PALACE OF REAL FAIRYLAND.

Hokitika Guardian, 1 April 1922, Page 1

PALACE OF REAL FAIRYLAND.

MOST BEAUTIFUL IN THE

WORLD

BANGKOK’S MAZE OF LOVELY AVENUES.

SIAMESE, THE PERFECT HOSTS

(By Viscount Northcliffe). SOUTH SIAM, Dec. 1921

There is nothing like a long voyage to teach one geography and to show up the weird delusions under which, people all over the world labour about places well known by name. Before I had been a day in Bangkok T heard that letters arrive there addressed to “Bangkok, Siam, India.” Perhaps it is not entirely the writer’s fault. My hand atlas—dated, I regret to say 1912—shows Siam in a map entitled” Farther India”; and divides between Siam and Burmah the long thin line peninsula which runs down to the Straits Settlements.

We are by no means the only pebbles on the beach. Siam’s foreign adviser in political'smatters, for example, is Dr Eldon James, an American, and of the Harvard Daw School. For all that, the English colony in Bangkok has an exceptional character. Here I met proportionately more public school )men than in any other part of the. Far East- that I have visited, except perhaps Malaya. Good sportsmen liked by the Siamese, energetic, and resourceful, they have made a little British settlement out here which, I am sure, has ,n great share in maintaining both the long-estab-lished comradeship between us and ; our delightful Siamese friends, and also, incidentally, British prestige in a far-off land.

In spent a particularly instructive evening at the British Club in Bangkok, where, at one of the dinners given in myj honour in Siam, I had the pleasure of meeting the leading mem-

bers of the "English colony. Listening to the talk all round me, T was deeply impressed with the atmosphere of youth and energy. All agreed in having nothing hut praise for Bangkok nnd ,for the fair and friendly treatment they invariably received at the hands of their Siamese hosts. ■Much of his friendliness is due, of course, to the fact that many of the Siamese princes and leading men send their sons to English public schools, whence they return homo deeply imbued with the English spirit. Prince Purnchntrn, of the Royal House, the organiser of thf excellent Siamese railway system, is a Harrovian. "Recently there has been some littlp change in this matter, and as with the Chinese, a, number of Siamese students now go to the United States.

The Siamese are a remarkable and a. very agreeable people. Their sense of hospitality is surpassed by that of no nation, in the world that I know. They are the perfect hosts. Never is there any outward sign of the trouble which they hourly take to make you feel at home. You merely live in perfect com fort in the easiest possible companionship with very charming and well-read folk. Many of the Siamese that I have met speak English faultlessly. Some know the language so well that they think in it; a ( nd no idiom in our very difficult tongue finds them at a loss. In .:art, and especially in architecture ns well ns in practical matters, aviation, engineering, and law. the Siamese are already the full equals of many European peoples.

I wonder how many places in this beautiful world are said to be “The Venice of the North,” or some other point of the compass. Almost every city built amidst canals is so called; hut T hesitate to add Bangkok to the list by dubbing it “The Venice of the Far East.” Yet the name is not inapposite. From the moment of my arrival in the great Menain River, when the ship dropped anchor opposite a picturesque building, my mind travelled straight to the jewel of European cities. Here was a great waterway set about on cither hand with splendid palaces and temples, while tree-shaped canals, bearing small, lazy craft on their .placid surfaces, opened into it every few hundred yards and wound back out of sight amid verandahed houses and little over-hanging shops. It was not the port of Venice nor the Grand Canal; hut it might have been.

Bangkok ;is not like Venice. It differs radically from Venice and also indeed .from any Eastern City that I have yet seen, except Tokio—in the verv large scale? on which everything in it is planned. Yet it might have been designed by an Eastern architect who had seen Venice and had discerned how its plan might he adapted to a Far Eastern form.

The streets in the business quarter are wide and straight. They lack some thing of the Eastern charm of colour, and their shops are more than halfEuropean in appearance; hut they are spacious and generously planned.

Not in the business quarter, however, is the spaciousness of Bangkok most .evident hut in the beautiful residential quarter. Here you find mile after mile of palace and garden and villa, howered in leafage and reached by immense avenues of perfect roadway bordered hy great trees whose top. branches lock together to form an unbroken roof for your protection against the fierce tropic sun.

Somewhere in the midst of these ideal surroundings stands the Sukhoday Palace, which, with true Siamese hospitality, was lent to me during my stay hy his Majesty the King of Siam. Many other palaces and houses, each enclosed in its trim garden, lie within .a few minutes’ imotor-drive of Suklioday, but tto : reach the outskirts of Bangkok proper always takes half an

hour in a reasonably driven car. And try, as I might, I could never be. quite sure in which direction lay any paricular house or districts Those lovely avenues formed one vast maze all about us.

Officially ,a palace. Sukhoday is a palace also in the descriptive sense of the word. It is a king’s house, and a very gracious one; it is, also, to' our English eyes, a perfect country house, designed and fitted in every way to suit the baking climate of Siam. It stands in a great garden, wrose lawns slope down to a. winding canal, where all day quiaint craft cruise up and down. All round it are woods full of bird calls, and at night the bull-frog and the crickets lull you to sleep. The palace itself consists of two large houses, standing about seventy yards apart, but connected by a wide gallery"that joins their first floors Each house is in itself a small palace, with large bedrooms and bath-rooms above and a series of reception rooms below. Round each floor runs an immense verandah, which more than doubles the size of the actual rooms. No more luxurious hot-weather house could be conceived.

I saw also another palace of a different order, the palace of the King himself. Here stand temples and shrines which for sheer beauty and riches must excel anything of the kind in the world. Indeed, as you pass through the great white stood gates you leave this world behind and are transported into another world, another age.

To no one has it been given to describe in words what Aladdin found in the magic cave. The treasures (abridged catalogue appended) lay heaped in dazzling profusion—that is how the writers all get out of it. And that is the only way to describe the King’s palace at Bangkok—except that content! In his life be had done a great thing. Guarding the steep, white marble steps of the main building of the temple stand two huge figures in strange mail, their faces hidden by masks; and of those masks one was very like the horrible Shinto mask that I saw at the seatemple of Miya jima in Japan. On every side your eye meets wonderful animals, dogs and lions, several feet .high. The animals are in plain stone; hut the gods and devils blaze with colours and metals.

Within the great temple is a shrine, surmounted by a small figure of Buddha made of jade—sometimes called the Emerald Buddha. All about this shrine are gilt statues, most of them studded with stones that appear to be diamonds. The great lofty doors of the temple are of some rich, dark wood exquisitely inlaid with mother-of-pearl; and all along the outer colonnades surrounding it are carving and inlay so lovely in design and workmanship that perforce you stand still and gape helplessly, rapt to silence hy beauty so incredible. “Fairyland—it’s just fairyland!” said one of my party. Fairyland, indeed, it was—the visible truth of all those thousand tales of inagie palaces and immeasurable wealth which we all have known since we could understand the printed word. But never yet did dreamer of fairy-tales dare to invent for the joy of a six-year-old such a place os the temple of Bangkok. Even at that age we were not so unsophisticated. We should have cried: “I don’t believe it one bit!”

Yet true and real it is. And there it stands, in a Far Eastern city wihch has telephones ,electric tramways, and English names to the streets.

Another treasure house 1 found in the royal apartments, which we visited after the fairy courts and shrines. In one room is a collection of royal hats —pure Elizabethan things of stiff velvet, witlr tall aigrettes and jewelled clasps. Such hats can be seen in any picture of English life between 1580 and L6lO. Round one end of the room stand the royal saddles and the royal palanquins, or rather open Sedan chairs —each a marvel.

The chairs are miniature thrones carried on long poles. The King’s favourite chair is covered with gold leal and thickly studded with what I was told were diamonds—every stone as big as the top of an ordinary pencil, and there must he many hundreds of them. And you wander out into the sunlit courts .again, to he dazzled anew by some yet unseen and exquisite arrangement of polychromatic roofs and to hear the soft silver murmurs of the little golden bells hanging from the great eaveß of the temple. They play no carillon save on windy days. On a sweet December day like this they speak in monosyllables, dreamily, without haste. In these fairy courts thenmagic voices are the only sound.

The other night the King and his. guests were invited to a performance at the Theatre Royal of a French comedy Le Tante d'Honeur. The players were very talented amateurs, and the jeune premiere was an Englishwoman. Naturally, the scene was exceedingly brilliant, the women’s dresses and the gorgeous uniforms of the Court and of the Staff of Marshal Joffrio making a grand display against the rich decoration of the house.

The King of Siam is particularly keen on the stage and all things theatrical. He is an authority on plays of all ages in most languages, from Wycherley to Alfred Capus; he is himself a playwright with a very happy manner, and a keen actor to boot. That evening, sitting in the royal box, he followed with the closest attention every phase ami moment of the airy trifle that was filling the house with ripples of laughfor. The King is not much over 40 years of age; with his mind deeply engaged on his favourite amusement he looked a good deal less. After the play our hosts of the evening, the Coinite de I’Alliance Franchise, bade us to supper in a great pavilion built opposite the theatre doors. We spent a night full of merriment and charm; and it was.well.after 3 o’clock •when we got back to the beautiful Pal-

ace at Sukhoday, with, the conviction that-we had been living in some specially fascinating chapter of-the “Arabian Night-B.”