Over the click-clack of the teak loom, Niphon’s family laments the lack of apprentice weavers at his Bangkok silk shop, as modernity lures young Muslims away from a trade their community has dominated for generations.
They say they are the last of the Muslim weavers of Baan Krua, a storied neighborhood of dilapidated wooden houses and a mosque in downtown Bangkok, nearly engulfed by the city creep of condos and skyscrapers.
“This is Muslim heritage... Baan Krua silk is very famous,” Niphon Manutha, 71, said.
Photo: AFP
A typed letter from Robert Kennedy on the wall of his canalside shophouse attests to that lineage — a gift to Niphon’s parents after the then-US attorney general visited in 1962.
The craft was passed down through generations of ethnic Cham Muslim women who migrated from Cambodia centuries ago and perfected the art of turning the cocoons made by Thai silkworms into meters of soft cloth with a unique sheen coveted across the world.
Silk weaving boomed after World War II thanks to American “Silk King” Jim Thompson, who is credited with taking Thai silk global.
Thompson’s house is one of the most visited tourist sites in Bangkok, but it was across the canal in Baan Krua where he first found his suppliers among the Muslim weavers.
“He came here every morning,” Niphon said, showing a photo of Thompson standing next to his mother at a loom.
At its peak Niphon’s family employed 50 people, producing thousands of meters of silk a month.
However, Thompson’s mysterious disappearance in 1976 in Malaysia led partnerships to shrivel, while production gradually moved to the north of the country from Bangkok.
Niphon survived by switching to a custom-order model, relying on his daughter to run a Web site advertising bright-colored scarves, bags and elegant napkins.
But with just a handful of older working weavers left in Baan Krua, the expertise from his corner of Bangkok is fading.
“It’s a shame the young generation is not interested,” Niphon’s sister Natcha Swanaphoom said, fixing her hijab in the mirror before going outside.
Though Thailand is overwhelmingly Buddhist, about 7 million Muslims make up the nation’s largest religious minority, and like the faithful everywhere they are observing Ramadan this month.
Muslims from Iran, Indonesia and other parts of Asia have long settled in Bangkok and around central Thailand, communities of traders and businessmen drawn to the city’s location at the heart of Southeast Asia.
The largest number are descendants of ethnic Malay from the southern Thai provinces bordering Malaysia who were brought to Bangkok as slave labor, cultural anthropologist Raymond Scupin said.
Many were put to work building the canals criss-crossing Bangkok that connect to the capital’s Chao Phraya River, giving the city the name “Venice of the East.”
Muslims also served in royal courts and the Baan Krua residents settled on land set aside by King Rama I, who founded the current Chakri Dynasty in 1782.
In the modern era the royal family has cultivated deep ties with Thailand’s diverse Muslim communities.
King Maha Vajiralongkorn made one of his first trips to the violence-plagued Deep South after ascending the throne in 2016.
However, in Bangkok, rapid urbanization and modernity have pressed hard on tradition.
“The sense of community has changed,” said Abdul Ahad, the tall white-robed imam at the Haroon mosque, one of the city’s oldest in Bang Rak District.
He cited the ease of purchasing alcohol, a drift from religious observance and the megamalls sprouting up around them.
“Today the kids are using their motorbikes and then going to forbidden places,” he said.
That generational gap has also been sharply felt in Baan Krua.
Niphon’s shop has no traditional silk weavers under 60.
“Our staff are getting older and older,” said Niphon’s daughter Pattramas, 40, bemoaning the “disappearance” of hand-driven crafts to easier salaried jobs.
Thailand still exports about US$15 million worth of silk, but Vietnam and China now provide fierce competition to the lucrative US market.
“The next five to 10 years, I don’t know” if anyone will be left to do it here, she added.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS