Talat Noi or Talad Noi (, ; ) is a historic riverside neighbourhood in Bangkok, Thailand, and a khwaeng (subdistrict) of Samphanthawong District. It occupies a low-lying strip on the eastern bank of the Chao Phraya River immediately south of Bangkok's Chinatown, and covers about 0.449 square kilometres.
Talat Noi grew in the early Rattanakosin period as a southward extension of the Sampheng market quarter, and it has been settled continuously by ethnic Chinese communities since the last decades of the eighteenth century. Its population has been unusually mixed for a Bangkok neighbourhood: Hokkien, Hakka, Hainanese and Teochew Chinese settled alongside Portuguese Catholics and Vietnamese refugees, and each group founded its own place of worship in an area of only a few streets.
For much of the nineteenth century the neighbourhood was a working port district dominated by the junk trade, and in the twentieth century it became the birthplace of Thailand's second-hand engine and automotive parts trade, known as Sieng Kong. Since the 2010s Talat Noi has been reinterpreted as a heritage and cultural tourism destination, a shift that has brought cafés, galleries and large numbers of visitors into a neighbourhood whose resident population is small, elderly and declining.
Etymology The Thai name means "little market". Scholarly accounts derive it from the Chinese name for the district, rendered in Thai as Talak Kia or Talakkia (, ), used by Chinese residents for the newer and smaller market that developed to the south of the much larger Sampheng market, then the commercial centre of early Bangkok. Because it lay so close to Sampheng, Talat Noi was at times treated as simply a part of it.
The Chinese name survives in local usage. The community market held at the Talat Noi Museum, for example, is called the Talakkia Friendly Market. A separate local tradition, repeated in popular guides, instead traces the name to a woman called Noi, said to be the daughter of a wealthy Chinese landowner in the area; this account is not supported by the historical literature on the district.
Geography
Talat Noi Subdistrict lies on the eastern (Phra Nakhon) bank of the Chao Phraya River, at the southern edge of Samphanthawong, the smallest of Bangkok's fifty districts. It is bounded roughly by Charoen Krung Road and Soi Phanurangsi to the east and north, by Khlong Phadung Krung Kasem and Bang Rak District to the south and east, and by the river to the west.
The area's street pattern reflects its origins as a riverside trading settlement. Two long thoroughfares run roughly parallel to the river: Song Wat Road, laid out under King Chulalongkorn after fires in Sampheng, and Charoen Krung Road, Bangkok's first paved road. Between them lies a dense network of alleys, of which Soi Wanit 2 (the continuation of the lane known further north as Sampheng), Trok Talat Noi (Soi Charoen Krung 22) and Soi Chao Sua Son are the principal routes. Before Charoen Krung Road reached the area, movement and commerce here depended almost entirely on the river.
History
Settlement after the fall of Ayutthaya The earliest permanent settlement in the area dates from the years after the fall of Ayutthaya in 1767, when refugee communities moved downriver and established themselves around the new capital. The Portuguese Catholics of Ayutthaya settled in two groups. One followed Father Jacques Corre to the western bank at Kudi Chin, where they built Santa Cruz Church. A second group, in dispute with French clergy over the leadership of that congregation, crossed to the eastern bank and settled in what is now Talat Noi. Their church stood close to an execution ground beside the cemetery of Wat Takhian, now Wat Maha Phruettharam, and they named it after Calvary, the site of the Crucifixion. The Thai rendering of that name, Kalawari, was eventually corrupted to Kalawa or Kalawan, and the church is still commonly called Wat Kalawa. The first, wooden church on the site was completed in 1787; it is known today as the Holy Rosary Church.
After King Rama I moved the capital to the eastern bank in 1782, Chinese households from Kudi Chin and from the banks of Khlong Bang Luang moved into Talat Noi, then still an outlying area beyond the walled city. The first of these appear to have been Hokkien, who built the Chow Sue Kong Shrine, the oldest shrine in the neighbourhood, recorded as founded in 1804.
Vietnamese refugees arrived at almost the same time. When Nguyen Anh, known in Thai sources as Ong Chiang Sue, took refuge in Siam in the 1780s, Rama I granted his followers land south of the city. The community built an Annam Nikaya temple there, formally Wat Uphai Ratchabamrung and universally known as Wat Yuan Talat Noi.
The junk trade and the Po Seng port
The growth of Talat Noi was closely tied to the boom in the Chinese junk trade in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Siamese state allowed nobles, officials and wealthy commoners to trade relatively freely. A number of Chinese merchants who prospered in this trade entered the nobility through the Krom Tha, the department of ports and foreign trade. Among them was Phra Aphai Wanit, a Hokkien merchant of the family later granted the surname Posayachinda, whose Po Seng wharf at Talat Noi was operating by the reign of Rama II at the latest. He received a royal grant of riverside land and built a group of Chinese buildings on it, the residence among them being the house known as So Heng Tai.
Po Seng dealt chiefly in medicinal herbs brought up from southern Siam, and passed to Phra Aphai Wanit's son, Luang Aphai Wanit (Son). The Bowring Treaty of 1855 opened Siam to Western shipping, and square-rigged vessels and steamships steadily displaced the junks. Some Chinese merchants adapted by moving into tax farming; the Po Seng operation did not, and it wound down, closing at about the time of Luang Aphai Wanit's death in 1894. On the opposite bank stood the rival Huay Chung Long steamship wharf of Phraya Phisan Suphaphon (Chuen), founder of the Phisanbutr family, later sold to Tan Lip Buay of the Wanglee family.
While the wharves prospered, Talat Noi filled with migrant labour and became as densely built up as Sampheng and Ratchawong to the north. The variety of the migrants is visible in the number of shrines founded here in the nineteenth century by Teochew, Hokkien, Hainanese and Hakka groups, and in the Chinese Catholic congregation that gathered at the Holy Rosary Church.
In a 2015 study of the neighbourhood, the historian Poom Putimahtama argued that the Chinese of Talat Noi developed in distinct waves: Hokkien and Hakka settlers first drove the local economy, followed by Hainanese who invigorated trade after Siam opened to foreign commerce, while the Teochew presence in the area was concentrated at the Holy Rosary Church and was largely Chinese Catholic. On this account the district was significant not only commercially but also as a base for Catholic missionary work in Bangkok and the provinces, and for the founding of Chinese schools and charitable associations that prefigured modern urban welfare institutions.
Ironworking and the rise of Sieng Kong
Chinese migrants skilled in metalwork settled in Talat Noi in large numbers, and the district became known for its ironmongers. Ocean-going ships calling at the wharves sold off serviceable surplus parts here, and local smiths were hired to forge anchors and chains. Hakka residents in particular appear to have specialised in ironwork, a specialisation preserved in the name of their shrine, Rong Kueak, understood locally as a reference to the making of horseshoes.
The trade expanded sharply after the Second World War, when large quantities of vehicles and equipment abandoned by both Allied and Axis forces became available as scrap. Because most of the metalworking shops stood near the Hokkien shrine of Sieng Kong, the name attached itself to the trade, and Sieng Kong became the general Thai term for a dealer in second-hand engines and machine parts. Talat Noi was for decades the largest such market in Thailand, and although the number of shops has fallen, workshops stacked with engines, gearboxes and axles remain one of the neighbourhood's defining sights.
Decline and revival From the mid-twentieth century the relocation of Bangkok's port facilities downriver, repeated fires and the general movement of families to the suburbs steadily emptied the neighbourhood. Younger residents left, houses stood shut, and by the 2010s the community was among the most elderly in Bangkok.
Renewed interest began in the 2010s. Creative businesses took shophouses that were cheaper and quieter than those in Yaowarat, and residents organised to press the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration for infrastructure improvements and conservation support. A Talat Noi Development Group of some twenty-five residents was formed in 2014 and ran markets, a vegetarian festival and cycling tours; a separate group, Khon Rak Talat Noi ("People Who Love Talat Noi"), worked on documenting and preserving local culture.
Religion and community institutions Talat Noi contains an unusual concentration of religious buildings for its size, each associated with a particular community.
Chow Sue Kong Shrine (), also known as Wat Sun Heng Yi, is the oldest shrine in the neighbourhood, founded in 1804 by Hokkien settlers and dedicated to the deified monk Cheng Chui Cho Su Kong. It remains a focus of the annual vegetarian festival in the district. Rong Kueak Shrine (), also called Hon Wong Kung, is a Hakka shrine standing directly on the riverbank within what was a predominantly Hokkien village. A stone tablet inside, dated to the fifteenth year of the Guangxu reign (1889), records that Hakka merchants had brought the image of the deity from China more than a century earlier, and that in 1888 a committee of Hakka merchants raised subscriptions to buy the adjoining riverside plot for 2,400 baht in order to build the present shrine. Phraya Choduek Ratchasetthi (Thian Chotikasathian), head of the Krom Tha Sai and himself Hakka, presided over its construction; an adjacent building that now houses an image of the god of wealth was originally his pumping station, which supplied piped water to Chinese households in Sampheng and Talat Noi. Holy Rosary Church (), or Wat Kalawa, is the parish church founded by the Portuguese in 1787. The present Gothic Revival building, the third on the site, was erected in the 1890s. As the original Portuguese congregation dispersed, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodian Catholics came to make up most of the parish. Wat Uphai Ratchabamrung (), known as Wat Yuan Talat Noi and in Vietnamese as Chua Khanh Van, is one of the oldest Annam Nikaya temples in Bangkok. Built by the Vietnamese community settled here under Rama I, it later received the patronage of King Mongkut and King Chulalongkorn, and long served Chinese Mahayana worshippers as well as Vietnamese ones. Wat Pathum Khongkha Ratchaworawihan, a royal Buddhist temple of Ayutthaya-period origin, stands at the northern edge of the subdistrict and retains murals restored in the reign of Rama III.
Architecture and heritage buildings
The So Heng Tai Mansion () is the best known building in Talat Noi and one of the last traditional Chinese courtyard houses in Bangkok. It was built for Phra Aphai Wanit of the So clan, a Hokkien bird's nest tax farmer whose descendants received the surname Posayachinda under King Rama VI, and consists of four timber ranges around a central courtyard. It has remained in the same family for around eight generations. Maintenance has been funded largely by the owners, and in 2004 a four-metre-deep pool was installed in the courtyard so that the house could operate as a diving school, an adaptation that keeps the building in use and helps meet its upkeep costs.