By Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 2010

A crumbling Mughal-era mansion in Dhaka’s old city. (Photo: Sebastian Strangio)

ACROSS Old Dhaka, decaying and sprawling mansions are hulking reminders of the city’s 19th-century commercial boom. Majestic, wrought-iron gates slump inward. Gardens are overgrown. Squatters have taken up residence in some of these empty shells, but mostly these Mughal-era (17th-19th century) structures are now regarded as less important than the land on which they sit.

Taimur Islam, an architect who heads the Urban Study Group, a Dhaka-based organization campaigning to have the old city designated as a protected area, says the pace of development spells an uncertain fate for the city’s architectural heritage. Since 2004, the group has created an inventory of about 3,000 historically significant structures in Old Dhaka, where a handful of buildings are razed daily. Mr. Taimur says that if the government took a more integrated approach to planning, it could accommodate the preservation of old buildings and also the needs of a ballooning population. It could even help reshape perceptions of Dhaka, one of the world’s fastest-growing megacities. “If it’s possible to restore all those important monuments under certain guidelines and come up with an integrated plan, the rest of the areas could be revitalized too,” he says.

One of Dhaka’s most arresting attractions is its magisterially bleak (or bleakly magisterial) national parliament, the Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban. Constructed from massive blocks of unfinished reinforced concrete bisected by simple triangles and circles, the building is perhaps the crowning work in the career of American architect Louis Khan. Although commissioned as the national parliament of Pakistan in the 1960s, the building wasn’t completed until 1982, well after Bangladesh gained its independence from “West Pakistan” and around the time that such brutal modernism began to seem a little passe. Still, Bangladeshis are justifiably proud of the building — according to Wikipedia, one of the largest legislative complexes in the world — which has since become something of a symbol of the young nation. Khan himself said of the strange, almost child-like profusion of geometric shapes that “It was not belief, not design, not pattern, but the essence from which an institution could emerge”. He also described its unique design as a “many-faceted precious stone, constructed in concrete and marble”.

Predictably, I had the privelege of seeing this greyest of grey buildings under an overcast sky. Lake Road, the wide boulevard running along the back side of the parliament, was lined with joggers, chaste young couples and posters of independence icon Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his daughter Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister. Unfortunately, access to the inside of the building is restricted to casual visitors and guards direct a friendly but determined head-waggle at anyone seeking to walk past the checkpoints along the outer edges of the complex. Taimur Islam, the head of the Urban Study Group in Dhaka, told me that 48 hours’ notice is required for journalists to gain permission to see the inside of the building, but from my limited knowledge of South Asian bureaucracy, I imagine the process is considerably more protracted. (This is a stark contrast with Cambodia, where you can pretty much walk into any building not ringed with razorwire and armed guards, including — but not limited to — ministries and foreign embassies).

Kahn died of a heart attack in 1974 at New York’s Penn Station after returning from Bangladesh, leaving behind a slew of classic brutalist structures and plans for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York, a commemoration of the late president. Kahn’s design for the park was abandoned after his death due to the city’s fiscal crisis, but was resurrected last year after an exhibition about the project’s history and a New York Times article published in 2005. It is apparently scheduled to begin construction soon. Kahn was also responsible for Yale University’s Centre for British Art, the Phillips Exeter Academy Library in New Hampshire and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Several more projects, including a synagogue in Israel and a presidential palace in Islamabad, Pakistan, remained unbuilt after his death. Click here for more on Kahn and his work.

A section drawing of Kahn’s design for the parliament building.

Here are some photos from my recent sojourn in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I spent some time this month visiting friends and chasing a few stories (some of which will hopefully come to fruition in the next few weeks). The city — one of the fastest growing metropolises on earth — is so bewilderingly large that one could spend days exploring it on foot. These photos, snapped during a series of walks around Old Dhaka and surrounding areas, document fairly well the small part of the surface that I scratched during my six days in town.

01 Rickshaws ply their trade in the streets in Armanitola, the former Armenian quarter of Old Dhaka. Armenian traders put down roots here in the eighteenth century, building grand palaces along the Buriganga River waterfront and throughout the old city. Today, only a single Armenian remains in the city — the caretaker of the old Armenian Church — while many of the buildings erected by wealthy Armenians are falling into disuse or succumbing to the wrecking-ball.

02 Watching a game of cricket at a schoolhouse in Old Dhaka.

03 Misery in the Bengali press, Nayapaltan.

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The following were taken during my three weeks roaming across Burma. Visit my Zenphoto photoblog to see more photos from my travels in the country.

01 Souvenir sellers at a nineteenth century monastery in Mandalay.

02 A cheroot-smoking Buddhist monk watches the scenery roll by on the train between Lashio and Hsipaw in Shan State.

03 Pulp fiction for sale in the streets of Rangoon. The city is heaven for the dedicated book-collector.

04 A clutch of ubiquitous Buddha statuettes grace a small pagoda in Mandalay.

05 Ceramic pots holding fresh drinking water at a pagoda in Hsipaw, Shan State.

06 Dragonfly breeding season along the Irrawaddy riverfront in Mandalay.

07 The flowing longyi of a souvenir seller stalking visitors to the vast temple plain at Bagan.

08 A Buddha sits serenely in the guano-strewn interior of a small temple in Bagan.

Since China’s economic rise, the ironies of ‘market socialism’ have become something of a staple of international journalism. Indeed, the story of socialism yielding to neoliberal economics can be sketched in sharp, simple contrasts: Mao and Motorola; Deng and Disney; Tiananmen and Toyota. But despite all of this — and all irony aside — I am constantly taken aback by the sheer capitalistic dynamism of the city that bears Ho Chi Minh’s name. The pace of development here is dizzying.

Two years ago, the Ben Nghe waterfront was a symphony of flaking stucco, lined with squat colonial-era houses and shop fronts. Today, the doctrine of development-at-all-costs reigns supreme: trucks roar along the canal, hauling concrete; new bridges stretch crenellated arms over the water. Across the water in District 8, high-rises have shot out of the mud, sheathed in green gauze. Alongside the usual Party exhortations, signs on Tran Hung Dao Street intone a new mantra — ‘Ho Chi Minh City Construction and Development!’ — a sentiment which now seems to dominate Vietnam’s state-approved ‘socialist’ lexicon. The only thing left untouched is the half-formed concrete monstrosity in the park between Pham Ngu Lao and Le Lai Streets, a decade-old testament to the failures of planned economics, now streaked with grime and reeking of urine.

Construction works along the Ben Nghe canal.

While I am very pro-development — after decades of war and upheaval, Vietnam surely deserves its place in the sun — it’s regrettable that it so often involves the desecration of the urban landscape. The new Petro-Vietnam tower on Le Duan Road, encased in reflective glass, is a case in point. Unfortunately, these sorts of architectural prophylactics are the downside of capitalist development, which no reasonable person would deny a developing country like Vietnam. The romance of poverty and decay, so often accompanied by middle-class bromides about the evils of Western consumerism, is undeniable for the visitor; but if raising living standards requires the implosion of a few old buildings, so be it. In any case, better the crash of bulldozers than the thump of artillery.

The French, fortuitously, had the sense to give their colonial project an attractive veneer and intended their buildings to last, so that most of the remaining grande dames of French Indochina have been pressed into service as museums, embassies, office buildings, hotels and outposts of the People’s Army, while the less ‘historic’ structures are gradually succumbing to the wrecking ball. The rooftop bar of the colonial-era Hotel Majestic, dwarfed by the shiny new Sheratons and Hiltons in all but old-world elegance, gives a bird’s eye view of the city’s transformation, commanding striking views of the Saigon River and the expanses beyond. On the morning I visit for breakfast, the sky is clear, the horizon a panorama rich with cranes and half-completed high-rises that recedes into an Appalachian haze of dust and traffic exhaust. While watching the river boats drift seaward, I ponder the irony of the fact that I’m eating foie gras and pain au chocolat above a street called Dong Khoi (‘uprising’), but there’s little currency in the observation: Saigon, like Shanghai, abounds in these amusing incongruities. In any event, the Vietnamese revolution was as much about nationalism as it was about communism, so the irony might be lost on many Saigonais. What self-respecting nationalist, they might reasonably ask, would wish for anything less?

I’m sitting in my hotel off Bui Vien Street in central Saigon, exhausted from the early start and aching in the legs from today’s walk. I’m stealing wireless, achingly slow, from somewhere nearby; and my Windows taskbar is in a state of constant excitement, informing me, every few seconds, of connections granted and denied. My new 7000-đông copy of Kanye West’s Graduation grinds and scrapes in the disc drive, slowly trickling data into my iTunes library. The familiar smell — a blend of chlorine, cooking oil and motorbike exhaust — drifts up from the street outside my balcony and the sun sinks behind a thicket of television aerials and satellite dishes.

I set off this morning to find a small bookstore in Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese district, which I discovered there in 2006. It was nothing more than a hole in the wall, piled high with dusty cast-offs from the post-’75 era, including volumes of Marx and Lenin, Russian textbooks, engineering manuals and a few dog-eared English paperbacks. It was here, strangely, that I first came across Gore Vidal’s Washington D.C. I also bought an old English-Russian map of Saigon from the early 1980s and a children’s story book entitled Bac Ho Kinh Yeu (‘Uncle Ho Respects and Loves’), describing Ho Chi Minh’s lifetime crusade against the imperialists and — judging by the watercolour on the cover — his enduring affection for preteens. I couldn’t for the life of me remember where the store was, except that it was across the road from the offices of the Saigon Cigarette Company, with a ten-foot concrete cigarette casting its monstrous phallic shadow over the parking lot.

After spending about two hours winding through the backstreets of Cholon trying to find the right street, I tried a different tack. Searching on Google.vn, I found the address to the cigarette company and gave it to a moto taxi, who had me there in about five minutes. To my satisfaction, the book store (Hieu Sach Minh, 23 Phan Nhan Ton, Q.5) was still there, a riot of paperbacks piled under a slumping awning. Inside, I was like a kid in a candy store. Old books were stacked from floor to ceiling, roughly ordered by language and subject. There was little in the way English fiction, except for a few third-rate Star Wars novels; but towards the back of the store I came across a treasure trove of antique non-fiction and ended up walking out with more than I could carry.

To start with, I bought a three-volume hardback series entitled Minority Groups in the Republic of Vietnam, compiled in 1966 by order of Harold K. Johnson, US Army Chief of Staff. As well as information on the ethnic minorities of the Central Highlands and the khmer krom of the Mekong Delta, the book has a detailed entry on the Binh Xuyen criminal syndicate, who operated the lion’s share of prostitution and gambling rackets in 1950s Saigon. A band of bandits and river pirates from the region south of Cholon, the Binh Xuyen rose to political and military prominence during the last years of French colonial rule. By the time of the French departure in June 1954, the group had gained control of Saigon’s police force and civil administration; it also controlled the opium trade, much of the city’s fish and charcoal commerce, and several hotels and rubber plantations around the capital. In the countryside, it maintained a string of semi-autonomous fiefs, exacting taxes from the local peasants and maintaining mutually-hostile relations with both the communist Viet Minh and the new government of president Ngo Dinh Diem. But for more than a year after coming to power, Diem waged a war against the Binh Xuyen, and, by the end of 1955, the syndicate had all but collapsed. From this point on, Saigon’s vice rackets were jointly controlled by freelance gangsters and, until his assassination in 1963, by Diem’s own extended family.

Fodor’s 1969 Guide to Japan and East Asia (stamped ‘Property U.S. Army’ on the inside cover) advises the prospective visitor to post-Diem Saigon: ‘This divided nation’, writes the author, ‘is the most dangerous country in the world for today’s visitor. Saigon is definitely not the place for a tourist’. Of course, if danger was your thing, there was plenty of fun to be had in wartime Saigon: One could spend a ‘nauseating’ night crawling the bars and ‘gaudy fleshpots’ of old Cholon, ‘notorious city of the demimonde‘; or, for a subtle change of scene, the nightclubs of District 1, where crones from the first Indochina War were ‘rehabilitated’ to handle the growing demand of American and other ‘Free World’ soldiers. There were also sites to be seen in Nha Trang and Hue, although the latter, ‘sometimes under shellfire’ and fresh from the ravages of the 1968 Tet Offensive, was ‘best avoided’.

An old Guide Historique Des Rues De Saigon, written in 1943 under the Vichy administration of French Indochina, gives a glimpse of the city in the somnolent age of high colonialism, when Graham Greene smoked opium in Rue Catinat and the tricolor fluttered over the wedding-cake Hôtel de Ville. André Baudrit, historian and committed imperialist, makes his dedication to the ‘Amiraux-Gouverneurs (1839-1879), les véritables fondateurs de SAIGON, ville Française’, and describes, in magniloquent passages, the glorious ‘conquet de Cochinchine’. Under a pile of engineering manuals, I also found a Vietnamese tabloid magazine (Doc Thay) from 1952, complete with news about the Hearst mansion, anti-communist propaganda, and photos of actress Jane Russell striking rakish poses against a backdrop of bougainvillea.

Before leaving with my stack of books, I asked the store owner for maps (ban do), unsure whether he would understand my pidgin Vietnamese. Apparently so: he disappeared upstairs only to appear five minutes later with an armful of dusty relics from the Diem era. For half an hour, we unfurled old road maps, US army aviation surveys and, most bizarrely, a briefing on Vietnam’s water resources from the Army Engineer Training School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Many of these maps were fraying and eaten away by damp, some literally coming apart in my hands as I unfolded them. Among other odds and ends, I came away with a French carte routière of Quang Ngai province, inscribed with blue biro; and, intriguingly, a military ‘joint operations graphic’ of Cambodia’s Kampot province, seemingly from the 1980s. I left the store reluctantly, my fingers blackened by dust and newsprint. The entire purchase — five maps, five hardbacks and a magazine — came to just US$40.

For shopping, Hong Kong never disappoints. I discovered this bounty today at Fa Yuen Street in Mongkok, my usual one-stop-shop for factory overruns and bizarre one-offs from the Chinese mainland. The following t-shirts are the only good ones I found that fit me; if I was a foot shorter, I could have come home with t-shirts featuring Mike Tyson, Stalin, a lesbian orgy, and/or the irrepressible ‘Softhard’ mascot (‘since 1988′). I’ll be sure to post any more hilarious t-shirts that I come across over the next few months, although my memory of t-shirt shopping in Ho Chi Minh City — where baroque American wrestling motifs are still au courant — does not exactly charge me with confidence. Still, these four (especially #01) have easily filled this trip’s quota of nonsensical clothing items. Enjoy!

01: ‘Someone call an ambulance! He’s been shot!’ Kitschy shock-art from Japanese fashion label OriginalFake. (HKD $60 / AUD $9)

02: British designer Jenny Bowers does The Stepford Wives — though at this price, probably a knock-off. In fact, it may have nothing at all to do with Bowers at all, despite the her name being in inch-high letters on the back. (HKD $60 / AUD $9)

03: The caption says: ‘”ROBOT ROBOT”: the driving force behind the continuing ROBOT culture’. (HKD $25 / $3.50)

04: ‘Rusty’. Nondescript and minimalistic — but, hey, actually wearable. Whowouldathunkit? (HKD $79 / $11)