When I was strong enough a kind friend, manager of the B.A.T., took me in his company's launch to see the klongs, or canals, which give Bangkok its individuality. It appears that until a few years ago no one was allowed without the royal permission to build on land and the houses stood on piles driven into the mud-banks at the water's edge or were constructed on floating pontoons moored to the side. The Menam, broad and handsome, is the city's main highway. Going up it, you pass wats placed advantageously here and there along the banks; and the high wall of the palace with the crowded splendour of the buildings behind it; public buildings, very grand and new; the trim, green, old-fashioned and dignified British legation and then untidy wharves. You turn down into one of the main klongs, the Oxford Street of Bangkok, and on each side are houseboats on which are shops open to the river front, and people go about making their purchases in sampans. Some of the canals are so broad that pontoons are moored in midstream and thus make a double or a treble row of shops. Little streamers, the omnibuses of the thrifty, puff up and down quickly, crowded with passengers; and as the rich in their great cars splash the passers-by on a rainy day in London, so opulent Chinamen in motor-launches speed along with a wash that makes the tiny dug-outs rock dangerously. Great barges are rowed slowly up and down, laden with wares, and these are the horse-drawn wagons that carry goods to market or from the wholesale merchant to the shopkeeper. Then there are the pedlars, like street-hawkers with a push-cart, who go about in little boats with their fish, their meat, or their vegetables. A woman, sitting under a yellow umbrella of oiled paper, paddles them along with a firm and easy stroke. Finally there are the pedestrians, single persons in a sampan who paddle to and fro bent on some errand or idly as one might take a stroll down Picadilly [sic]. To unaccustomed eyes it is surprising to see a decent old woman with a mop of grey hair deftly manœvring about her day's shopping. And like children scampering across the road tiny boys and girls, sometimes stark naked and seldom with more than a rag around their loins, dart in and out among the steamers and motor-boats in tiny little dug-outs so that you wonder that they are not run down. On the houseboats people lounge about idly; men mostly half naked wash themselves or their children, and here and there half-a-dozen urchins scramble about in the water.
And as you pass down a klong you get a sight of little creeks running out of it, only large enough for a sampan to enter, and you have a glimpse of green trees and houses sheltering amongst them. They are like the secluded courts and alleys that you find in London leading out of a busy thoroughfare. And just as the main street of a large town winds into a suburban road the klong narrows, the traffic dwindles, and now there is but one houseboat here and there, as it might be a general store to provide for the varied wants of the neighbours; and then the trees on the banks grow thick, coconuts and fruit trees, and you come but now and then upon a little brown house, the home of some Siamese who does not fear solitude. The plantations grow more extensive and your klong, which first was a busy street, then a respectable road through the suburbs, now becomes a leafy country lane.
