The Fight for Sam Yan Shrine

In central Bangkok, the looming demolition of a Chinese shrine on university land is exposing ideological fault lines between powerless communities and profit-hungry developers

According to the website for Samyan Smart City, a 63-hectare slice of land near Bangkok’s main shopping district will eventually be a state-of-the-art utopia catering to every man, woman and child. By 2037, the public will enjoy ‘A city that is not just smart, but livable in every dimension.’ In the video renderings, electric cars glide along elevated roads that weave between tree-topped towers: shopping centres, innovation hubs and other boxy ‘business units’.

What this vision of the future fails to articulate or visualise is the civil society pushback. In recent years, the property management arm of the capital’s Chulalongkorn University, PMCU, has begun redeveloping this parcel of prime commercial land, which flanks its sprawling 100-hectare campus, for blatantly economic purposes. And while taking this profit-maximising course of action is PMCU’s proprietary right, the manner of its execution has angered many stakeholders and commentators, particularly those fond of Modernist architecture and concerned about the communities that inhabit it. 

One sore point is Siam Square. PMCU’s revamp of Bangkok’s long-standing centre of teenage fashion and lifestyle has gifted shoppers with new malls and a walking street befitting any cosmopolitan Asian capital. But this ambitious reset has also led to shophouses and market alleyways being squeezed out, and The Scala, a late-Modernist cinema of huge sociohistorical importance, being demolished.

Next in the firing line is a Chinese shrine smack bang in the centre of the Samyan Smart City masterplan. Built in 1970 to replace an older structure that burnt down, the Chao Mae Thap Thim shrine is both a fine example of the vanishing craft of Thai artisans with Teochew Chinese heritage and a functioning place of worship. Its fine calligraphy, murals of mythical scenes, smoking incense and prized statues of deities such as the sea goddess Mazu, lend it a potent religiosity that belies its tender age.

But today this shrine has also taken on a stark ideological symbolism. While it once stood at the heart of Sam Yan, a lively shophouse community that teemed with character, the structure now stands alone amid two half-built tower blocks destined for commercial and residential use. According to Thai architect Duangrit Bunnag, ‘there is no rationale from a design, architecture or urban standpoint for removing the shrine,’ as the masterplan includes a garden that could accommodate it. Yet PMCU has refused to discuss this solution, and instead embarked on a legal path that began with issuing an eviction notice to the long-serving caretaker.
Ironically, some students from Chulalongkorn University — the supposed beneficiaries of PMCU’s Samyan Smart City — have leapt to the shrine’s defence. ‘We’ve been portrayed by some as a generation that doesn’t follow tradition, knows nothing about our roots and follows Western culture blindly, but we’re the ones protecting the Mazu shrine,’ says one student in The Last Breath of Sam Yan, a documentary about the movement that has been playing in Bangkok. Led by well-known activists such as Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, the group has garnered support partly by contrasting the evocative architecture of the original shrine with the flawed design and cursory ceremonies of the ersatz replica that PMCU built without public consultation nearby. 

Yet they are ultimately fighting a mentality, not poor workmanship. The shrine’s supporters think PMCU’s plan to raze the shrine — the last surviving remnant of the demolished Sam Yan community — are indicative of a disregard for subaltern urban heritage, a pervasive ‘we know best’ attitude, and a lack of basic human decency. And the involvement of an admired bastion of higher education in this gentrification only makes it all the worse. ‘They’re capitalists who claim to be intellectual,’ says Chotiphatphaisal in the documentary. 

When the shrine’s fate is decided in court at the end of August (a case it is unlikely to win), it will, for Chotiphatphaisal and other campaigners, be a verdict that speaks volumes about education and society, the poor and the powerful, in Thailand, as well as the ideas underpinning so-called ‘smart’ cities. 

Text by Max Crosbie-Jones

Images from The Last Breath of Sam Yan