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Green Artisan

Thai Silk

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Story of Thai Silk

In Thailand, fabric weaving has been practised since prehistoric times and rural society has regarded it as a women's duty during spare time after work in the fields. The development of both colours and designs of the finished products have been a result of the weavers' own imagination and a long heritage as well as some other factors. In the old days fabrics were a kind of status symbol; there were fabrics for the common people to be used either everyday or on special occasions like merit-making, traditional rituals or important festivities, fabrics for the upper class including the king and the royal family and finally those for the Buddhist monks.

Thai fabrics have a great number of designs, usually distinguished by region. Northern women have been considered very skillful weavers, especially of cotton fabrics. They started by weaving for domestic use and then produced for export as well. During the Sukhothai Period, about 700 years ago, besides the ordinary coloured ones, a five-colour fabric was produced, commonly known as Pha Benjarong. Different groups of people then produced their own fabrics; court people for example would make fabrics for themselves and ordered some fabrics from abroad. As history has it, silk began to be imported from China during that time. Besides clothing, people began to use fabrics for other purposes such as home decoration and other household items ). Fabrics during the Ayudhya Kingdom which was about 400 years ago assumed another important role besides materials for clothing and decoration-they were used as money.

Story about Jim Thompson
Jim Thompson was an American businessman who helped revitalize the Thai silk and textile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. A former U.S. military intelligence officer who once worked for the Office of Strategic Services, Thompson mysteriously disappeared while going for a walk on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain his disappearance, but what actually happened to him remains a mystery.

Jim Thompson's life
During World War II, he was as a commissioned officer in the Office of Strategic Services .He was about to be deployed in Thailand when the Surrender of Japan in August-September of the same year officially ended World War II. Thompson arrived in Thailand several weeks after Victory over Japan Day to take charge of the Bangkok OSS office.Leaving the US Army in 1946, he returned home to bring his wife back to Thailand. She did not agree to this and divorced him. Thompson returned to Bangkok, embarking on a renovation of the Oriental Hotel with a number of partners. From here he worked with a number of Thai investors to found the Thai Silk Company, in 1947. Although he officially abandoned intelligence activities,many have suspected he was still working under non-official cover for the CIA. During the Vietnam War, his closest friend, General Edwin Black, was in charge of United States Air Force operations over Laos and Thailand.

A civilian once more, Thompson devoted himself to revitalizing a cottage industry of hand-woven silk, which had for centuries been a household craft in Thailand but was dying out. Thompson located a group of Muslim weavers in the Bangkok neighborhood of Bankrua and provided hitherto unavailable color-fast dyes, standardized looms, and technical assistance to those interested in weaving on a piece-work basis.

Besides inventing the bright jewel tones and dramatic color combinations nowadays associated with Thai silk, he raised thousands of Thailand's poorest people out of poverty, making millionaires out of his core group of weavers by giving them shares of the Thai Silk Company. His endeavour showed a profit from its first year of operation.

Thompson's determination to keep his company cottage-based was significant for the women who made up the bulk of his work force. By allowing them to work at home, choosing their hours and looking after their children while weaving, they retained their position in the household while becoming breadwinners.

It was only after Thompson's disappearance that the Thai Silk Company relocated its weaving operations to Khorat, a city which serves as a base of operations for the Royal Thai Army. Although the Company abandoned home-based weaving in favor of factories in the early 1970s, the Thai Silk Company's Khorat facility looks more like a beautifully landscaped campus than a factory.

In 1958 he began what was to be the pinnacle of his architectural achievement, a new home to showcase his art collection. Formed from parts of six antique

Thai houses, his home sits on a klong across from Bangkrua, where his weavers were then located. Thompson went for an afternoon walk in the Cameron Highlands in Pahang, Malaysia, on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967, and disappeared.