Lumphini Park: a window into cultural history

The first time I visited Lumphini Park [1] more than 20 years ago, it was in the month of May. That time of the year, day maximums invariably exceeded 35 degrees Celsius. With the approaching monsoon season, relative humidity was quite high too. In the sun, I was scorched. In the shade, I was steamed. 

Knowing the tropics as well as I did, I knew better than to go to a park in midday, so I left my first visit till the later afternoon, but even then, it was quite unbearable. 

"This is not a park," I remember saying to myself, "this is the sahel." The air around still felt like an oven although it was getting past 5 o'clock. The entire day's heat was radiating back from the wide expanses of bitumen that made up the grand driveways. Retreating to the lawns gave only slight relief. Being the hot season, the grass had turned scrawny and brown, the earth beneath exposed and behaved much like the bitumen, releasing heat back to the air. And because some idiot wanted lawns, shade trees were few and far between. 

Without enough trees to soften the landscape, the glare of the tropical sun hurt the eyes. It got worse when I approached the lake's edge hoping for a slightly cooler breeze, for the light skimming off the water's surface was blinding. Wherever I went, I was baking in the heat. The eyes were in pain. My shirt was uncomfortably wet and sticky. Fire ants were gnawing at my legs. And they called this a park. 

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On account of this first experience, I have rarely gone back to Lumphini Park despite innumerable visits to Thailand since my first, intoxicating tour of the country. But I've always wanted to share with others what Lumphini told me, so on my most recent visit to Bangkok, I took a camera with me. 

Now, these pictures don't at all represent what I experienced on my initial visit. The pictures here were taken in the very late afternoon of a January day that was experiencing a cold snap. I don't think the temperature that day exceeded 26 degrees and it might have been the coolest day in the entire year, and overcast too. Moreover, being just a few months after the wet season, so the grass was unusually fat and green.

Unrepresentative as these pictures are of the usual heat and glare of Lumphini, they nevertheless make my point very well: that Lumphini Park is a relic of a colonial era. This is what Lumphini was meant to look like  -- a grand European park from the 19th century, with soft light -- even though it enjoys this feel on only the 3 coolest evenings out of 365. In these vistas, it tells the story of a period when Asians looked to Europe. 

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Lumphini Park was a gift by King Rama IV, also known as King Mongkut (1851 – 1868) to the people of Siam. He donated 200 rai [2] of his personal land for the public amenity. Mongkut's statue today stands at the main entrance of the Park. 

That was a time when the European powers, particularly Britain and France, were making inroads into Indochina [3]. Western industrial and military technologies were leagues ahead of the agrarian cultures of Southeast Asia. Western civilisation and knowhow seemed so superior that if Asian countries were to escape complete subjugation, it was necessary for Asians themselves to learn from the West. 

This motivation to learn from the West spanned the whole gamut of human affairs, from building railways to organising a postal system on the Western model to redesigning uniforms for the military. Western styles crept into architecture, urban planning... and parks. 

That's why Lumphini looks the way it does. It appears to be a cross between Le Jardin des Tuileries of Paris and London's Hyde Park. Like the Tuileries, it has a broad boulevard running straight down its central axis, wide enough for an entire cavalry regiment to parade down its length. Like Hyde Park, it has large expanses of water complete with a jette d'eau. And like so many European gardens, it has vast stretches of lawns, only occasionally punctuated by trees, so that you could have a picnic while basking in the sun, in Europe that is. You'd be mad to do likewise in the tropics. 

Lumphini Park even has a building that reminds me of the Lido house in Hyde Park, built as it was in a romanesque style, totally alien to the Siamese tradition. Without the broad eaves that our hot and monsoonal climate requires, this building must represent the height of absurdity in copying from the West.... until one sees the Chinese gazebo. 

The 19th century West had a fetish for artifacts from the exotic orient. It was common for gardens to have a little Chinese corner. But here in Lumphini, at Longitude 100° East, in a country that had traded with and sent envoys to China for a thousand years, to plant a Chinese gazebo like it was some novel curiosity seems completely misplaced. It only confirms how Lumphini Park was one great transplant from the West, and included within the package was the exoticisation of the East, even though Siam was right here in the same East. 

But Bangkok is not in Europe. Instead of cool temperatures warmed by the sun, in this part of the world, we have scorching heat that drives us into the shade of big trees. If we didn't hold the West in so much awe, we'd have a more intelligent response to our climate when designing parks. Instead of vast expanses of lawns (which turn into uninhabitable savanna in our climate), we would have arbories providing contiguous shade.

My own thoughts about what a park should be like in the tropics is in the box alongside. Trees, trees and more trees!

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In a small way, I was glad to see, in my recent visit, that happening. In one spot, a number of palms have been newly put in. But as you can see, so have cars! 

In other ways, the modern Thais have started to reclaim Lumphini for themselves. While it is almost deserted in the heat of the day, Lumphini comes alive after 5 p.m. Hordes of joggers pound the bitumen and smaller groups of friends sit and chat under the available trees. Even the normally shunned fields bleached by the midday sun get a little life when soccer teams use them as football pitches as twilight draws in. 

But most gratifying of all, I thought, was the way a dance-aerobics group quite democratically seized the front gate from King Mongkut. There, where the boulevard was broadest, where royal and aristocratic horse-carriages were once expected to drive through in stately procession through a European-styled garden, there is now a cacophony of Thai pop music. This widest part of the bitumen is also the most commodious part to hold 200 people prancing up and down hoping to keep the modern flab off.

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. Sometimes spelt as Lumpini Park. The park was named after the spot where Gautama Buddha gained enlightenment.
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2. A rai is a traditional Thai unit of measure, normally used for land and buildings. 1 rai = 1600 square metres
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3. By 'Indochina', I mean the part of continental Asia lying between India's Assam and China's Yunnan and Guangxi.
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Addenda

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