I remember paying a sinking fund of X Baht/Sq. Meter when I bought my condos. I believe the money went to the Bangkok Municipality. I don't know what it will be used for.

As for Bangkok sinking, the answer is simple.

Build on stilts like the old days

Amsterdam and the most part of Holland is 20 ft below sealevel,so call some Dutch engineers,they love to work in Thailand.

Most Thais don't know how to swim.. Someone stands to make a fortune running swimming classes..

Bangkok 2050....

I would say build dykes like the Dutch. Bangkok isn't lost, as measures can be taken. But it does require long term planning.

Just leave it to the Dutch!

That's what the Great King Chulalongkorn might have thought a little bit more than hundred years ago.

Visiting the Netherlands in 1897 it was one of the things he talked about with Queen Wilhelmina. It was not easy to find a Dutch hydro-technical engineer who was willing to come to Siam, but finally after the intermediation of Chao Prya Abhai Raja (the Belgian Thai Prince Gustave Rolin Jaquemijns) a young engineer working in the 'Dutch Indies' was prepared to come and have a look at the situation.

Poor engineer, poor Homan van der Heyde! He encountered exactly the same problems as many of us experience now, working or doing business in Thailand.

Enormeous corruption, turf wars, prestige conflicts, sabotage and so on.

Four years he endured to work under these very difficult circumstances and in March 1909 he embarked on a ship that brought him back to the Dutch Indies, the present Indonesia.

When he left, Bangkok had canals (the 'klongs'), locks and sluices and the yearly floods were part of the past.

In four years time he managed to controle the water level of Bangkok.

To realise the Greater Bangkok plan he would have needed another six years, but he gave up the battle against the bureaucracy.

Especially the Minister of Agriculture, Chaoprya Thewet, couldn't stand that a foreigner would show the way to have two harvests a year in the Bangkok

area, just by controlling the waterlevel. It would be such a loss of face that he sabotaged the whole process.

Though there remains a little note of Prince Damrong to King Chulalongkorn in the National Archive of Bangkok with the text:

"We should never have let him (Homan van der Heyde) go!"

Twentyfive years later Prince Damrong insisted that Homan van der Heyde would sit next to him at an official dinner in Amsterdam.

The interesting thing is that last month, exactly hundred years after that Homan van der Heyde left Siam, the present Gouvernor of Bangkok, MR. Sukhumbhand Paribatra boarded a helicopter together with the Dutch Embassador Tjaco van den Hout to studie the areas where Dutch hydro-technical expertise and support is needed again.

History repeats itself!

Limbo