PERPETUAL PUZZLEMENT

Bangkok has dramatically changed over the past century, but some things remain the same, not least foreigners' mixed feelings about this city where peace and chaos, beauty and eyesores, ease and difficulties have blended so well.

"Visitors today often experience feelings similar to those recorded during the second half of the 19th century and later. A sense of bafflement was followed by conflicting impressions of the place," said Maryvelma Smith O'Neil, the author of Bangkok. A Cultural and Literary History.

The Oxford-educated writer teaches the history of art in Geneva, Switzerland. She recently gave a lecture on "Strangers in a Strange Land" at the Siam Society which shed light on the life of foreigners in Bangkok from 1850 to 1950.

She said many foreigners who arrived in Bangkok were fascinated by the "strange, glittering, heat-burdened world", like writer Joseph Conrad. Others were captivated by the impressionistic qualities and chaos. British writer James Kirkup liked Bangkok because it made him "feel at home with my sense of disorder".

After the middle of the 19th century, the great majority of Western visitors to Bangkok came here by steamer, and most of them expected to see a Venice of the East like the former capital of Ayutthaya.

Prior to the Bowring Treaty of 1855, fewer than two dozen Westerners lived in Bangkok. Most of them were adventure-seeking missionaries in their twenties. Presbyterian missionaries, however, were unprepared for the chaotic life of an Asian city.

A travellers' tale written by George Windsor Earls in 1837 reads: "It is very inconvenient to walk in the town, not only on account of the mud, but from the number of dogs, these brutes appearing to consider Europeans fair game."

Nevertheless, not all Westerners reacted negatively to the hassles in Bangkok. Some thrived.

One of these was Robert Hunter, a Scots trader and opium dealer who lived here from 1824 to 1844 and became fluent in Thai.

His two-storey brick colonial style house overlooking the Chao Phraya River set a standard for foreigners' residences in this city. He was the person who sent the first Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, abroad to be exhibited to the world.

Living next door to Hunter was Dr Dan Beach Bradley, a US missionary who contributed a great deal to Siam as a doctor-cum-journalist. Dr Bradley joined a New Year's party at Hunter's house in 1836.

He later published a critique describing dinner parties by Europeans in the East as overindulgences in eating and drinking and "a host of consecutive evils".

The doctor also observed that a new class of citizens - fortune-seeking adventurers - began to populate Siam after the opening of trade relations with the West. Many found the local women irresistible.

Among them was New Englander George Virgin, who came to Bangkok in 1856, served briefly as acting vice-consul from the United States to Siam, became leader of a lower class of US citizens - mostly rum sellers and pimps - and never returned home. Virgin was said by Bradley to have bought mistresses and yielded to a life of lust.

By 1864, Bangkok began to become a city of smokestacks. The Loftus map of 1878 by Danish tram operator John Loftus shows that many of the Europeans worked in Bangkok as officials of a dozen foreign embassies nearby Si Phraya and Sathorn roads and between the river and New Road. There were also foreign experts and administrators invited by King Chulalongkorn to serve as advisers to Siamese government offices.

O'Neil said: "The foreigners who came here at the end of the nineteenth century at the behest of King Chulalongkon [sic] made huge contributions to Siam in administration, finances, the judiciary, architecture, medicine, journalism."

According to her, other foreigners worked for foreign shipping or trading firms. A few of them practised law or medicine or opened European dry goods stores. Missionaries operated schools and tried to spread their faith.

Most Westerners opted for Bang Rak village, where a Western-style central business district emerged following the opening of a canal and roads after 1861.

The British enjoyed a monopoly on most of the trade in natural resources, especially timber and tin. During a visit in 1888, Lt GJ Younghusband noted: "Half of the European residents are English. In fact, to the casual observer Bangkok appears as much English as Aden [that is the British Yemen]".

Mining expert Herbert Warington Smyth noted that there were almost no Frenchmen in Bangkok except for one or two officials of the consulate. He also noted that the French had a bad reputation here.

The Italians were much more favoured for construction and renovation projects commissioned by the monarchs they served. They established Little Italy on Pan Road, a narrow lane connecting Silom and Sathorn roads. In 1909, two dozen Piedmontese artists, architects and engineers served at the Ministry of Public Works of Siam.

In the old days, Bangkok was a great place for gossip and scandal. A US missionary remarked that there was plenty of social life to keep the gossip mill running: Receptions at foreign embassies, sporting competitions at the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, dances at the Bangkok United Club, dinner at the Oriental, and frequent royal events, elegant occasions where men donned tailcoats or smoking jackets and women wore long white gowns.

Smyth found Bangkok amusingly cosmopolitan, yet dull. To him, expatriate life had its routine of work by day. A journalist writing in the Bangkok Times in 1903 noted that sometimes newcomers tried to form a philosophical society or a debating club, but that the ideas finally fizzled out.

By 1904, about half a million people had populated Bangkok. Four hundred foreigners, most of whom were Europeans and US nationals, and some of whom were Japanese and Koreans, were listed together in the Bangkok Directory of that year. Many were members of the 16 expatriate sports clubs in existence in the city. A Briton later bragged: "We were living in a world of sport, sunshine and cheap alcohol."

By 1925, 1,676 Europeans and 97 US nationals were residing in Bangkok, where Western banking facilities, a hospital and nursing home, a museum and a library had emerged.

Whether they were attracted to Bangkok by duty, commerce or adventure, many foreigners considered their daily life very harsh.

"Foreigners in Siam were often undone by the monotonous, enervating heat and disease. [The months of] March, April and May were known as the cholera season. The poor drank from the rivers or canals, foreigners stored rainwater in klong jars and fretted.

But the Europeans were not spared, despite their considerable precautions," O'Neil said.

According to this historian, Western women in Siam were faced with poor health, loss of children to diseases, and boredom. For example, Emilie Bradley, the first wife of Dr Bradley, had a very tough eight years in Bangkok. She lost a child to smallpox, suffered from a prolapsed uterus, neuralgia, digestive problems, and finally died of chronic tuberculosis.

In their Victorian attire, women in the late 19th century might have found the tropical heat in Siam unbearable, although locals pulled punkah fans during meals. They would wrap large paper bags over their long skirts like baby buntings to protect their legs from mosquitoes.

To relax amid all the problems, many foreigners opted for booze. A British general who visited Bangkok in 1929 noted that a certain amount of alcohol was more necessary for one than in England. "It helps out the less nourishing food, and turns the mind from trivial worries, which are often unduly magnified by the heat and mosquitoes of tropical life," he wrote.

Opium was another choice for some foreigners.

"The British in Bangkok didn't smoke opium, but many of the French did," according to Gerald Sparrow, who served as a British judge of the International Court for two decades.

No matter what, Bangkok has always been a magnetic to foreigners. According to O'Neil, foreigners stayed on in the past because they were obsessed by the alluring, aesthetic and gentle Buddhist culture of Siam.

She noted: "The Belgian jurist Emile Jottrand, writing in 1898, echoed a bit of general advice of the old European residents to newer arrivals: Go home soon; otherwise you won't want to."

Things haven't really changed that much after all.