Frances Robinson

Bangkok

The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles is a quiet haven in a humid and chaotic city

Last time I went to Thailand, there’d been something of a misunderstanding about accommodation, and my friend and I ended up in a dive on Khao San Road. In a grim room with stained mattresses and peeling paint, the thud of beats from the disco made everything vibrate gently. Stalls outside offered fake IDs, tatty souvenirs and novelty edible insects. I’m not averse to eating crickets, but these ones needed embalming fluid, not cooking oil.

So we took a tuk-tuk across town to the Grand Palace, just seeking a break from sunburned students in short shorts drawling about full-moon parties. Instead, what happened next was one of the highlights of the trip. In a courtyard, past the gold domes, the jewel-encrusted statues and the emerald Buddha, we stumbled across the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles.

The museum opened in 2012 after Queen Sirikit, now 83, asked her husband, the superbly named King Bhumibol Adulyadej, if she could use the Ratsadakorn–bhibhathana Building, the former Ministry of Finance, for a silk museum. Some monarchs would simply have been angling for an overflow wardrobe, but she hired curators from the US and made something rather more serious. Visitors receive a vivid description of the silk-making process — larvae and all — as well as guides to the various techniques used in Thailand. There are plenty of traditional Thai dresses: chakris, dusits and tai dams galore.

Then there’s a more personal story. Travelling around the countryside in the 1950s, Queen Sirikit saw that the tough work of weaving was an important way for women to earn a living — as well as an endangered piece of Thai heritage.

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