Sampheng Market (Chinatown)

Sampheng Market (Chinatown) refers first of all to a lane: a narrow, pedestrian-only alley lined with shophousesA narrow, deep urban house built in a row, whose ground floor serves as a shop and upper floor as living quarters, typical of the trading towns of South-East Asia., from which numerous side passages branch off. Around it extends a commercial district that bears the same name. The lane is not simply one street among others in Chinatown: it is its historic backbone, the line around which Bangkok’s Chinese quarter first took shape before spreading towards Yaowarat.¹⁵

The district lies in Chakkrawat subdistrict (khwaengAn administrative subdivision of Bangkok, ranking below the district (khet), the urban equivalent of the tambon in the provinces.), within Samphanthawong District, near Yaowarat and Ratchawong Road. It extends as far as Saphan Han, Phahurat and WangThai word for a palace, particularly the residence of a prince or a member of the royal family. Burapha, in Phra Nakhon District. The thoroughfare starts from the Talat Noi neighbourhood. The busiest stretch runs between Ratchawong Road, which cuts across the lane, and Chakkraphet Road. The route has scarcely changed in a century: maps from a hundred years ago already trace the same line.⁵

Several names refer to this same route. The common Thai name, สำเพ็ง, is also written สามเพ็ง, which accounts for the transcriptions Sampheng or Sampeng. On street signs and in official usage, however, the lane is called SoiThai word for a lane or side street branching off a main road; soi are often numbered after the main street from which they branch. Wanit 1, sometimes Wanit 1 Road. The change stems from a government notice that renamed ‘Sampheng Road’ as ‘Wanit Road’, from a Thai word meaning ‘commerce’. This renaming is linked to a policy of asserting Thai national identity. Usage did not follow: everyone still speaks of Sampheng.¹¹

Within the lane itself, other names survive. The stretch between Saphan Han and Chakkrawat Road bears the name TrokThai word for an alley, that is, a narrow passage between buildings, generally narrower than a soi. Hua Met. Old maps, above all, know nothing of ‘Wanit 1’: they divide the route into sections and passages designated by a series of names in Chinese characters. This layering of place names – Thai, administrative and Chinese – sums up the history of the place, at once the quarter of a community from China and a street in a Thai capital.¹¹

Where does the word Sampheng come from? The hypotheses are many, and no answer prevails: there is no decisive evidence in favour of any one of the explanations put forward. Several of them look for the answer in the former landscape. The first links the name to a nearby temple and canal called Sam Pheng, whose name is said to have been shortened in the pronunciation of the Chinese residents. The temple certainly exists: today’s WatBuddhist monastic complex that brings together, within a single enclosure, several religious buildings, monks’ quarters and ancillary buildings; the word does not refer to a single building. Pathum Khongkha was formerly called Wat Sampheng.¹

Other readings start from the lie of the land. ‘Sam Phaen’, the ‘three plots’, would evoke ground divided into three by two canals, the one that ran north of Wat Sampheng and that of Wat Sam Pluem. ‘Sam Phraeng’, the ‘three forks’, would refer to another feature of the site. A final, more unexpected hypothesis sees in it the name of a fern, the lamphaeng, whose leaves resemble those of basil. All these explanations have in common that they anchor the name in a territory of canals and low-lying land that predates the trading town.¹

A second group of hypotheses looks to the languages of the region. One connects Sampheng with a Mon word meaning ‘lord’ or ‘dignitary’. It is attributed to the historian Sujit Wongthes, who infers from it that Mon people lived on the site before the arrival of the Chinese. Jit Phumisak, for his part, is associated with another line of enquiry, that of the Khmer samphali, meaning ‘procuress’ or ‘madam’.¹⁶

A simpler explanation, put forward by Khun Wichitmatra, makes the name the trace of three people called Pheng who are said to have lived there. Nothing allows us to decide between these readings, which reveal above all how each projects onto the name an idea of the quarter: a land of canals, an ancient lordship, a place of carnal commerce or a community of neighbours.⁵

In everyday language, the name has also taken on a pejorative meaning. In Thai, ‘สำเพ็ง’ is used as an insult for a prostitute, and the expression ‘Sampheng woman’ is known in this sense.¹⁷

The history of the quarter begins with that of Bangkok. In 1782, Rama I founded a new capital on the east bank of the Chao Phraya. The land chosen for the Grand Palace was then occupied by Chinese, led by Phraya Racha SetthiSiamese noble title held by the head of the Chinese community, who represented it before the royal authorities., the title borne by the head of the Chinese community. The king ordered their relocation to clear the site for the royal residence.²

These residents were resettled between two canals: that of Wat Sam Pluem, now Wat Chakkrawat, and that of Wat Sampheng, now Wat Pathum Khongkha. These two Buddhist monasteries, together with Wat Samphanthawong, also known as Wat Ko, still serve as landmarks for locating the old quarter.⁷

The area allotted to the Chinese was then marshland. A small path linked it to the walled city, and it was this track that became Sampheng lane.¹⁵

The area at first stretched from Wat Sampheng to Wat Ko. It later spread to Saphan Han and Phahurat.⁴

By around 1785, the lane already formed the heart of the Chinese quarter. The contrast with the rest of Bangkok was then striking. The capital was above all a city of canals and floating houses. Sampheng was the exception: Chinese merchants built brick houses there, standing on the ground.¹³

Trade dealt at first in imported goods, and warehouses rose nearby to store them. The lane is considered one of the first commercial centres of the Rattanakosin periodPeriod of Thai history that began with the founding of Bangkok as the capital by King Rama I at the end of the eighteenth century. It takes its name from Rattanakosin Island, the heart of the royal city., which began with the founding of Bangkok.¹⁵

In the nineteenth century, Sampheng was described as the largest land-based market in the city. There one could find imported fruit, silks, tea, soap, medicines, glassware, gold, knives and iron tools, goods from China. Paper articles and ritual offerings, dried goods and salted fish were also sold there.⁶

This variety reveals the market’s dual function. It supplied the capital with imported goods, but it also served the daily and religious life of the Chinese community, which found there its familiar foodstuffs and the objects of its rites.

The density of the quarter had its downside. The tightly packed houses, built of bamboo and roofed with vetiver grass, frequently burned. The phenomenon was so familiar that it passed into the language. In the world of Thai boxing betting, the expression ‘ไฟไหม้สำเพ็ง’, ‘Sampheng fire’, denotes the unexpected defeat of a favourite, which ruins the punters at a stroke.⁷

The imageIn Thai Buddhism, a devotional representation of the Buddha, most often a statue, venerated as an object of worship. conveys the suddenness and scale of the losses that a fire could cause in a quarter where goods, dwellings and shops were crammed together. It is also a reminder that the memory of Sampheng rests not only on its walls but on the words it has left in everyday Thai.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the quarter was associated with gambling, opium and prostitution. The Briton Smyth, then living in Siam, spoke of it with contempt. A photograph from 1909 clearly shows this dual nature: Sampheng appears in it both as a commercial district and as a place of nightlife, with its brothels, gambling houses and opium dens.¹³

This reputation did not eclipse commercial activity, which remained the bedrock of the quarter’s life. The trading town and the pleasure town then shared the same lanes, a few steps from the temples that had bordered the quarter since its founding.

Between the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, Yaowarat Road, laid out later than the lane, overtook it in size and importance. Sampheng did not decline for all that. The lane remained prosperous.¹³

Popular usage, attached to the old name, has made this renaming a matter of street signs rather than of memory.

The quarter remains shaped by the calendar of the Chinese community. The Lantern Festival, Qingming – known as Cheng MengChinese ancestral festival, held in spring, during which families visit graves to tend them and leave offerings there. In Thailand it is called Cheng Meng. in Thailand – the Moon Festival and above all Chinese New Year are celebrated there.¹³

Market and ritual life thus echo each other from one end of the place’s history to the other.

Sampheng Market (Chinatown) is today one of Bangkok’s major wholesale markets, and it also sells retail. The lane remains pedestrianised, lined with shophouses, those narrow terraced houses combining a shop on the ground floor with storeys above. On sale are gift items, accessories, clothing, hats, watches, dolls, toys and food. Traders come to stock up in bulk, private shoppers to look for good prices.⁵

The lane also retains an organisation by specialities and landmarks. Rope and string shops cluster between Yaowaphanit and Song Sawat roads; a fabric shop, Kikuya, serves as a landmark for regulars.¹⁴

The market’s endurance does not rule out difficulties. In 2019, the press reported the weakest trading at Sampheng in half a century, a slowdown shared with other Bangkok markets. The cause put forward was the rise of online commerce, which draws some of the customers and resellers away from the alleys where they once came to stock up.¹⁵

For a place born a market and still one, this competition strikes at the very heart of its function. The lane weathered the arrival of Yaowarat and the transformations of the city in the twentieth century without losing its role; remote selling raises a question of a different kind, since it makes it less necessary for buyers to travel to the shops.

Fire, which left such a mark on the nineteenth century, remains a danger. Several fires have struck the area in recent years: in January 2018, a four-storey commercial building; in August 2021, a building behind Wat Chakkrawat; in February 2022, a building used as a toy warehouse.⁹

On 26 June 2022, another fire broke out on Ratchawong Road, near the pier of the same name. Several shophouses were destroyed and the fire left people dead and injured. Its presumed cause was the explosion of a transformer belonging to Bangkok’s electricity company, and the tangle of electrical cables helped the fire spread from one building to the next.⁸