Finding Jim Thompson

Jim Thompson called his courtyard his jungle. For us, it was an oasis in the middle of Bangkok.
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We decided to check out the Jim Thompson house in Siam Square. He led a really adventurous life: originally an architect, he joined the Army during WWII but made it to Asia after Japan surrendered. He joined the OSS (now the CIA) and returned to Thailand, which he quickly fell in love with and built a house out of 6 existing traditional Thai teak houses. What he came up with is a wonderful combination of Thai architecture and Western comfort.

While building his home, Jim Thompson also discovered the silk trade, which had been all but abandoned in favor of western-style clothing. He built some factories and started his company, which eventually became Thailand’s largest silk producer and supplied the fabric for the costumes of the original King and I. Sadly, he disappeared one afternoon while on vacation in Sri Lanka.

thai silk

entry to one of the other outer buildings
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We toured the grounds first, which he described as his jungle. It’s a courtyard full or little ponds and really big plants, so I guess the name is apt. Our tour guide had a really interesting accent when saying “This way, please” and “Ladies and gentlemen”- it involved an awful lot of diphthongs and other linguistic devices that I have yet to learn. The house is built on stilts to protect from the rains (which start in May, lucky for us). Under the house were little living areas with various Buddha statues and goldfish bowls interspersed with mini jungles. Inside, the house was a kitchen, a dining room, a large open air living area, a study and two bedrooms. I got the feeling there were more bedrooms before the place started doing tours. The bedrooms each had chamber pots disguised as sculptures. There was also a mousehouse, where Chinese children used to keep their mice and watch them play, sort of an early TV.

This is a woodblock used for printing the silks. The bar across the top is a measuring stick. Each of the slats could be removed for printing different colors on the silks.
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Naturally we hit the silk shop after our tour. Don’t worry – if the crazy Thai DHL agent is true to his word, there are some silk goodies in store for some of you. Since I have lately become addicted to the skills of the Bahrain tailors, we started looking for silk fabric to buy by the meter. This involved a very long walk across Bangkok (we didn’t learn the day before that city blocks are way longer then they look on the map, especially when it’s hot and humid the whole way). We finally made it to the flagship silk store, but they didn’t really have that much of a selection and so, after another refreshing juice, we headed back to the hotel.

That night we met up with the other people on our tour and enjoyed another dinner and beers in the backpacking district while hearing horror stories about our next day’s drive to Cambodia.