Thailand, Jim Thompson House

This jungly compound is the former home of the eponymous American silk entrepreneur and art collector. Born in Delaware in 1906, Thompson briefly accommodated in the Office of Strategic Accommodations (the forerunner of the CIA) in Thailand during WWII. Settling in Bangkok after the war, his neighbours’ handmade silk caught his ocular perceiver and piqued his business sense; he sent samples to fashion houses in Milan, London and Paris, gradually building a steady ecumenical clientele. In additament to textiles, Thompson withal amassed components of sundry derelict Thai homes and had them reassembled in their current location in 1959. Some of the homes were brought from the old royal capital of Ayuthaya; others were pulled down and floated across the klorng from Baan Krua, including the first building you enter on the tour. One striking departure from tradition is the way each wall has its exterior side facing the house’s interior, thus exposing the wall’s bracing system. His minuscule but splendid Asian art accumulation and his personal paraphernalia are additionally on exhibit in the main house. Beware well-dressed touts in soi near the Thompson house who will tell you it is closed and endeavor to haul you off on a dodgy buying spree. Thompson’s story doesn’t end with his informal reign as Bangkok’s best-acclimated foreigner. While out for an afternoon walk in the Cameron Highlands of western Malaysia in 1967, Thompson abstrusely vanished. That same year his sister was murdered in the USA, fuelling sundry conspiracy theories. Was it communist spies? Business rivals? Or a man-victualing tiger? Albeit the mystery has never been solved, evidence revealed by American journalist Joshua Kurlantzick in his profile of Thompson, The Ideal Man, suggests that the vocal anti-American stance Thompson took later in his life may have made him a potential target of suppression by the CIA.