Mass Produced Buddha Statues

Bangkok spreads out before you as you approach it from the airport by taxi, inching along the horizon the closer you get. It is a vast cityscape, a sprawling, awe provoking metropolis. A forest of gargantuan structures take up your whole field of vision. Over 1000 sky scrapers lurch up towards the hazy, ash-grey polluted sky. It feels dramatic, it looks powerful. Your are in the East, entering the mighty city of Bangkok. It is huge, Bangkok is a mega city, the term I believe generally used for a city who's population is roughly over ten million people. Now, in order to recall the rest of my personal experience of Bangkok clearly, a minuscule history will need to be brought to mind in the first instance.

Bangkok the capital city of Thailand, began life as a market town originally settled under the Kingdom of Ayutthaya on the Chao Phraya river which runs through the city today. The 'Kingdom' was essentially a bunch of principalities under the King of Ayutthaya. In the 1700's the Kingdom was invaded and ransacked by a Burmese invasion. Much of their art, temples and literature was tragically lost. The Burmese withdrew within the same year to concentrate on their war with the Chinese. Chaos reigned in the confusion after and a General Phraya Tak (who became king Taskin) fought the remaining Burmese and established the capital of Thonburi. General Chao Phraya Chakri who later became King Rama established the capital of Rattanosokin across the river from Thonburi. So where Bangkok is today was the site of two capital cities. King Rama mounted a coup against Taskin and became King in 1782. Today the ruins of the old city of Ayutthaya are preserved as a UNESCO world heritage site and thus King Rama became the founder of the modern Bangkok we know today. In the 1800's Bangkok heavily industrialised. There was a huge population boom in the 60's then came the Asian Investment boom in the 80's as multi-national corporations put there head quarters in Bangkok. Today Thailand is known as one of the Asian 'tiger cub' economies and as we know is heavily export driven.

Now, please forgive my nose-wrinkingly crude history but I feel it is necessary to be glanced at to really get across how how rapidly the city has undergone massive socio-economic change. The history shows how precious what is left of the old Ayutthaya Kingdom is and how it sits jewel like among the rushed concrete of modernity. To my mind this seems summed in the image of the infamous head of a Buddha statue in the old Ayutthaya city that has had the roots of a bodhi tree grow and wrap around it. In the same way the roots of modernity have enveloped the old city and the old temples. The future, the new, is squashed right up to the old.

The new Bangkok of today is a brave new world, far removed from it's past. All the major consumer culture symbols are present in the city today. You are never far from the yellow glow of the golden arches of McDonald's and the homogeneity, the predictability, the repeated nature, of western consumer culture. Conspicuous consumption, the buying of consumer goods to display social status is prevalent. The Siam Paragon shopping mall in Bangkok is one of the largest in Asia, with over 270 shops and ten floors it is of dizzying proportions. As a man who can feel overwhelmed in Tesco's when it's busy on a Saturday I was glad not to have gone, but noting it's presence in the city displays the cultural and historic shift that has taken place. It seems apt at this point to quote Zygmund Bauman when he wrote about the 2011 English Riots, “the fullness of consumer enjoyment means fullness of life. I shop, therefore I am. To shop or not to shop, this is the question.” And remember, in the world of today, "if you don't have an I-phone, well, you don't have an I-phone." I think that the enormity of the mall sums up the disparity of the Bankgkok of the past and the Bangkok of today. A pervasive consumerism is part of the new Bangkok, a Bangkok of hyper modernisation and consumption.

Of the old then, and the Ayutthaya past, the Temple of the Golden Buddha was to my mind the most impressive. At some point, before the Burmese invasion the statue was covered in plaster to prevent it being stolen. It wasn't until 1955 that by accident the plaster was chipped by and the secret golden statue inside was re-discovered. It is the worlds largest golden statue. When you see it you can imagine some villain out of a Indiana Jones film scheming to steal it. It sits knowingly in the temple, in the lotus position, in it's true form, utterly resplendent. Gold on that scale does not look tacky, it has a curious, glorious warmth to it. It conveys the sense that there is something more to us, something as brilliant as the glint of the light of the golden form. The temple walls are adorned in a beautiful and ornate hand painted pattern. To reflect on the patience and presence of mind it must have taken to paint is truly humbling. You get the sense stood in the temple with your bare feet flat on the mindfully cleaned floor, watching the statue glint under the dome of the meticulously painted walls that the statue was perhaps made by men with higher minds. 

As is normal with most cities the 'palace next to the slum' scenario occurs in Bangkok. The poor sit at the rich man's gates. You can see lame dogs limp among the flashing lights of the strip clubs and dirty children sleep on the street. Drunks lay asleep hunched over on the steps to shops. Graffiti, a global phenomenon is present on some bare walls. Bangkok is a city of exoticism, it is sin city. Your are constantly invited by men with a long list of sinful acts to go see a 'ping pong' show. He will do this by accompanying his proposition with an amusing 'pop-pop' noise. Men constantly offer porn dvd's in the street, stalls sell rows of sex paraphernalia. There are strip club all over the place and of course there are the lady boys.

To walk around Bangkok is to experience sensory overload. There is the noise, the din of the traffic, the constant beep of cars, the whistle of the traffic controllers and the shrill noise of the smaller engines of the tuk-tuks. The crash of the sky train meandering like a snake maybe 25 foot above you. The hum of people talking everywhere on phones, market men loudly advertising their products (it seems if they is a space on the pavement not constantly occupied by pedestrians someone will set up a stall there), large adverts on t.v screens can be heard and seen, looking ghostly above the urban landscape. Then there is the smell, food seems to get cooked in every crevice and cranny available and wafts tantalisingly into the streets. You feel the heat. It's not just hot it's the mugginess, the closeness of the heat is draining, the city essentially acts as a microwave. Then there is the the visual overload. The people of Bangkok live cheek by jowl. They hang from the rafters. Its an anthill. People! People are everywhere. People brushing past you, people passed out and homeless sat next to the pavement. Groups of people huddled around fuzzy t.v's down alley ways. People cooking, eating selling, buying. It's thrilling to just walk down the street and the city feels alive.

There was a night market near our hotel and I spent a good evening strolling through it. Now, I do not know whether this can be verified as a quantifiable, statistical truth however I have a deep inking that there may indeed be more fake watches in Bangkok than people. The shelves were full of knock of clothes, 'adides' t-shirts and the like. You can buy fake headphones, some unbelievably well faked trainers, fake hair dryers, everything and anything for anyone. For those with a warped and evil propensity towards violence knuckle dusters, knives, throwing knives, daggers, flick knives, tazer's, swords and replica air guns are all readily available to the discerning customer. Other stalls sell jewellery, pictures, and statues and mugs etc. From the stalls row upon row of mass produced Buddha's stare blankly at you from the stall after stall.

Earlier I referred to Bangkok as a brave new world, the title of Aldous Huxley's famous dystopian novel. The title, 'Brave New World' comes from a moment in the novel when the main protagonist Bernard Marx repeats ironically to himself the Shakespeare line “O brave new world, That has such people in it.” The line is taken from Shakespeare's the Tempest and is a line by a character called Miranda who after living a quiet and subdued life on an island sees civilisation for the first time and exclaims in wonder "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!" The line in the Tempest is also ironic as all she can see are some drunken sailors, however it is the wonderment and amazement that the line is exclaimed in that I think best optimistically sums up my very short experience of Bangkok. "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"