Hotel · Bangkok

Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok

The Oriental dates itself to 1876, but its oldest building is from 1887, and every era of owners since has added a wing of its own.

Neighbourhood: Riverside, Bang Rak
Status: Open

The Oriental counts its age from 1876, when two Danish sea captains, H. Jarck and C. Salje, opened a hotel on the east bank of the Chao Phraya. Nothing of their building is what guests see now. The oldest part of the hotel is the one commissioned by H.N. Andersen, the Danish merchant who bought the business in 1881, from the Italian firm Cardu and Rossi. It opened in May 1887 and survives as the Authors' Wing.

Its name comes from the hotel's best-known story, and the story is mostly the hotel's own telling. It says Joseph Conrad stayed in 1888, a year after the building opened; Somerset Maugham caught malaria here in 1923 and recovered in the hotel, and wrote about it in The Gentleman in the Parlour; Noël Coward came often in the 1930s. Suites in the old building carry their names, and the Authors' Lounge, where afternoon tea is served, is in it too. OKYTO counts the hotel among Asia's grand heritage hotels.

After the war

The modern Oriental begins after the Second World War, during which the Japanese army used it as an officers' club. In 1947 six partners bought it for 250 US dollars each. Among them were Germaine Krull, the photographer and former war correspondent, and Jim Thompson, the American who revived the Thai silk trade. The Bamboo Bar became the city's first jazz bar that year, and it still has live music. In 1958 came the ten-storey Tower Wing, now the Garden Wing, which the hotel calls Krull's greatest achievement, with the French restaurant Le Normandie on its top floor; it now trades as Anne-Sophie Pic at Le Normandie and holds two Michelin stars.

In 1967 the Italthai group bought the hotel, and five years later it went into partnership with The Mandarin in Hong Kong, the start of the Mandarin Oriental group. The River Wing, finished in 1976 and opened by Queen Sirikit the following April, added 350 rooms and turned an old hotel into a large one. A restoration of about 90 million dollars in 2019 rebuilt it with fewer, larger rooms, cutting its river-facing rooms from 338 to 301 and raising its suites from 30 to 46.

The wings still divide the hotel. Nearly all the rooms are in the River Wing of the 1970s. The two older buildings hold only about thirty rooms and suites between them, among them the writers' suites in the Authors' Wing of 1887.

The white colonial Authors' Wing among palms, with a later hotel wing rising behind — The Authors' Wing of 1887, with a later wing behind it, 2022.

In its first years most guests reached the hotel from ships that had come up the river past Paknam, and the hotel built a pier to collect them in small boats. Its boats still run, now across the Chao Phraya to the far bank, where Sala Rim Naam, the spa and the cooking school stand side by side.