Bangkok, as a capital city, grew out of a small fishing village back in 1782, and has been developing ever since — its layers of culture and architecture settling both on top of one another and side by side, one era never quite replacing the last. It’s precisely this that has created, and will keep creating, the unmistakable contrasts the city is known for the world over.
I ran headlong into Bangkok’s contrasts within my very first hours in the city, back in 2019. I was riding in from the airport by taxi, admiring the handsome buildings and shopping centres, marvelling at the sprawling road network, when the driver suddenly turned into an unremarkable little courtyard, stopped the car, and pointed towards the building next door, telling me my hotel was there. I flatly refused to get out, thoroughly convinced I’d just been dropped into one of those notorious, crime-ridden districts you see in films. A quick call to the hotel, though, confirmed I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Ducking quickly through the door, I found myself in the hands of a wonderfully warm group of Thai women, all trying their best to reassure me. Even so, I decided I wasn’t going anywhere — I only needed the one night there, waiting for my next flight.
My stomach, however, had other ideas. I got hungry.
The same warm-hearted women told me there was a Night Market just round the corner. So off I went — and found myself in a genuinely local Night Market, the real thing. Nobody kidnapped me; quite the opposite, everyone was thoroughly kind, and did their best to feed me a whole string of dishes I couldn’t begin to identify.
That’s how my acquaintance with Bangkok began. Since then, I’ve returned to the city many times, and every time, I’ve found myself struck anew by the sheer proximity of it all: expensive restaurants beside night markets, glossy shopping malls beside street vendors, elegant high-rise condominiums beside slums. Temples beside office towers. Chinatown and Little India tucked in alongside everything local. Traditional Thai architecture standing right next to European. All of it, together, is Bangkok.
I’d always been curious to see a genuine slum, though always too wary to actually go looking for one — until chance simply put me in the middle of one. Flying into Bangkok late one evening, already in the dark, I was trying to make my way from the metro to my hotel, and Google Maps led me along what looked, at the time, like a narrow riverside promenade. Walking the same stretch again the next morning, I realised it hadn’t been a promenade at all.
In the photograph, there’s a narrow path with the river running along one side, and a slum along the other — and, right in between the two, flowers and greenery.
I’d always looked at photographs of slums before and assumed they were dangerous — if nothing else, surely the kind of place where the criminal element lives, genuinely unsafe — while the large, clean, handsome buildings meant safety. But standing on that particular street, I saw the whole thing completely differently.
The people living there are ordinary people, exactly like you or me — they simply have less money, and so they live as best they can with what they have. And what they can do, it turns out, is smile at the occasional stranger who’s wandered in by accident, sit on a bench watching the sky, decorate their modest homes with flower pots and ribbons, laugh, chat, and simply live. Just live.
You could, if you liked, borrow the language of today’s success coaches: “They only have themselves to blame for their troubles, and they need to get up and go chase success.”
Well, firstly, it’s hardly their fault they were born into a poor family unable to afford their children’s education. Nor is it their fault that the wealthier world tends to shut out people without one. There are two things none of us gets to choose: how we’re born, and how we die. What we can choose, though, is whether to be happy — and happiness was never really about money, expensive cars, or designer handbags.
Secondly, who exactly needs them to get up and chase success — themselves, or the success coach? They’re happy in their small homes, happy selling fruit on the street, happy within the world they actually inhabit. And that, in itself, is a kind of success.
And that, right there, is the real contrast of Bangkok.
