Postcard from... Bangkok

The Mangkorn Road is named for the Dragon, and here at the heart of Bangkok’s Chinatown the red lanterns hang across the street alongside the Thai and Royal flags. The lanterns have been hung for Chinese New Year, the flags for the King’s birthday two months ago. This is one of the longest established neighbourhoods in the city, a busy area of trade and commerce that manages to combine some of the worst air pollution with the highest real estate prices in Bangkok.

Not that any of this matters when the celebrations get under way. Almost ten million Thais are Chinese, and Thailand has the largest Chinese community in the world. Added to this, some forty percent of Thais - including the Royal family and many former prime ministers - have some Chinese ancestry, and over four centuries the Chinese community has been integrated into all levels of Thai society. So New Year is a big deal on the Mangkorn Road, where the dragons dance beneath the lanterns on the street that bears their name.

Postcard from... Kindla

Inside the old charcoal burners’ hut, where walkers can bed down for the night (but only one night), a guestbook rests in a tin box on a wooden shelf. We have stopped by the lake in the centre of the Kindla Nature Reserve, about as far from the boundaries and the car parks as it is possible to be. It is a beautiful spot, former mining country left to be reclaimed by nature. The lake we are sitting at was once an open-cast mine. The rivers and streams we crossed to get here were once diverted, their power harnessed to work the pumps and the lifts. This place, where so many have been inspired to write about on the thick pages of the guestbook, was once a key site of Swedish industrialisation.

We open the book and read back through the entries. They are mostly in Swedish, some in English, but there is one young girl who writes in German. As we flick back through the pages we see her appear again and again, usually around the end of summer, as she makes an annual walk to the heart of the reserve with her grandfather near the end of her holiday. The most recent entry is her fourth. She is now thirteen years old. The first time she visited and took a pen to the book she was ten. Over the years her handwriting has improved, but her chatty enthusiasm for this place remains the same.

It is nice to think of her coming back time and again, to this place that was once the preserve of charcoal burners, miners and ironworkers, and that is now left to be discovered by only those willing to make the six kilometre walk to the heart of the reserve. It is not difficult to imagine that this will always remain an important place for the young woman from Duisburg, a long way from home in the heart of the Swedish forest.

Photo by Katrin Schönig

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Postcard from… Liuzhangli

From the raised platform of the metro station in the Liuzhangli district of Taipei, the cemetery stretches out along the hillside and into the distance. This particular cemetery, built on the side of the hill along Chongde Street to take advantage of good feng sui, is ten kilometres long and one of six “Graveyards of Renowned People”, officially listed and recognised as historic sites.

Down there, amongst the many graves, is a simple three by three metre plot that is the final resting place of Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), the founder of the Taiwanese People’s Party and a central figure in the 1920s opposition movement to Japanese rule. Imprisoned more than ten times, Chiang died in 1931 of typhoid in the same year that his political party was outlawed. Buried in Liuzhangli, his gravestone was inscribed with a quote from his will:

“All my comrades must fight on with diligence and determination, and old comrades must unite to become stronger.”

During the Martial Law era that lasted in Taiwan from 1949 until 1987, democracy activists would gather in the cemetery to hold memorials and rallies for supporters, whilst according to the Taipei Times, more recent years have seen the cemeteries as central meeting points for the development of human rights movements. It seems Chiang Wei-shui’s spirit lives on, in the place where he was laid to rest.  

Postcard from... Rocquetas

When they came here it felt like their big chance. The house in that small town in the Midlands that they had called home for over two decades had increased in value, beyond anything they could have imagined. People urged them not to sell. “The house prices will keep going up,” they said, and for a while they were right. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to make the escape. And so they landed here, a town in Spain that is not quite Spain, with its branch of the British Legion, a German doctors office, and a Belgian driving school.

They found the shop in a small arcade, a block back from the beach. The real estate agent was Swedish, and had lived in the area for years. Good foot traffic, she promised. An international crowd. She showed the spreadsheets, with numbers of hotel rooms and average occupancy rates. Reassurance that when the tide of tourists retreated, the locals - both Spanish and northern European (mostly retired) - would pick up the slack. And so they signed the contract. They would sell environmentally-friendly, cruelty-free cosmetic products. The shop opened. It did okay. Not great, but okay. After a while they realised they were never made to be shopkeepers. They had to open seven days a week in the summer, but never earned enough to hire staff. In the winter, things were slower than they had been led to believe.

And so, after three years, they were heading home. Was it all a mistake? It was too soon to say.

Postcard from... Montague

It was near the end of the first semester that he discovered the Book Mill. He cannot remember what drew him there, what force motivated him to climb into his grandfather’s old Ford, the one handed down “before I am gone” so that he would have a means to get around at college. It was cold that day, a light dusting of snow on the fields north of Amherst as the road heads towards the hills rising up from the Pioneer Valley. The roads were quiet that day, the sky overcast and sullen. Flags flew limp on the their front yard poles, gardens closed for the coming winter.

There were only a couple of cars lined up in the gravel lot next to the old wooden mill. He parked alongside them, the next in a neat row. Across a wooden footbridge he pushes at the door. On the other side a room, one of many, lined with books. A place of creaking floorboards and hidden corners, of people working on laptops and sympathetic smiles, a coffee or a beer and a view down to the rapids. Until he opened that door he did not realise how much he needed this place. The college and everything he had already experienced, a few miles down the road, was already becoming bearable. Because he knew he could always drive north in his grandfather’s car to this safe harbour, on the banks of the Saw Mill river.

Books you don’t need
In a place you can’t find

But he did. He found it.

Picture: Katrin Schönig

Postcard from... Koh Kret

The house was abandoned, with objects strewn across the dusty wooden floors, but they offered clues as to those who once lived there. This island, Koh Kret, was once a bend in the Chao Phraya River before a canal was built as a shortcut for boats in 1722, separating it from the mainland. Mon people settled here and today Koh Kret is still known for the Mon style pottery produced there as well as  several temples, including one next door to the house. Had this been the home of monks? It seemed that way, based on the things we found as we picked our way over the open terrace in the middle of this traditional Thai style house.

One object in particular caught our eye; a mountain scene, the peak high and snowy, looking down on a lake. Rocky paths, leading from the shore up towards the summit. Where was it? Certainly not Thailand… We tried to imagine the person that once looked upon this painting. Where had he got the painting from? How did it make him feel? Why hadn’t he taken it with him when he left? But we had no access to him, or any of them who had once called these ruins home. Any stories we could pull from the wooden walls were only those of the imagination, pieced together with what had been left behind. The next time we came to the island we resolved to find out more, but the house had gone. It had been cleared away, and all the objects in it.

Postcard from... Berlin

The first morning of the year in Berlin never feels like the start of something. In the aftermath of the party, the remains of a million and more fireworks strewn across the pavements and parks, the empty bottles and the piles of fag ends, the resolute joggers picking their way through the wreckage, it feels more like the final staggering steps of the previous twelve months than a new dawn. The streets, so full of noise and smoke and people in the early hours are now deserted, so much so that those joggers get polite greetings from strollers and dog walkers, a conspiracy of friendliness between the early risers that is usually absent in the anonymity of the city.

Slowly the rest of Berlin wakes, checking the weather through the curtains or from apartment balconies. It doesn’t matter what the reality is, New Year’s Day always feels in the memory as if it was grey, no wind or weather to speak of, as if that too is taking a few hours off. In this city where brunch is routinely served until 4pm the breakfast period stretches on into the evening. The shops are shut. Some restaurants too.

“Our cafe is closed today on account of yesterday…” reads a sign in the window. New Year’s Day? Nah… the city agrees: it can start tomorrow.