I first arrived in Bangkok’s Chinatown in 2013, by train, at Hua Lamphong station before dawn, after a long journey from Nong Khai, at the Lao border. It was still dark. The area around the station was bustling — commuters, vendors, migrants, petty thieves — a restless energy filling the narrow streets and alleys. It was chaotic and magnetic. When I came back years later, trains were no longer arriving there. Long-distance routes had been diverted to the new Krung Thep Aphiwat Grand Station, and Hua Lamphong, once the beating heart of the district, was already on its way to becoming something else: a charming relic, a museum.

 

At the same time, Sampheng — historically the core of what is now known as Bangkok’s Chinatown — was changing. What had long been considered a dense, “dirty,” and less appealing part of the city was becoming desirable. Cocktail bars popped up, rents increased, and artisanal shops began to disappear. The neighborhood was being reshaped to fit the new, glamorous image of the city. I began returning regularly from Vientiane. I extended my stays, settling near Hua Lamphong, and slowly moved into the interiors of Sampheng. I was no longer just passing through. I recognized something fragile, a kind of decaying, ephemeral beauty. Sampheng felt to me like an aging woman: once striking, still graceful, carefully holding onto her beauty, but inevitably approaching the end of something.

 

This project grew out of that realization.

 

Coming from years of photographing Laos, where even urban life retains a rural rhythm, Sampheng feels like the opposite: compressed, intense, instinctive. A dense urban organism at the heart of one of Southeast Asia’s largest cities.

 

This ongoing project builds a visual narrative of a neighborhood suspended between persistence and disappearance, while questioning what is lost when a place becomes heritage. Will Sampheng become a museum? What happens to the life that still fills it?