The Mandarin Oriental Bangkok
Thailand

A hundred and thirty years ago, when Thailand was still Siam, the Oriental Boarding House sat on the bank of the Chao Phraya, the river of kings. Over the years it has been bought, sold, renovated and revamped, new wings added and old torn down, but through it all it has been the place to stay in Bangkok.

When I first saw Bangkok in 1975, it felt like falling through a rabbit hole into another world. Rice paddies along outlying klongs could be seen on the drive from the airport. Ancient teak houses mingled with modern cement boxes. Wats (temples) and palaces dominated the scene. Their phantasmagorical gold roofs curling towards heaven towered above the mostly one and two story buildings. It was a storybook city. Gold trumped gray, palms grew over houses (at home in Chicago palms only grew in hotels,) and porcelain pieces decorated temple walls as well as royal tables.

Then, the Oriental was nearly one hundred years old. It was all neoclassical white, tropical gardens, wicker chairs and slow rotating ceiling fans. It felt like something right out of Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad—and indeed it was—both authors frequented the Oriental in their time.

Today, you can stay in one of the Author’s suites. There’s the very oriental Somerset Maugham suite where one can recline on a magenta silk daybed before climbing into an ornately carved, gold and teak covered bed—a bed that would do nicely as a small wat. The Joseph Conrad suite, on the other hand, has a gracious, spacious terrace overlooking the palms and orchids of the gardens that looks even more inviting than its curtain-draped four-poster bed.

As it was, I stayed in a deluxe room in the Garden Wing. Frankly, I consider myself a connoisseur of hotel bed views, and this is a world-class view. From my bed on the open second floor of this split-level room, I could see the river through the two-storey windows of the living room.

I lay in my bed, mesmerized, not unlike lolling in a deck chair on a steamer pulling out of a foreign port. By day kaleidoscopic, longboat taxis zip round barges pushing more barges down to the sea. By night, old-style Thai boats, mainly hotel ferries, peaked roofs outlined in tiny white lights, looked like little houses scuttling across the river between the walls of bright lights of the towering buildings on either bank.

Should you want to know more of the past, I suggest you settle into a commodious wicker chair under an Author’s Lounge palm. Sip a gin and bitter, read Maugham’s The Gentleman in the Parlour, and late in the afternoon, repair to the library for tea.

"You must try another cream puff with your tea," the gracious Khun Ankana urges. (Khun followed by the first name is the proper form of address in Thailand.) Perhaps, because the hotel’s history, I was invited to tea by the Oriental’s grand dame herself, Guest Relations Consultant Ms. Ankana Kalantananda. Surrounded by the library’s antiques and books, tea arrives on a silver service along with a tiered plate of crustless sandwiches, fruited crumpets and sweets.

"Yes, the other side of the river was mainly orchards when you were here in 1975," she assured me. "That was before the River Wing with the new lobby had been built. Guest used to enter by what is now the Writers Lounge. It was an open courtyard then."

Khun Ankana is as interesting as the Oriental itself. Trained in Paris, she was the first Thai woman to enter the hotel business. Barbara Cartland, the prolific British romance novelist thought so as well, basing a character after her in one of the two novels she set at the Oriental.

"Everyday at eleven, I went to her room to lace up her corset," said Khun Ankana who was in charge of caring for Ms. Cartland at the Oriental. In responding to Ms. Cartland’s questions during the lace up sessions, Khun Ankana told her of her life, thus becoming a character in the novel that is dedicated to her.

Khun Ankana has pampered Oriental’s guests from Queens to commoners for nearly seventy years—just one of the people that make the Oriental Bangkok the Grand Dame she is.

 Kate Crawford      January 2007

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The Mandarin Oriental Bangkok on the web.