Jim Thompson House
After my market morning this morning, my first visit this afternoon was to the Jim Thompson House.
But, wait, you say. Jim Thompson doesn’t sound Thai. What the heck?
You’re right. It doesn’t sound Thai. But this is just the introduction section. An explanation is forthcoming in the detail section immediately below. Be patient, Grasshopper. Be patient. I’m in a predominantly Buddhist country. Meditate. It’ll be here before you know it.
After the Jim Thompson House, I visited a couple of wats (temples).
There. Introduction done. Let’s get on with it for those of you who just can’t manage to meditate any longer.
Jim Thompson House
The reason Jim Thompson doesn’t sound Thai is that he was born and raised in the United States, in Greenville, Delaware, in 1906 to American parents.
Thompson joined the army. Not when he was born, obviously, but sometime later. He was stationed in Bangkok for a while and fell in love with it. When his tour of duty ended, he moved to Thailand.
He became interested in the hand-weaving of silk and did his best to revive the industry that was disappearing. He chose a plot of land immediately across the canal from Bangkok’s silk-weaving district. There, he built a beautiful home out of teakwood.
Jim Thompson became a designer and made silk costumes for Broadway shows. He got his big break when he created the costumes for “The King and I.” That brought him great fame and he started up a successful silk company, sourcing most of the silk for his products from across the canal.
In 1967, Jim Thompson went on a trip to Malaysia, where he disappeared without a trace. Shortly after his disappearance, his house was turned into a museum.
Wait. What? Jim Thompson disappears and right away they turn his house into a museum? A museum with a fee to tour it and other money-making facilities on the property? Sounds a little suspicious, doesn’t it?
The lush grounds are free to walk around. There’s also a restaurant (it was closed at lunchtime today for a wedding), a café, a snack bar, and a shop that sells relatively upscale silk goods.
To visit the house/museum, you have to pay for a 45-minute tour. Being a house, and this being Thailand, you have to take your shoes off to go into it on the tour, although not for the little bit of the tour that’s outside of the house. The teakwood walls and ceilings and polished teakwood floors of the house are beautiful.
There is a room inside with some decorated pottery tableware. Two identical pieces are shaped like teapots. There’s a spout but no lids. They aren’t teapots, but rather they’re for pouring red wine. The tour guide asked if anyone knew how they got the wine in if there was no lid.
One person (not me) got it right. You turn it upside down and pour it into the bottom. Fortunately, the pieces sit on a glass shelf in a glass cabinet so we could bend down and look under the wine-pouring pot to see the hole. According to the guide, there’s a tube that extends up from the hole into the pot higher than the level of the wine. So, when you turn the pot right way up after filling it from the bottom, the wine doesn’t spill out. Instead, you can pour it from the spout. Clever, but I’m not sure why you’d want to do that other than it’s an imaginative and artistic way to serve wine.
The house has Jim Thompson’s furnishings and furniture still in place. There are Buddha and other statues here and there and some paintings. In the guest room, there are some porcelain pieces decorated in blue and white. One of them is in the shape of a cat.
According to the guide, the cat is a chamberpot. The head pulls off and little boys can pee into it. According to the guide, there were bigger chamber pots for men. She didn’t say what girls and women did. Nor did she say what they would do if they had to go number two. Nor did I or anyone else want to ask.
Jim Thompson’s house had regular toilets. The cat was just a collector’s item.
The guide pointed through a window at a little teakwood house outside about the size of a dollhouse. It was a spirit house. The belief is (I’m not sure if it’s a Buddhist belief or a Thai-specific tradition) that when you build a house you disturb the spirits living in the soil, so you have to build a spirit house for the spirits and stock it with food and little tchotchkes. I think I know where some of the bagged blooms that I saw at the Bangkok flower market went. There were some strings of them in front of the spirit house.
I went and took a closer look at the spirit house after the tour.
Two small astrological charts that were drawn up specifically for Jim Thompson hang on a wall in a hallway. One of them warned him that he should be careful when he was 61 because he would be in danger that year. Want to guess how old he was when he went missing? That’s right. Sixty-one. So maybe astrology isn’t nonsense after all.
Or maybe it was just a coincidence. Or maybe I was wrong about someone polishing Jim Thompson off so they could turn his house into a museum. Maybe it was the astrologer who killed him as PR for their astrology business. Or maybe it was a deep-state plot. Or possibly he was abducted by space aliens. You decide.
The tour guide left us off in a room with text panels giving more information about Jim Thompson. Despite his absence, his silk company is still in business. It supplies silk fabrics to high-end hotels and it sells silk products to the public.
The exit from that room was through a store where you can buy Jim Thompson silk clothing and other silk products, because of course that’s where the exit would be.
By the way, a search found a link to what I think is the legitimate webpage for the Jim Thompson House, http://www.jimthompsonhouse.com/, but when I tried to go there, my Safari browser told me the connection is not private and it may be someone trying to steal my personal or financial information and I shouldn’t go there. You decide if you’re brave enough to visit. I can’t vouch for what’s there because I took Safari’s advice and didn’t visit it.
Wat Ratchanatdaram
When I climbed up Golden Mount the other day, I saw from the top a nearby temple that looked quite attractive. Google Maps told me there was a temple, Wat Ratchanatdaram, in about the position where I was looking. Coincidentally, after posting about Golden Mount, someone sent me via social media a link to the Wikipedia page for Wat Ratchanatdaram.
I decided to go there after the Jim Thompson House.
Getting there was half the fun. The Jim Thompson House is beside a canal. A ferry runs on the canal. There’s a stop for the ferry not far from the house. Google Maps told me to take that ferry and then walk for I forget how long.
I went to the ferry stop. A ferry arrived. I asked the person working on the ferry if it was going to the stop Google Maps told me I needed to go to. She didn’t speak English. I pointed to the name, which of course was in English on Google Maps, and asked if this was the ferry I should be on. She shook her head in the affirmative unless here an up and down headshake means no. I got on and paid her my fare.
The ferry started going. I looked at Google Maps and saw that we were going in the wrong direction. I got off at the next stop and took a ferry going in the other direction. But I eventually got to Wat Ratchanatdaram.
Wat Ratchanatdaram looks more impressive from atop Golden Mount than up close. There aren’t many places at the temple compound where you can get a look at the full sweep of the temple.
There’s one building in the compound with a small fee to go in. It has about five storeys and is attractively decorated outside. Inside there are a few white, mostly unadorned perpendicular hallways, with a spiral staircase in the centre. Around the perimeter hallway, there are Buddha statues against the wall. Despite being straight and intersecting at right angles, the multiple corridors form a bit of a maze. Only one goes to that floor’s entrance to the spiral staircase.
The other centre perpendicular hallways dead-end at the spiral staircase. The non-centre hallways just cross the building.
Each floor except for the top was the same and extremely uninteresting. The top floor had an outdoor area with good views.
Another building, also nicely decorated outside, was also decorated inside. There were Bhuddah images and other decorations up front. It was a prayer building.
When I went inside, six monks were sitting on a slightly raised platform to one side. Sitting is probably the wrong word. They weren’t sitting cross-legged. They had their legs folded back underneath them, with their knees forming an acute angle that my knees couldn’t possibly form, particularly at my age, but they probably never could.
The monks were chanting when I arrived. It was very calming. I stayed for a while, but not until they finished. I couldn’t stay too long because I was mellowing and if I get too mellow I ripen and rot. (Sorry, that’s a line from Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.”)
Wat Sukhat
After Wat Ratchanatdaram, I stopped at another temple, Wat Sukhat, primarily because it was only a very slight detour from the walking route to the MRT station I had to get to to get back to my home.
Walking there, I found the street to go to if you ever want to buy any Buddha statues and other Buddhist iconography (and I think a couple that belong to the Hindu religion). One whole block was lined on both sides with shops selling those items.
Wat Sukhat is a very beautiful temple complex. I didn’t go into any of the buildings because, one, it was already late afternoon and there was the free wine and appetizers in my hotel’s executive lounge to think about. And, two, I was tired of taking off my shoes and putting them back on today.
When I was there, some people were standing on a veranda a few steps up from ground level. They were looking out, not into the attached building. I couldn’t see what they were looking at. But I could hear it. Monks were chanting there too.
None of that is what Wat Sukhat is famous for. It’s famous for a giant, deep-red swing structure, built in 1784, that sits out front. It used to be used in an annual ceremony. A bag of gold was suspended from a pole 75 feet high. Men would swing on the giant swing and try to get the gold. Several men died trying and the ceremony was banned in the 1930s.
That seems like a weird thing to have in front of a Buddhist temple, but there it was.
And with that, it was time to call it a day. I mean, what would have been the point in staying any longer now that they no longer suspend bags of gold from poles?
Aside
Eating Utensils
I read somewhere, I forget where, that here in Thailand they tend to use spoons as forks and forks as knives, and they don’t use knives at the table at all. So foods that North Americans (e.g., me) and Europeans would usually eat with a fork, they scoop up with a spoon.
Foods that need cutting are generally tender enough to be cut with a fork. Often, when I’d be expecting a knife I didn’t get one. In addition, a fork will be used as a pusher of food onto a spoon as a knife is used to do onto a fork back home.
They use chopsticks here, but only for noodle dishes.
In my experience so far, that variation in cutlery use seems to be generally true,
Despite knowing what the custom is here, I often catch myself using a fork like North Americans and Europeans use forks and using my spoon like a knife. It’s not intentional, I just naturally find myself using a fork like I would back home and substituting the only other available utensil for the missing knife.
And, if provided, I’ll use chopsticks for more than just the noodles on my plate. Again, it’s not on purpose. It’s just what feels natural for me, a non-Thai. I hope I’m not perpetrating any serious social faux pas. If so, should any Thai person read this, I deeply apologize if I ever unintentionally offended you.
Discover more from Joel's Journeys & Jaunts
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Add a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Very attractive place, that Jim Thompson house. Some very fetching silk pillows. No doubt you can purchase something very similar at the gift shop. Nice garden, too. That astrological prediction sounds like a plant to me. Not criticizing it at all – people love that sort of thing. And then they go through the gift shop. I like wat you have been getting at on your wanders. (sorry!). Seems to always be some kind of attractive temple or two at hand. And bravo for getting yourself around foreign cities and tables. The alternative I suppose is to do tours but the price to pay would be packing around with PEOPLE, persevering through all the prattle and really, we’re on holiday here, so where is that at? Onward, intrepid adventurer!
Jim Thompson’s house and grounds are grand and definitely worth a visit, but I suspect they’d be much less grand and visited (or possibly wouldn’t still exist) if it weren’t also a branding exercise for Jim Thompson silks, a company that survived his disappearance. I’d never heard of the brand before. Now I have.
I may be naive, but I think the astrological charts were in fact ones he had done, but the timing of his disappearance was coincidental. Coincidences do happen. The thousands of predictions that don’t turn out to be true don’t get remarked upon. The one that is accurate does. Or maybe the whole thing was faked. What do I know?
I’ve done a few walking tours on previous trips, but I tend to save tours for things that would be difficult to do on my own, like out-of-town sights without good self-guided transportation options or short boat cruises. There are good points to tours, but I don’t particularly love the regimentation of them.