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This is a tourist map of Bangkok dating from the late 1960s, showing the heart of the city along with many advertisements for hotels, restaurants, jewelers, and more businesses targeted at tourists. The map shows the area including the neighborhoods of Khlong San, the Dusit District, Bang Phlat, and more, though some of these neighborhoods are not yet built up. Roads, railway lines, canals, business locations, and attractions are shown and named in Thai and English.
Bangkok is now the most visited city for international travel in the world (with 22.7 million international visitors in 2019), but when this map was made it welcomed fewer than a million tourists a year. The Vietnam War and the growing affordability of travel were starting to bring a large influx of American tourists, likely the targeted audience of this map. Several of the hotels listed in the advertisements are noted for being particularly popular with G.I.s.
The limited extent of the city shown in this map, perhaps unfamiliar to travelers familiar with the contemporary sprawling city, was being rapidly expanded at the time. During the 1960s floods, ever-present congestion, and lack of affordable housing made it apparent that the city needed to be expanded in an organized way. This issue was addressed as early as 1960 by the Litchfield consulting team's Greater Bangkok Plan 2533 and other agencies, but top-down city planning would not come in full until 1992.
The advertisements included with the map help to date the publication. Those on the front of the are generally older and more established than the ones on the verso, likely reflected to some degree in the amount they were willing to pay for advertising. The best constraint for dating is from the Nana Hotel, which was built in 1963 and expanded with fourteen additional stories in 1973. Here the hotel is shown without its addition, suggesting that construction had not even started or been considered, giving us a likely pre-1970 date.
![[South Vietnam & Cambodia] Carte de la Cochinchine . . . Dressee au Bureau Topographique Des Troupes De L'Indo-Chine Fevrier 1890](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/62547.jpg)
