in the classic early Bangkok style that originated in the time of Rama I. The principal Buddha image, Phra Chunlanak, is from Sukhothai although it was installed as recently as 1949, a century after the temple was built. The image is in the “Subduing Mara” position, conquering evil, the right hand over the knee, the fingers touching the ground, the left hand remaining palm up in the lap. There are other Buddha images in the crowded temple compound, which also includes a school.
Wander down the quiet little lane that runs beside Wat Anongkharam, heading towards the river, and in this neglected corner of Klong San once lived the most famous of the temple school’s former pupils. The late Princess Srinagarindra, the Princess Mother, who was born in 1900 and passed away in 1995, was the mother of two kings: Rama XIII, who became king in 1935 at the age of nine, and died in mysterious circumstances in 1946, and King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX. Yet she was born a commoner, the child of a Chinese father and a Siamese mother, and she grew up on this very street, attending what was then the all-girls school at Wat Anongkharam, founded by an enlightened abbot who believed in the need for girls to have an education, not a generally accepted practice at that time. Her father was a goldsmith and the family lived in a modest rented house. In those days when Siamese were not required to have family names, the young girl was simply known as Sangwan. She went on to study nursing at Siriraj Hospital, further along the riverbank, and after graduating she was one of only two girls in that year to win a scholarship to study nursing in America. It was in the United States that she met Prince Mahidol, the sixty-ninth son of Rama V, who was studying medicine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The couple later returned to Siam, where the prince worked to form a public health system, but he died young, passing away at Sra Pathum Palace in 1929. In 1993, shortly before his mother’s death, King Bhumibol made known his wish to renovate the area around the Princess Mother’s childhood home to provide a public park. Her family home no longer existed but there were some similar buildings nearby, which the owners gladly donated. The Princess Mother Memorial Park is a lovely, leafy area of some one-and-a-half acres, sheltered by tall trees and with fragments of walls and crumbling arches embedded amongst the greenery. There are two house-sized exhibition halls, which display photographs and mementos from the Princess Mother’s life, and there is a reconstruction of her childhood home. This plot of land had once held the mansion home of another member of the Bunnag family, Pae Bunnag, who had been director general of the Royal Cargo Department during the reign of Rama V. Part of his kitchens still exist, now forming the Pae Bunnag Art Centre at the back of the park. To one side of the park, seated on a bench, is a life-size bronze statue of the Princess Mother, gazing across the greenery.
Leave the park by the rear gate and there is a small patch of wasteland and, behind that, sitting directly on the riverbank, one of Bangkok’s most florid Chinese shrines. Gong Wu Shrine has a long history, predating Bangkok and even predating the Taksin era. There are three statues here of Gong Wu. The smallest was brought to Siam by Hokkien traders around the year 1736, during the period of the Qing Dynasty Emperor Chen Long. Later, in 1802, the second Gong Wu statue arrived, and in 1822 a wealthy Chinese named Kung Seng renovated the shrine, installed a bell tower, and brought in a third statue. The Gong Wu Shrine has its own jetty, and from the end of this can be seen a small green onion-shaped dome at a neighbouring jetty. There is a small public garden between the two jetties, so the only way to find out what the dome belongs to is to walk around the garden and into a rather dusty little corner, where through an almost hidden gate is the courtyard of the Goowatin Mosque. This is, however, a very unusual mosque. The dome is mounted over the jetty, and the only indication that this tiny building is a place of worship is the traditional row of taps outside for the washing of hands and feet. Originally the building had belonged to (yes, you have guessed correctly), Tat Bunnag. It had been used as a warehouse, and next door, boarded up and crumbling away, is a splendid colonnaded building that must have been the offices. The Persian ancestor of the Bunnags, Sheikh Ahmad, had been a Muslim, and many of his descendants had held high office for Islamic affairs in Siam. The Bunnag line had become Buddhist, but clearly there were strong family connections because when a group of Muslims arrived from the Indian city of Surat in the time of Rama IV, Tat Bunnag had handed over this property for them to use as a mosque. The Indians were traders but some became skilled translators in the Bunnag business. One of them was named Ali Bai Nana. Everyone knew him as Clerk Ali, but he had ambitions beyond translating, and he rose to become one of the wealthiest members of the Indian community, the founder of the powerful Nana family. His descendant Lek Nana owned part of the land on which the Princess Mother Memorial Park was laid out, and the family today own huge plots of land on Sukhumvit Road, where the name is given to the district that is served by the BTS Skytrain Nana station.
Crossing a bridge over the small canal that runs through here to connect with Klong Somdet Chao Phraya takes us under the concrete span of Pokklao Bridge to, just a few metres further on, the green girders of the far more aesthetically pleasing Memorial Bridge. Opened in April 1932, the name commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Chakri dynasty, although in Thai it is simply named after Rama I, King Buddha Yodfa, and is known as Saphan Phra Phutta Yodfa, or colloquially, Saphan Phut. The designers and builders were a British company, Dorman Long, who also built Sydney Harbour Bridge and who remain in business to this day. Work began on 3rd December 1929. A riveted steel truss structure, using 1,100 tons of structural steel, the bridge has three spans. The two outer spans, each of 74.9 metres (246 ft), are fixed. The centre span, measuring 61.8 metres (202 ft 11 ins) and 7.3 metres (24 ft) above the water at its highest point, is a bascule span, composed of two separate parts, each of which could originally be tilted upwards to allow tall vessels or ceremonial river processions to pass underneath. The bascule arms turned on fixed trunnions and were balanced by 450-ton cast-iron weights hanging inside concrete piers on both sides of the river. An electric motor operating the gearing could raise the two bascule leaves in less than five minutes, and a petrol engine was on standby in case the power supply failed. The operator sat in a cabin on the east pier, with an electrical cable on the riverbed connecting the gearing in each pier. Another cabin was located on the opposite bank for the sake of design symmetry, but the only mechanism controlled from there was the safety locking gear. Sadly, this ingenious mechanism, designed by a British engineer named Frederick Thompson and manufactured by Thomas Broadbent and Sons of Huddersfield, is no longer in use. When the Pokklao Bridge was being built in 1983, ending the possibility of tall ships sailing any further upriver, the two bascule sections were permanently connected and hold-down tendons and bearings installed to dampen any movement. As the entire lifting gear is contained inside the piers and is not visible from the shore or the river, the curious-minded, strolling along the pedestrian walkway to try and see how the mechanism worked, will find little to enlighten him.
At the foot of the bridge is Wong Wian Lek, the smaller of the two Thonburi traffic circles. Or at least, this is where it used to be. With the opening of the Pokklao Bridge and its access roads, the circle was cut in two and its landmark clock tower moved east towards Somdet Chao Phraya Road, where there is still the Wong Wian Lek Market. From here operated a bus service over the bridge to business areas such as Chinatown and the Indian district of Pahurat. The terraced houses alongside the road connecting to the bridge were of two storeys, with a tin roof, and many of them survive today. In the vicinity of the circle there were shops and parking areas for horse-drawn carriages and cycle rickshaws waiting to take people over to the Bangkok side. The food shops along the footpath meant that the area was a busy and colourful one, especially at night. In the years between the opening of the bridge and the start of World War II., bands played here on Saturday and Sunday evenings and the circle, with its buses bringing in passengers and moving them out, must have been very pleasant, especially compared to the impersonal roar of today’s traffic over the bridge. Wong Wian Lek Market, however, still retains its garden atmosphere and is a noted place to buy Buddha amulets, while on the other side of the bridge approach road there is a small
