“WHEN THE AMERICAN TROOPS left Vietnam and all the Rest and Recreation programs ended it was thought that Bangkok would collapse. Bangkok, a hugely preposterous city of temples and brothels, required visitors. The heat, the traffic, the noise, the cost in this flattened anthill make it intolerable to live in; but Bangkok, whose discomfort seems a calculated discouragement to residents, is a city for transients. Bangkok has managed to maintain its massage parlor economy without the soldiers, by advertising itself as a place where even the most diffident foreigner can get laid. So it prospers. After the early morning Floating Market Tour and the afternoon Temple Tour, comes the evening Casanova Tour. Patient couples, many of them very elderly, wearing yellow badges saying Orient Escapade, are herded off to sex shows, blue movies or “live shows” to put them in the mood for a visit later the same evening – if they’re game – to a whorehouse or a massage parlor. As Calcutta smells of death and Bombay of money, Bangkok smells of sex, but this sexual aroma is mingled with the sharper whiffs of death and money.

Bangkok has an aspect of violation; you see it in the black jammed klongs, the impassable streets that are convulsed with traffic, and in the temples: every clumsy attempt to repair the latter seems to have been initiated by tourists rather than worshippers. There is a brisk trade in carvings and artifacts stolen from temples upcountry, and this rapacity – new to the once serene Thais – is encouraged by most of the resident foreigners. It is as if these expatriate farangs expect a kind of repayment for the misery of having to live in such an insufferable place. The Thais muddle along, as masseuses and marauders, but a month before I arrived several thousand Thai students (who described themselves rather curiously as “revolutionary monarchists”) marched on the police headquarters, brought down the government, and in the space of an afternoon managed to destroy seven fairly large buildings downtown. It was, like the patchy regilding of the recumbent Buddha, a popular violation, and now the street of gutted buildings is included in the Temple Tour: “Over here you will see where our students burned -“

That was written in the mid 1970s, but if you handed it to me today I wouldn’t know the difference.