Finding Ancient Cham Food in Bangkok’s Silk Weaving Village

Finding Ancient Cham Food in Bangkok’s Silk Weaving Village

welcome inside the fascinating neighborhood of Bon crua a tie name meaning the kitchen Village it’s a place that holds some of the world’s most ancient culinary Secrets but to find them well that meant unraveling a history that’s one of the most fascinating and intense we’ve ever covered it’s a story that tells the tale of a great ancient Kingdom Colonial battles in the founding of modern Bangkok and along the way well it took us through everything from World politics to Hollywood Cinema to a mystery that would shake the ground into continents today on OTR we’re on the hunt for one-of-a-kind food history but more than that we’re here for the story of the ancient mysterious and Starcrossed Village of Bon crua [Music] 5 years ago there was a food festival in a neighborhood called bon crua now that by itself isn’t a story I mean this is Bangkok there are food festivals every 20 minutes but this one I mean this was different in fact as far as I can tell there’s never been anything like it in this country or anywhere else before or since it was meant to celebrate the food of an ethnic group called The Champ from the Champa Kingdom a people who had a massive impact on Ancient southeast Asia a people whose kingdom fell hundreds of years ago and of people whose descendants apparently are the residents of Bon crua maybe the craziest thing about this place I never knew was here and its people who I didn’t know still existed is that it’s not even hard to find it’s pretty much right down town literally steps away from one of the most popular tourist attractions in the entire city right there like a dartboard distance away that’s the Jim Thompson house maybe the most iconic house in Thailand a mansion built by an eccentric foreign businessman of reconstructed homes from across the central Thai region a million people a year go there and even more live or work or shop in the busy districts all around but somehow in the middle of all of it there’s an ancient Cham neighborhood that’s still intact now that brings up a lot of questions but the first and most important before we start exploring is who the heck are the [Music] chams there’s an ancient Cham Legend told about a goddess named pagar created from the clouds in the ocean foam she would float on a piece of Eaglewood to the coast of what we now call Vietnam bringing with her rice fruit trees and all the abundance needed for a new civilization to the people who told that story austronesians who came on boats from the Philippines by way of Borneo around 4,000 years ago well this land rich and fertile must have felt like a miracle so they built a new home where they’d stay and build what would become the longest lasting Dynasty in the history of Southeast Asia now unlike most ancient kingdoms the Champa didn’t form or expand by military conquest it was more like a confederation of five semi-autonomous austronesian states cooperating on trade and sharing a language and culture their kingdom was established as far back as the events of the Bible and would last until the Industrial Revolution they were unique interesting the Champa were a matriarchal society with land and titles passed down through the women and they wrote in a language that would influence much of the entire region they sailed far and wide their trading boats so omnipresent that what’s now called the South China Sea was for centuries known as the Champa sea their Traders reached Japan Persia and as the first from Mainland southeast Asia to establish a relationship with India they introduced Indian spices and created not just an early form of Curry but the very first ever discovered outside the Indian subcontinent and it’s not just Curry that the chams were known for they were the first on the mainland to cultivate coconuts of course a Hallmark of their ancestors the austronesians the little bit we know seems to show they were baking before anyone else in Southeast Asia they created their own fish sauce as a condiment were making sausages before the Chinese and had their own versions of sour soups not unlike Filipino cagon theirs was a complex Cuisine revolving around the seasons something like the chams themselves that deserves better than it’s gotten from history anyway all of that is a very long way to say that when we heard about the possibility that there were Cham people making Cham food inside this neighborhood well we had to see what we could find [Music] the neighborhood of ban crua was settled in 1785 just 3 years after the establishment of Bangkok according to the stories this land which was then the farthest outskirts of the city was granted by the king Rama the in gratitude to the cham people specifically to a small group of about a 100 Cham soldiers who’d fought side by side with the Siamese since the days of iua basically that story starts when the Champa Kingdom fell not all at once but gradually starting in 1471 when they were made a vassal of the Vietnamese L Dynasty with their military under L control many sailors went abroad to become mercenaries where they’d gain a reputation as skilled Naval Warriors they fought for the malaka sultanate where they went toe-to-toe against the Portuguese on the water and also converted to Islam after Mala they followed the malaise South to defend the jeor sultanate then used that city as a base while they fought Christian Invaders across the region long story short it was in one of those battles off the coast of Cambodia where the ethnic Cham soldiers Allied for the first time with the Siamese and specifically King naras Swan the great of iua so impressed was naras Swan with their fighting that he offered them a place to live in iua and a job as his personal Battalion over the next 200 years the remaining Champs from Champa scattered across the region with groups settling in Cambodia and what’s now Malaysia but the chams who came with narwan would stay at the Forefront of the Siamese Army until being granted this plot of land when the new capital was settled so how do you find food when all there is to go on is a festival that may or may not have been held half a decade ago and no restaurants Cham or otherwise anywhere in sight actually how do you find anything in a maze of narrow alleys that on the surface could be any other residential Enclave in this city the best plan we could come up with was to start where the festival supposedly took place the Yami Kara mosque which happens to be the oldest mosque in Bangkok the first one constructed after the founding of the new city [Music] we arrived at the mosque when it was quiet and the Imam invited us inside and offered to help share some information about where we were and as it happened well in a stroke of good luck he turned out to be pretty much the perfect person to help us get our [Music] bearings [Music] for for [Music] Vietnam I got the feeling that as the head of the Historical Society for a small neighborhood that doesn’t see many visitors Mr jaran would have been happy to stay and talk to us all afternoon but we were here on a mission and so to help us find our way he introduced us to his colleague the mosques women’s leader known by the nickname of Tim now maybe we were just unbelievably lucky or maybe this is a very small community but by a stroke of Good Fortune Tim as it happened was the organizer of the very same food festival that brought us to Bon crua and she was on her way to bring us to someone who might be able to cook something for us to eat when right as we were outside the heavens opened and it started to pour down rain and we were carrying loads of camera gear so she hustled us into the house of one of her relatives a man named nepon Manas who at age 76 born and raised in ban crua could at the very least help us fill in the missing parts of our story while we waited out the weather [Applause] [Music] okay for for the ancestors of Tim and nepon arrived in this Village in the 1860s in a second wave of Champa migration to bangok now where we’d left off the chams not including the ones who came to cam had scatter Ed across the region and they’d live in clusters until In 1832 when the last Cham City in Vietnam was finally overrun by the NN Dynasty with Min mang outlawing the practice of Islam and it got bad the Champs who remained were forced to eat pork and renounce their faith or be executed as traitors and soon enough the same thing would happen to the Champs who had settled in Cambodia like the ancestors of nepon and Tim when the French arrived and also banned the Muslim religion now as it happens these events would have three lasting consequences for ban crua first the population would increase more than five-fold now filling all the land granted by Rama the first second this would become for a Time the only Community left on Earth that preserved old Cham traditions and third well one of those Traditions is weaving silk which would become massively consequential and turn this story upside down [Music] around 500 BC in his seminal work shuing or the book of ODS the great philosopher confucious told of an ancient Chinese princess named Lau or ceiling Shir who was sitting in the garden of her husband the emperor hangi when something fell from a mulberry tree into her cup of tea it was a cocoon and before she could pull pull it out it began to soften between her fingers the Cocoon unraveled into a single thread longer and longer when it was too long for her to hold she laid it out on the ground and found it stretched further than the 600 M of her Palace Garden looking into the Mulberry Tree she found more of these cocoons and after Gathering a small handful and softening them in warm water she wo them into the softest and most beautiful fabric anyone had ever seen with this knowledge she’d be transformed into a goddess the goddess of silk now this is just a legend in fact it’s quite likely that neither Leu nor the famous hang D actually existed but the story is important because it confirms what we already know from archaeology which is that by the time of confucious nothing in what’s now China was more important more prestigious than silk silk is a fabric made from threads left behind by silk worms which are the larvae of a rare species of moth and feed only on the leaves of the Mulberry Tree it takes around 4 days for a silk worm to build its cocoon with each one a single thread that can stretch as long as500 M or just shy of a mile when softened in water and then woven together these threads produce a material that can only be described as silky something feather light soft as air and the Very definition of luxury since as long a go as 6,500 BC the Chinese were the only civilization who knew its secrets and they would quickly learn that by controlling the silk trade they controlled power here was something more valuable than gold and of which they had a monopoly but to actually take advantage of this Priceless resource they’d need to find buyers and for that well they Enlisted the help of the great Traders known as the Champa since the chams were trading with India Persia and all corners of Asia they would buy silk for export and eventually they were receiving massive shipments of the raw material than handling the weaving themselves Chinese silk weaved by the Champa would become perhaps the world’s most coveted item sold on Ocean routes while the Chinese set up their own land connections which eventually spread to India and as far as Europe something that today of course we call the Silk Road it’s hard to overstate the importance of silk once it’s spread AC across the ancient world it was worn by Cleopatra hung as tapestries in Indian palaces and valued above anything else in both ancient Greece and Rome the Roman Emperor Helio gulus was said to wear nothing else ever and when the Goths under allori the would put the city under siege they demanded a ransom of gold black pepper and 4,000 silk tunics the Chinese Monopoly of silk cultivation would start to cck back around the 3rd Century ad when silk worms were smuggled to Korea supposedly by a group of young Chinese girls and to kotan in today’s Shang Province brought by a princess who hid them in her hair as a wedding gift for her new husband and around the year 550 ad at the height of the Silk Road the bantine emperor Justinian sent two priests to China as undercover spies who finally return to what’s now istan buul with their walking can’s packed full of silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds but what couldn’t be replaced was the craftsmanship of the ancient CHS and demand for their silk continued to increase financing their own civilization’s so-called golden age from the 8th to the 11th century ad ending only when the camars invaded and ransacked the kingdom that would Mark the end of Cham trade as their boats were now needed for fighting but for those who lived in Champa City I the Traditions were passed down from generation to generation in time forgotten by the rest of the world but a unique part of their own identity something that starting in the 1860s would be kept alive only here in [Music] Bon fore [Music] [Music] spee [Music] for [Music] [Music] for in the 1860s as the new arrival swell the neighborhood most of the people worked as fishermen or boat Builders with the women weaving silk for their own families they survived their culture and Cuisine preserved thanks to a shared religion and language but the silk was just something they did for themselves or for a small amount of extra income selling their excess clothing along the River on the weekends and that’s how it would remain for almost a century before all at once everything would change and thanks to one fluke of History nothing here would ever be the same again [Music] [Music] the man who would bring Fame and Fortune to ban ca’s Cham silk industry was born on the other side of of the world in Delaware in 1906 he was born into an eccentric and influential family his father owned a textile company and was close friends with President woodro Wilson his mother a leader in the women’s suffrage movement maybe the most prominent Advocate against giving women the right to vote the young Jim Thompson grew up in affluence attending the best prep schools and studying architecture at Princeton University where he competed in yacht racing in including in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics after college he worked as an architect trading on his parents connections to design homes for the Rich and Famous and in his spare time breeding bantam chickens and serving on the board of the world’s top ballet company where he found an interest in costumes and fabric now in spite of family connections Thompson never managed to pass the test for his own architecture license so when the Americans entered World War II he enlisted and was soon sent overseas after stins in North Africa in the European theater he was to be part of a mission to invade Thailand to push out the occupying Japanese he departed from Sri Lanka in 1945 for Bangkok but before he arrived the war was over so he figured he might as well stick around his first move was to join with five other investors to buy the Oriental Hotel now the Mandarin Oriental which he would renovate and remodel before chance encounter in 1948 would change everything walking along the sandp canal one day he heard the sound of weaving looms something he recognized as remember his dad owned a textile company walking into the neighborhood he saw houses weaving the finest silk Fabrics he’d ever seen he bought a few samples and sent them to New York where thanks to his family connections they found their way to the editor of Vogue magazine who was floored by what she just scene so Thompson and a partner started a business called the Thai Silk Company Limited giving the majority of shares to the Bon crua families including the parents of nepon Manas what would happen next would be something unbelievable an overnight explosion in global demand for Bon crua silk as all of a sudden a fabric once worn by Roman emperors in Cleopatra was rediscovered all over again the world couldn’t get enough of this stuff it would be used in fashion worn by the wealthy would catch the attention of the kennedies and was turned into costumes made for iconic movies like The King and I and benur Thompson was profiled in Publications ranging from The New York Times to the Atlantic with Time Magazine dubbing him the silk King at its peak Bon crua was producing 500 meters a day of thae silk for Jim Thompson thousands of people worked in the supply chain and as he famously shared so much of the profits many who had spent their lives as subsistence fishermen suddenly became quite wealthy including the Manas family which employed as many as 50 people here in ban crua for kindness hisory is very kindness kindness man [Music] in the years after Jim Thompson’s arrival Bon crua would explode into a prosperous Community their silk famous around the world and the financial rewards significant by the mid1 1950s neon’s family was earning more than $100,000 bought per month which in today’s money is equivalent to about $53,000 per month or 26,000 times the average national income and it wasn’t just the money it was the pride too of being a part of something famous on a global [Music] scale for of Queen [Music] fore foree for for to understand what comes next in this story well we have to start start by going back to why he came to Thailand in the first place because nothing about Jim Thompson was quite what it seemed it’s true that he was an architect and did voluntarily enlist in the US Army in 1941 but after that well things get a lot more murky soon after Thompson enlisted he was recruited to join the oss the precursor to today’s CIA his actual role in World War II was in covert operations first targeting the Nazis and then the Japanese which is why he was part of the secret plans for the invasion of Thailand and once he arrived in Bangkok well he didn’t just choose to stay I mean that’s not how military commitments usually work as a matter of fact he was assigned to live here undercover while working as a clandestine spy protecting American interests across southeast Asia but by the time he’d set up his silk company his Allegiance was already in question people who knew him said that he became disenchanted with the post-war American priorities which shifted from protecting Global freedom to an anti-communist Witch Hunt he began to be viewed as something of a reckless Maverick a cowboy who ignored orders instead supporting anti-colonial rebellions especially in French Indochina and he made enemies in Thailand too where he’d become a close Ally of the deposed prime minister pry bonam Yong a pro-democracy revolutionary who fell out of favor in the first years of Rama the 9th and as his silk Fortune grew so too did his trouble in his new home country with Rivals emerging wanting a piece of his success and corrupt officials in the countryside where he invested in massive silk plantations infuriated that they no longer controled the flow of provincial money as his problems piled up with pressure building on all sides in 1967 Jim Thompson took a vacation to an old British Resort town in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands on the morning of Easter Sunday March 26th while his three traveling companions prepared for church service Thompson took a walk alone for 20 minutes before returning to the group that afternoon he left again where around 400 p.m. he waved to a British cook as he walked down a jungle Road this would be the last time anyone would ever see Jim Thompson the case of his disappearance would become an international sensation ation with journalists soldiers bounty hunters and even psychics descending on the Cameron Highlands where they joined the American Embassy and the Malaysian police in an 11-day search that turned up nothing theories abounded some guessed that he’d been killed in a failed kidnapping looking for ransom others said he’d gone deep undercover in work related to the Vietnam War there were plenty who claimed he’d been killed by a business rival looking for a leg up in the silk industry or that he’d been assassinated by any of a half dozen Southeast Asian governments or even his own CIA it was also speculated that maybe he took his own life as for a decade he’d been hounded by the Thai government who accused him of stealing Priceless Antiquities as part of his art collection and at the time he disappeared even with an annual income in today’s money totaling more than $7 million per year he had less than $50 in his personal bank account sightings would come in from time to time in various places across Asia and the South Pacific but nothing was ever confirmed the most recent Theory to gained Traction publicized in a 2017 documentary claims that when he’d left before church he’d gone to set up a meeting with the leader of Malaysia’s communist rebels the country’s most Wanted Man on a mission allegedly in support of their activities but actually one last assignment from the CIA the rebels caught on to his motives and killed him at the meeting with his body hidden somewhere never to be discovered whatever happened this would be the end of Jim Thompson and with it the end of ban crua at least as the silk weaving capital of the world the neighborhood would Fade Into Obscurity its Secrets held Within These alleys for Generations before Jim Thompson’s arrival would again become Secrets once more and the legacy of the Champa people would be kept Alive by only one remaining family okay [Music] foree [Music] [Music] for after Jim Thompson disappeared the business for Bon crua would dwindle with even the company named after the old Silk King finally packing up for knon R’s sea in 1988 as insult to injury buying the old equipment from outof workor Cham Weavers to take to their new Factory by the middle of the 1990s plans were made for ban crua to be demolished its land the proposed site of a new highway more than 200 years after the settlement of the neighborhood and 2,000 years after the founding of the cham Kingdom the ancient way of life for the people of this community appeared to finally be at an end but that’s not what happened to the surprise of everyone including those who lived here in Bon crua the planned Highway proved a turning point the citizens bonded together and after 2 years and 8 months of fighting the plan was withdrawn but developers still had their eye on this land and the local citizens knew if they were going to avoid the wrecking ball well they’d need to give the city a reason to leave them alone and it would be nippon’s cousin Tim who would be the first to propose an idea which brings us to why we came here in the first place fore in the years after the highway plan fell through when Mr jarian the Imam of the mosque assembled a group for local preservation it was Tim who brought up the idea of using their unique Cuisine to Showcase ban crua and give the neighborhood a reason to hold together for with the ne hood on the verge of collapse and having narrowly escaped demolition Tim realized that in a city obsessed with food well maybe that would be the ticket she hosted the neighborhood’s first food festival in 2019 and after a long Interruption because of covid while as soon as she could she got back to work with help from the mosque she Enlisted the community to support her Mission and last year brought Bona’s Cooks together for an event spread Only By Word of Mouth to see if people might be interested it was a smashing success because of this Bon crua was invited to be a part of bangkok’s 20124 design week just 3 months ago ironically enough for an art festival not for silk but for food and again the city responded and since then the new identity of ban crua has begun to catch on for while we’ve been hiding from the rain in spending our day with nepon Tim asked one of the members of the mosque to surprise us by cooking one of the neighborhood’s Specialties a dish found only in ban crua it’s a curry but not something that looks like what you might have found found in ancient Champa this is more of a mish mash of cultures and ingredients with things like tomato and Chili Peppers which arrived from the new world there’s Thai Basil and Gango Indian spices and a curry paste that’s most similar to a Cambodian C but honestly who cares if this isn’t an ancient dish because what it is might be something even more rare and exciting it’s a dish that tells the story of the remarkable people of ban crua their incredible path to get here and their perseverance to survive with their culture intact a culture and a Cuisine that’s entirely their [Music] own [Music] fore [Music] for me uh cow cat me [Music] for kitchen [Laughter] okay that’s perfect that would be great we can look the other way so she doesn’t feel any shy not I think [Music] [Music] she [Music] [Music] e for [Music] [Music] [Music] subscribe to the channel for more from OTR thank you so much to everyone who supports us on patreon it really helps to keep us going and gives us a chance to Spotlight places like this find links below to our patreon and social media and follow the link in the pinned comment for the location of Bon crua or of course just ask anyone for K nippon’s house so long [Music] [Applause]

Following a tip about a food festival once held in a unique neighborhood in Bangkok, we set out to explore Baan Krua and unravel the stories of the Champa Kingdom and the ethnic Cham people who live within its alleys. Following the hints about the festival, the story brought us from the local mosque, to neighborhood homes, to a dish we’d never tried before; and in between, uncovering the epic rise and fall of one of the most fascinating places we’ve ever explored.

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0:00 – Introduction
1:01 – The Food Festival
2:40 – Champa
5:18 – Into Baan Krua
7:17 – The Mosque
11:29 – Niphon Manuthas
14:28 – Silk
18:51 – The Masters
20:45 – The Start of Baan Krua Silk
22:15 – Jim Thompson
25:45 – Golden Age
30:23 – The Rest of the Story
35:01 – The Last Ones Left
37:34 – Food Festival
40:40 – The Kitchen
43:26 – Conclusion

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