The Tuk Tuk - One Of Bangkok's Few Remaining Olden Icons

Bangkok’s Chinatown is one of the few places where you can still go and get a true feel for the historical urban culture and architecture of the olden days of Thailand’s capitol city. One element that really makes Bangkok’s Chinatown so visually Thai is the strong presence of the original Bangkok taxi, also known as the Tuk Tuk.

The Tuk Tuk, also referred to by some Thais as a Sam Lor (meaning a three-wheeled vehicle in Thai), is something that you don’t see in Chinatowns anywhere else in the world. So it is distinctly Thai. Not only that, but you see even less of the Tuk Tuk around other parts of Bangkok now in general. As a means of urban transport though, it is still one of the best vehicles for navigating through narrow Bangkok streets because it is not as wide as a car, but still has the ability to carry heavy and bulky amounts of cargo.

Having been based in Bangkok for quite a long time, I often forget how some parts of the city like Chinatown really still have a lot of that post war era Indochina urban Asian charm. But sadly it is an element of the local Bangkok architecture and culture that has diminished a lot in many of the neighborhoods where modern looking development over the last 30 years has replaced much of the classical Architecture.

Although this blog post serves as a photo reportage of the Tuk Tuk, first a bit more about Bangkok’s Chinatown. You have a wonderful mix of Thai and Chinese cultures melded together, accompanied by great food stalls and fresh markets, and many original post WW2 buildings and shop-houses, some of which have a bit of Portuguese design influence. In fact, Bangkok’s Chinatown still appears much like it did in photos of Bangkok from 35-45 years ago (except for the modern cars) to the point where you almost feel like you’ve stepped off a time machine when you arrive there.

People often think Chinatown simply means it is a very Chinese area. And it is, but Chinatown in Bangkok somehow feels as much Thai (in terms of the culture) as anywhere else in the city. But it also has the Chinatown feel with the many cramped and crowded, narrow lanes, myriads of packaged and dried foods traders, gold shops, Chinese herbal medicines, great dim sum restaurants, and a constant feel of hustle and bustle well known to Chinatowns throughout the world. Not to mention, some great Thai-Chinese Buddhist temples worth visiting that you won’t find anywhere else.

As for me, getting to Chinatown means taking a fun ride along Bangkok’s Chao Phraya river on one of the public transport boats which stops right at the Ratchawongse pier in Chinatown. This is part of the joy as it adds to the whole historical Bangkok experience by reminding you of the days when travel in Bangkok was often by water and when so much of the city was still made up of small canals and river inlets. Back then Bangkok was affectionately known as the “Venice Of The East”, and for good reason.

This last week I decided to spend a couple of days photographing Tuk Tuks in Chinatown while they were going about their daily routines. I could have easily photographed Tuk Tuks in other parts of the city where they can still be seen traveling on major roads, or parked in groups, but I felt by adding a bit of the Chinatown backdrop into my Tuk Tuk photos it would help give a more historical feel to the images.

So throughout this series of photos you have been viewing you might have noticed I often captured the Tuk Tuks when they were moving, interacting with people on the streets, or in groups of at least 3 or more. And whenever possible, I tried to include the feeling of the jostling in Chinatown caused by the traffic within its limited amount of road space.

When shooting this series I mainly stayed within a couple of the main Chinatown locations where the background contained a concentration of shop signs that have some Chinese characters and a row of red hanging Chinese paper lanterns.

To add a bit more to the retro, old world feel of the images I post processed them using a series of levels adjustments to create a cinematic style of color grading. I did this by muting the colors a bit first and then adding in some bluish hues. I then crushed a lot of the shadows to darken the deeper parts of the images and increased the contrast which also makes them look a bit more abstract. Perhaps in another post I will talk more about my post processing techniques on this series of images.

In my opinion it is hard to get a feel for the presence of these photos from just the small images pictured within this article. So if you would like to view any of the photos in greater detail then please click on the photos themselves and each will load up a much larger 1800×1200 sized image of the photo for you to see.

I shot other angles from the side, rear, and some panned shots of the Tuk Tuks too. But when doing my edits I found the front view of the Tuk Tuk to be so distinct that I decided to post mainly frontal shots for now. Perhaps in the future I will make a second post showing other angles. Of course any questions or comments are welcome below as always.

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The Tuk Tuk – One Of Bangkok’s Few Remaining Olden Icons

By Marc Schultz | 9-January-2016

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