Some of those statues were new two- and three-story figures, painted bright colors, and surrounded by the gilt columns of temples. But the older ones more often caught my eye, statues pitted and time-blackened and crumbling, statues that had kept watch on rice fields for seven or eight centuries. Wars had been fought under their smiles. Unmoved, they had seen kingdoms come and go. Thirty generations of monks had draped the huge figures with saffron banners.
In the small towns, teak buildings, swaybacked and angular as old horses, stood here and there behind tile-faced commercial banks and concrete restaurants. Everywhere, I saw Thai spirit houses—tiny temples on pedestals that shelter and propitiate the forest ghosts displaced by human habitation.
It was a magical trip, and by the time the road began to wind up into the mountains that surround Chiang Mai, the city had taken shape in my mind as the gilded capital of one of those vanished kingdoms. Taxes and tribute had passed over the mountains I traveled through. Teak for temples and palaces had been carted over the roads I followed. Architects and scholars, some of them 700 years dead, had practiced their arts in this city.
I knew that the Old City inside the walls was home to temples, shrines, and museums. Here was the marketplace for the diverse hill tribes of the Golden Triangle region (once the crossroads of trade between Laos, Thailand, and Burma). These aboriginal peoples—Akha, Lahu, Lisu, and Hmong—had migrated centuries ago from Tibet and China to the steep limestone mountains of Northern Thailand. I knew it was a place where pedicabs, banned from Bangkok because they slow the flow of traffic, still silently moved along the streets. I imagined it was a place where ghosts still lived in their own homes.
And so I was not prepared for Chiang Mai. A few hours after I hit town, I found myself at the night bazaar, in a built-over section of the new city that lies between the old walls and the river. From my hotel I walked along streets noisy with the snarls of tuk-tuks, which sound a bit like a chain saw attacking a tin roof, the blaring horns of truck drivers and the mutter of motorcycles, in addition to sirens, shouts, and rattles. I refused a dozen offers of taxi rides, looked into store windows full of running shoes and microwaves, and walked past restaurants advertising hamburgers and banana splits.
The Lisu,Thailand’s premier opium cultivators and the most culturally advanced of all hill tribes, are an outgoing, friendly, and economically successful group of people.While most hill tribe villages are poor and dirty, Lisu villages are often clean and prosperous, loaded with sewing machines, radios, motorcycles, and perhaps a Datsun truck.Terrific salespeople, they enjoy setting up stalls and selling their handicrafts in Chiang Mai’s night market.
—Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook
In the bazaar itself, the sound systems of three or four pirate cassette stands pounded away as members of the hill tribes, in full costume, hawked their wares: hand-embroidered quilts, bags, backpacks, jackets, pillowcases, and tablecloths. Lowland Thais sold lacquer ware, beaten silver, small bronze statues, silks, wood carvings, painted umbrellas, and Burmese wall hangings. On the sidewalks, tables were laden with fake goods: Gucci vinyl, Taiwanese Rolexes, shirts bearing the labels of Lacoste, Dior, and Chanel. Street vendors sold Mekong whiskey by the drink as well as steamed bread and barbecued strips of pork on bamboo spits. Tourists from everywhere—Sweden, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, India, Italy, Germany, France, and Hong Kong—crowded the stalls, sidewalks and streets. Words from a dozen different languages came alive, began to collide, ricochet, fuse, burn—and turned to laughter in the night.
This Chiang Mai I had come to was a carnival. Giddiness floated in the air, and glee gripped visitors as they cashed in yen, marks, and greenbacks for wads of crimson and purple bills. Whole streets had become festivals of neon.
Other festivals were in progress. In hotels and cultural centers across the city, troupes of traditional Thai dancers performed to the weirdly percussive music of old Thailand. Audiences sat around low tables, leaning against hard triangular pillows called mon khwan, while they ate a khantoke dinner—Northern Thailand’s traditional cuisine of barbecued chicken, sticky rice, and curry stew—and watched the sinuous moves of dances choreographed a millennium before.
In the nightclubs that line the strip across from the Old City’s Thapae Gate, Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead tunes were performed by brilliant guitarists and drummers—and by singers who had learned their lyrics a phoneme at a time. In some of those same clubs, bar girls sat at tables, drinking $2 instant coffee and practicing English with Germans, Italians, and Japanese.
Chiang Mai can be an overwhelming experience for a visitor who comes into it lulled by the serenity of rice fields. My first night there, I collapsed at midnight into my bed at the Montri Hotel, tired but unable to sleep. The downtown tour had left me with images that did not fit well together. After a thousand repetitions, the Klee-like designs of hill tribe embroidery had begun to explode against my eyes. The American music had become too loud, too jarring.
Confused by my sudden plunge into the noise and light of a full-tilt tourist industry, I had left the markets empty-handed, convinced that the ancient hill tribe designs had been overproduced, handcrafted or not, that lacquer ware might have looked all right in a world without plastic, and that even the ersatz Rolexes, at $30, were too expensive to take home to the children of friends.
The Montri itself contributed to what was, by then, an acute case of overstimulation. I had meant to save money by staying there, and indeed I did. But while my room was clean and the shower had hot water, I was trying to sleep right above the kitchen, and garlic fumes had wafted up around the pipes in my bathroom. Going in there was good for the sinuses, bad for the eyes. Noise from the Thapae Strip—the horns of taxis, the bass notes of rock and roll bands, the shouts of drunken tourists—came in through my window. I’ve got bus lag, I said to myself. Sometime in the early morning hours, sleep finally came.
The Montri might be a cheap hotel, but its restaurant serves the best cup of coffee in town. I made my second foray into the city late the following morning, after drinking five thick black coffees and reading the Bangkok Post. I walked out into warm February sunlight.
Chiang Mai has the easy morning atmosphere of a place that stays up late. Along the moat north of the Thapae Gate, grassy banks provide small secluded places to sit. I found one and gazed down the line of trees to a brick corner of the old wall. The water was quiet, except where the fine high spray of fountains rippled the surface. The vistas seemed European rather than Asian, at least until a single fisherman began to walk slowly along the inner bank, holding a bow and shooting a tethered arrow at any carp careless enough to let a fin break the water.
This small scene lingers in my memory. Behind that suddenly loosed arrow and the arc of line that followed it half across the water, I began to see a different city. The night before, I had wondered if the ancient capital of the Lan Na Thai, or “Kingdom of a Million Rice Fields,” had not been transformed into just one more late 20th-century stop for exotic goods to display in cultural trophy rooms. The sudden thrashing of a carp in still water ended that line of thought.
The first thing to remember is that our temples are based on the sacred Buddhist texts known as the Traiphum, which describe heaven, earth, and the netherworld. Our temples are designed to resemble heaven as closely as possible, so that we can ensure an intimate harmony between heaven and the more immediate world of our land and its people.
—Abbot of Wat Doi Suthep, quoted by Jeffrey A. McNeely and Paul Spencer Wachtel, Soul of the Tiger
In the afternoon I rode in the back of a songthaew—one of the small covered pickups that are used for passengers in much of rural Thailand—up Doi Suthep, the 5,500-foot peak that provides a majestic backdrop to Chiang Mai’s skyline. Its top is crowned by the ornate roofs of Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, a 14th-century monastery that overlooks the city. It is a 40- minute ride to the base of the great serpent-flanked stairway of 290 steps that lead to the central temple. Once there
, I found myself in the midst of a great crowd of Thais and foreigners. We made the climb, paused for soft drinks at the small stand at the top of the stairs, took off our shoes and walked into the cloister. Foot-worn stone floors led past what were once bronze statues of the Buddha, now near-featureless mounds of gold leaf, their sculptors’ art obscured completely by the microscopically thin, inch-square offerings of pilgrims. Other, larger statues filled niches and rooms off the central plaza of the temple.
From a parapet facing east, you can see the buildings, streets, and trees of Chiang Mai and its surrounding villages. This is a Buddhist city. Everywhere I had gone in it, I had seen monks, studying English in open-air classrooms, hitching rides on motorcycles, or gazing impassively at the goods in the markets.
There are more than three hundred other temples below the one at Doi Suthep (the city’s highest). Besides Buddha images, many temples also give space to Hindu and animist deities. Sculpted demons, the more modern of them wearing wrist-watches, scowl behind temple gates. Murals and statues dramatize the ancient myth that pits the garudas (birdlike creatures), who rule the air, against the nagas (serpents), who rule the earth. There on top of Doi Suthep, I knew what it meant to see with the eyes of a garuda.
Back at the bottom of the stairs, I found a woman who sells pairs of sparrows in tiny bamboo cages. I paid a few baht to release two birds.
A culture that accepts motorcycles and forest spirits, nagas and garudas, bow-fishing and Led Zeppelin, also accepts the traveler, makes him feel welcome, bids him stop, slow down, and look around. I spent a week in Chiang Mai, staying quite comfortably at the Montri (after I’d changed to an air-conditioned room far from the kitchen).
I took a couple of tours out to the factories that line the road to Sankampaeng, a handicrafts village eight miles east of town. There, in small adjuncts to factory outlets, artisans create teak landscapes, silk cloth, dolls, wall hangings, elephant-skin boots, silver bowls, statues, and jewelry. Six-foot umbrellas are made and painted before tourist audiences. Child artists demonstrate the intricacies of producing lacquer ware, step by painstaking step. Tables, chairs, and beds—heavy, solid teak designs that recall an age when trees were thick and wood-carvers thicker—crowd showrooms.
There is a danger in factory tours. Tuk-tuk and taxi drivers will offer to take you on one without charge, because the factories pay them ten baht for each tourist delivered to their doors. And once you’re there, people try to sell you things you don’t need. I must confess I bought some—a silver bowl, a teak duck—and I’m glad I came home with them. But for a while, carrying them around town in bags that were already bulky, I wondered about my shopping wisdom.
I had better luck back at the night markets. I realized that the quilts, embroidery, and hand-weaves of the hill tribes, once taken away from clashing colors and crowded stalls, become beautiful. Hand-stitched quilts for $50 and loomed wall hangings for $20 are particularly good buys. And mailing home a package from the Chiang Mai post office took care of most of my purchases, though the duck remained with me throughout my stay.
But it is not the goods of Chiang Mai that characterize the city. I remember a late night at the Six-Pole House, a restaurant and nightclub in a restored century-old teak warehouse, on Charoenrat Road across the river from the Old City. A Thai rock band was tearing into Olivia Newton-John’s “Let’s Get Physical.” When the song was done, a young Canadian, carrying a clarinet case, walked to the bandstand and asked if he could join in. He stepped up to the microphone, and the audience—half Westerners, half Chiang Mai University students—heard him play a Benny Goodman arrangement of “April in Paris,” then “Take the A Train,” then…. But the band wanted to play rock and roll. The clarinet went back into its case, the Canadian stepped down, and the old walls began to shake to Creedence Clearwater’s “Born on the Bayou.”
I remember this scene because the young Thais who made up the band were having a good time picking and choosing from a whole worldful of music. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Benny Goodman or couldn’t play a polite backup to a young foreigner. But they were there to rock out, and they had the aggressive confidence of people who have a culture that can assimilate alien art forms and technologies and still remain intact.
This flexibility is not part of hill tribe cultures. In the middle of my stay I arrived late one afternoon at Chiang Mai University’s Hilltribe Research Center. I knocked, having finally found the way northwest from town to the campus, past uniformed soldiers at the gate, through a maze of buildings and roads, to the center’s closed door. A woman opened it.
“We’re closed,” she said, and smiled. “But you can come in.”
Inside I wandered through a small museum that shows the traditional costumes of ten hill tribes. Baskets, wooden tools, and fantastically ornate silver jewelry—all specimens of items sold in Chiang Mai’s antique shops—surround life-size wooden figures in tribal regalia. I thought of American Indians, of ways of life that did not fare well when they met more aggressive cultures.
In the hills around Chiang Mai, trekking companies have introduced the tribes to the money and clothes of tourists. (The witch doctor of one tribe wears a hooded Yale sweatshirt.) These people sell baskets and traditional clothes to antique dealers, since such items have given way to plastic buckets and blue jeans in mountain villages. The Thai government has suppressed opium growing, a prime source of income for many of the tribes, and has begun an assimilation program that is bringing people out of the mountains. A way of life is being lost. Tragedy lies in the carved faces of those museum figures. I lingered with them until the staff of the center told me it was time to lock up. Back in the night markets, members of the hill tribes were opening their booths and stalls, getting ready for the night’s onslaught of buyers.
If there is tragedy in the air of the Hilltribe Research Center, it does not reach the food markets and restaurants of the city. For Chiang Mai, if nothing else, is a wonderful and comic celebration of food and drink and the good life that goes with them. The city’s expatriate restaurateurs offer French, Italian, and German food—most of it good.
But Thai food is wonderful. You can try Northern Thai cooking—hot, full of incandescent peppers and fresh vegetables, spiced with lemon grass and lime and ginger—at storefront cafés and elegant restaurants all over town. Particularly good are the noodle dishes, fresh vegetables, Burmese-style curries, and anything—pork, shrimp, fish—doused with the local pepper sauce.
North of the night markets and squeezed into a grid of narrow streets is a great open-air market of farmers, fishermen, frog-sellers, and noodle-makers. Stalls sell sardines steamed in curry and wrapped in banana leaves, fish heads, a half-dozen colors of rice, live starlings, bamboo shoots, eight kinds of peppers, strange tubers, swimming catfish, hulking chunks of beef, breadfruit, pomelos, baby squid, dried and pressed fish, bundles of shallots, small haystacks of noodles, crabs, cheeses, mushrooms, bird eggs, and swimming eels. And those are just the items I could identify. There is much more—steaming bathtub-size woks of food, all of it new, all of it disturbing to a palate trained by American fast food.
But a week of eating in Chiang Mai cured me of any apprehensions I had had in its food markets. I walked to shrines and ate, visited temples and ate, wandered through museums and ate, listened to music and watched dances and ate—at food stalls and storefronts, as well as at restaurants near the hotels.
Toward the end of my stay, I was sitting in the Roof Garden Restaurant, an open-air fifth story dining room just across from the restored Thapae Gate. From there, I could see my hotel and the serrated brickwork of the gate, dark against the sunset. Above them, to the west, golden light shimmered around the edges of the broken-topped pagoda of Wat Chedi Luang in the Old City. The temple towered above the trees, ruined but majestic; once it was 260 feet high, before an earthquake toppled it in 1545. The sun, bright red and huge, sank into the ridges of Doi Suthep.
This is the image I most remember when I thi
nk of Chiang Mai. The city had changed after a week—and had emerged from under its carnival garb. I had begun to feel its peace, to sense its deep history and its connection to a way of life not tied to day-to-day concerns.
I have forgotten the Thai names of favorite foods, and some of the souvenirs I bought in the night market have disappeared—gone to friends for birthdays or weddings. But I still remember that sunset over a ruined pagoda, in a city under a mountain, half a world away.
John Rember lives in Stanley, Idaho. He is writer-in-residence at Albertson College, Caldwell, Idaho, and is the author of two collections of short stories, Coyote in the Mountains and Cheerleaders from Gomorrah.
The Western idea that a white elephant is an object which is not only valueless to its owner but is also a real burden seems to spring from an account of court life under the ancient kings of Siam. In those days of numerous concubines and a libidinous king, the story goes, there were so many offspring, nephews, and cousins vying for official state appointments that the king had to be creative to come up with sufficient titles to go around. He devised the position of Keeper of the Sacred Royal White Elephants and gave a relative a position of trust and honor by making him responsible for the care, feeding, and costuming of the pampered animals, all to be paid for out of the keeper’s own purse. The keeper soon found himself penniless as a result of being forced to support huge and economically unrewarding animals which, as the sacred possessions of the king, had to have only the best of everything. Thai historians insist that this story is apocryphal, but knowing the keen Thai sense of humor and the Asian way of getting the upper hand through a smile-clouded subterfuge, it is not unlikely that at least one Thai king had had his fun—and maintained his elephant entourage—in this way.
Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides) Page 19
