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Touring Southeast Asia Yesterday (Part 1),
Thailand and Neighbours before Tourists

Prepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International

We become angered—we get caught in a traffic jam, a flight we planned is overbooked, a clerk at the other end fouled up our reservations and we must settle for another hotel. When this happens, how many times we have heard it said, or have uttered it ourselves: "I should have been born a hundred years ago!"

Granted, travel a hundred years ago had a romance all of its own. How thrilling for someone living in London to book a cabin (port side going out) on a P&O liner and steam off to the Far East, through the Suez, with a stopover in Bombay, and then on to Singapore, up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok, across to Saigon and then on to Hong Kong or maybe Manila before reaching Yokohama. A five to six month trip. What excitement!

But we must be realistic. Such travel was not for everyone. Unless they were seamen before the mast, government civil servants, anthropologists working for big museums, or else very very rich people would not have come to Asia merely for a vacation. Nor would they have had the incentive a hundred years ago to travel half way around the world to reach the East. What did they know about Asia? Siam, Singapore or Hong Kong? They were no more than exotic names in fancy gazetteers. There were no guides or travellers' handbooks in those days that sold Asia. In fact, there was very little knowledge about the area in 1904. When Sir Clarke was appointed Governor of the Straits settlement, he requested maps and information of any kind of the Malay Peninsula where he was going and was told there was absolutely no information of any kind available.

And those places that are so popular today—Phuket, Chiang Mai, Bali, Kathmandu—a hundred years ago weren't known, even in Asia. The great ruins of Angkor Wat had only been recently discovered. Kuala Lumpur, the present capital of Malaysia, was little more than a jungle outpost, less than 40 years old. Taiwan was a coaling station in the South China Sea, and Phuket, visited by Captain Light a century before, was only a mark on sailing charts. Pattaya was a fishing village.

Nevertheless, visitors did come east. We have the accounts of many of these early travellers. Joseph Conrad wrote volumes about Asia, Anna Leonowens told us in her book about her life in the Royal court in Bangkok, Alfred Wallace explored the eastern jungles and reported on them, and many lesser-known travellers, like Isabella Bird, an English woman who passed through Southeast Asia, have handed down their stories which fortunately are in print today. Many of these travellers’ tales are fascinating and informative, and they give us a clear picture of what travelling in this part of the world was like in their day. And from what they had to tell, it wasn't all that romantic, not as we imagine it to have been. And there was no Royal Orchid Holidays.

So let's suppose, for one reason or another, perhaps a rich uncle died or a museum agreed to back you, you did decide to come to Siam. How would you get here, and once you did come, where would you stay? Hotels were few. What about the sights, what could you see and do, and how would you get around? There were no buses, taxis or trains. There weren't even roads. What, then, was it like travelling in Asia back then?

To have reached Asia, of course you would have had to come by sea. Travel by land then was impossible. (It took Marco Polo 17 years to make the round trip.) There were, however, some fine shipping lines then, the P&O Line and the Messangeries Maritimes, but the bulk of the travellers came by steerage class on merchant vessels. It was a tough way to travel, far below deck in airless cabins jammed with bunks.

Furthermore, first class or steerage, you could expect the voyage to last six weeks from London, five weeks from San Francisco. The big boon to travel to Asia came in 1869 with the opening of the Suez Canal. Travel time was cut in half.

What we also tend to forget today is that those travellers who did manage to reach Asia back then made it a-once-in-a-lifetime trip. There were no repeated journeys. There simply wasn't enough time when travel was so slow. I often think about this when I meet someone today, and they announce in one breath how nice it would have been to visit Asia a hundred years ago, and in the next breath they say that on their vacation next year they might take in Phuket instead of Pattaya. Visits to Asia today can be yearly events; they weren't in 1904.

Before airports and air
travel the post docks
were the centre of
excitement

Travel advertisements
100 years ago came in
journal and magazines

A major means of travel
within a city was by
rickshaw

Hard to believe, but this
was Kuala Lumpur, the
capital of Malaysia
a little over
a hundred years ago

Singapore developed
rapidly as a Straits
Settlement

Few hotels a hundred
years ago, but colonial
homes were abundant

Early train travel was
not the best, but better
than elephant back

Wild elephants were the
train engineers traffic
problem

Southeast East Asia
changed when the
demand for
rubber grew. Here is one
of the first rubber trees

The first motor carriage
is about to put the
rickshaw out of business

Little traffic problems
in 1904

The first Thai Airways
plane makes an
appearance and the
world was never the same

Our steamer arrives in Singapore. We disembark and after a fortnight we will travel up to Bangkok and then to Hong Kong and Manila. Where will we stay? Finding accommodations presented problems for early travellers in Asia before the turn of the century. For civil servants and people travelling on official business, government rest houses were provided. They became institutions, spread out across the Indian subcontinent all the way to Burma and down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore. They averaged twenty miles apart, the distance a bullock cart loaded with luggage could travel in a day.

Rest houses were simple—spacious, high ceiling rooms, with shutters opening on the verandah, mosquito nets draped over the beds, flowered porcelain Shanghai jars filled with fresh water and each with a dipper. Sticks of smoldering incense burned in pots beside the beds to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Air-conditioning then was a turbaned youth who sat in a far corner. In a slow rhythmic motion he would pull the cord of the punkah, causing the enormous rattan fan suspended from the ceiling to swing in pendulum motion back and forth. A few old rest houses still have their punkah fans and every time I see one today, I wonder how honeymoon couples who checked into a rest house managed. Turning on the air conditioner is so much easier, and less inhibiting.

But we are not government servants and we need to find a hotel. In Singapore there were several adequate establishments. Passengers from the P&O liners unloaded at Hotel de l'Europe. Conrad remarked in one of his novels that passengers came to the hotel with their luggage plastered with hotel labels to prove "they are well travelled." Even in those days tourists were the brunt of sarcasm.

If you were a seaman in 1904, you could have checked into the Seaman's Home on south Bridge Road, or into Raffles Hotel which opened only a year before. The Sarkies brothers converted a girls’ school into the Raffles Hotel, and they opened two other properties, the E&O in Penang and the Strand in Rangoon. Rumour has it that Conrad was one of Raffles' first guests, also a 23-year-old journalist named Rudyard Kipling. Kipling commented that the food was great at Raffles but the place to stay was at the Hotel de l'Europe. The old Hotel de l'Europe remained standing until 1936, when it was demolished to make room for the Supreme Court.

Travellers who did arrive in Singapore a hundred years ago witnessed an atmosphere that we might find hard to believe today. I felt it in part when I first arrived in Singapore 35 years ago, but that was nothing compared to what Isabella Bird was found. She was enthralled with Singapore, especially the bazaars "the continuous rows of open shops which create for themselves perpetual twilight by hanging tatties forming long shady alleys." She tells of crowds of buyers and sellers, the bustle and noise, the ringing of bells and rapid beating of drums and tom-toms. She called it "an intensely heathenish sound. And heathenish this city is. How I wish I could convey an idea, however faint, of this huge, mingled, colourful Oriental city."

It's 1904 and we've spent two weeks in Singapore and decide to visit Malaya to the north before continuing to Bangkok. There are no roads, and less than two dozen miles of rail lines. Towns on the Malay Peninsula were only pockets of civilisation, each one living in isolation. The only means of communication was by way of narrow jungle tracks. Goods had to be carried by bullock cart or elephant back.

Since overland travel to the Malay states was impossible, the only way to visit was by steamer, as Isabella Bird had done. She left Singapore by local steamer and sailed to Malacca, Port Swetenham (which is Port Klang today), Lumut and Penang. She described the voyage: "The mercury was 90 in my little cabin, and it swarmed not only with mosquitoes but with cockroaches, which in the dim light looked as large as mice." It doesn't sound very much like a romantic way to travel.

Travel then did have its discomforts. One of these was mosquitoes. There was no escaping them. "I am dreadfully bitten on the ankles feet and arms, which are 80 swollen I can hardly put on my clothes," wrote Miss Bird from her room in Port Swetenham. "I have to sew my feet up daily in linen." She also remarked that a tiger, which “had devoured six men”, was killed in the forest nearby. Tigers in Singapore at the same time were killing on average 600 workers a year. One did not venture away from the towns. Jungle walks were out and early morning joggers of today would have to have been beware back then.

Piracy was another threat. When Miss Bird arrived in Lumut, the ink on the Pangkor Treaty was not yet dry. The treaty gave Britain control over the Dindings, a strip of land along the Malay mainland where pirates hid in small coves and in the mangrove swamps. Pirates raided a town on the coast and slaughtered a dozen people the month before Miss Bird arrived.

But, in 1904, if you were a big game hunter you would have enjoyed Malaya and most Southeast Asian countries. In fact, in Malaya you could have made money at it. There was a $15 bounty on tigers, five for rhinos and five for crocodiles.

Next week in Part 2 we will continue on to Bangkok and get a glimpse what life was like in the City of Angles back then, a hundred years ago.

Questions & Answers

Q. Dear Sir, My husband and I are arriving in Bangkok in early October and are considering a visit to China. We notice that Thai Airways International has flights from Bangkok to China, but what about visas. Someone said you can only get a visa for China from your home country. Is that true? We hate to get visas for both time and cost if you don’t go there. Can you advise? —Helen Frost, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

A. Dear Mrs. Frost. Thai Airways International serves as a gateway to China and serves eight destinations there. A few flights have stopovers in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. Yes, you can get your visits here in Bangkok. It takes two working days and two photos. Some visitors even get them in one day, at an extra fee. For more about destinations in China, go to the ROH index and check some of my past stories. —HS

Harold Stephens
Bangkok
Email : ROH Weekly Travel

Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited.

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