(Bangkok) A 200-year-old Chinese villa in the historic heart of Bangkok: an odd place to set up a diving school, but in a city that shamelessly demolishes its heritage, the company is helping to preserve the magnificent residence.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Called So Heng Tai, this traditional house made of precious wood has its origins in the 18th century in the trade of bird’s nests, very popular in China, and was built on the edge of the immense Chao Praya river which crosses the Thai capital. .
In its center, an interior courtyard which for several years has housed a 4-meter-deep pool wanted by its owner, Poosak Posayachinda, a former professional diver.
The activity makes it possible to generate income to meet the significant maintenance expenses of the building, 25,000 dollars per year, and to ensure its survival.
The diving school has trained more than 6000 people since its creation in 2004.
“In rainy weather, you realize the many holes that let the water through. Sooner or later we will have to redo the whole roof and that is a lot of money,” Poosak told AFP.
So Heng Tai is a rare success story in a megalopolis that has almost no interest in preserving its architectural gems.
In recent years, the city’s frantic reinvention has seen the rise of gleaming shopping malls and flashy apartment buildings, while buildings like the art deco La Scala and the British embassy dating from the 1920s were razed.
So Heng Tai is a rare success in Bangkok
“It’s because people want to make more money. That’s all that matters,” Bill Bensley, an American architect based in Bangkok, told AFP, especially since Thai law only protects buildings over 100 years old.
According to historian and archaeologist Phacha Phanomvan, annual maintenance costs can be an insurmountable burden for families with historic properties.
“We don’t have a heritage lottery or a funding structure that can step in to save heritage,” she says.
The Ministry of Culture nevertheless keeps an inventory of national heritage, but according to Phacha, many places are not declared by their owners, because of the constraints that this entails.
“For individual owners without state assistance…it is better for them to sell the property. Sell the individual building and then sell the (land),” she explains.
Some properties, especially those made of teak, a highly prized wood, are dismantled, moved and reassembled to become boutique hotels elsewhere.
We should “leave these properties where they are […] rather than dispossessing Bangkok of its (history),” she said.
For 5 years photographer Ben Davies roamed Bangkok, taking hundreds of views and when his book ‘Vanishing Bangkok’ came out, ’30-40% of the places I had photographed had either disappeared or become unrecognizable’. he told AFP.
Follow Singapore’s lead
“I have the horrible feeling that one day Bangkok, apart from its temples and palaces, will have lost so much of its identity and character that it will look like any other megalopolis in Asia,” he added.
Other countries in the region offer Thailand possible solutions, notably Singapore which, since the end of the 1980s, has been held up as an example in Asia.
The city-state has systematically integrated the need to preserve heritage into all its development projects, according to Yeo Kang Shua, an architectural history specialist at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.
Preserve as much as possible of what already exists, restore identically and carefully maintain the buildings. As a result, “in the 1980s, being classified as heritage was considered a death sentence by many owners (because of all the regulations that went with it, editor’s note), but today, because of the rarity of these buildings in Singapore, their prices have skyrocketed,” he told AFP.
In Bangkok, some signs of change are visible. A wealthy Chinese-Thai family recently renovated dilapidated Chinese warehouses dating back to the 1850s, transforming them into a huge space for exhibitions and cultural events.
At the So Heng Tai diving school, Poosak makes his students work at their own pace.
Faithful to his ancestors, who arrived in Thailand with “a pillow and a mattress”, he is determined to save the family home. “If someone comes to me with an offer, the answer is no, as simple as that, regardless of the amount of the offer,” he says.