The Khlong Mae Kha

Part of Ancient Chiang Mai

Some 250 years ago in the calm of rural northern Thailand the clear waters of a small stream, the Maenam Kha, wound their way through the meadows to the east of Chiang Mai. From this point their way to the South China Sea was still long - always southwards, first to the nearby Maenam Ping, then swelling the flood of the mighty Maenam Chaophraya, Lord of Rivers, at Nakhon Sawan, before finally entering the Gulf of Siam at Paknam - a tiny but constructive part of the natural scheme of things.

Maenam means "mother water", hence "river", in Thai. But whilst most people have heard of the Maenam Chaophraya, and many are familiar with the Maenam Ping, few - even in Chiang Mai - will know the name of the Maenam Kha, albeit this waterway runs through their everyday lives just as it traverses the commercial centre of the city itself.

Of course, the waters of the Kha don’t really constitute a river anymore - at least in the inner city area. They were redirected at the end of the 18th century, and since that time have been known as the Khlong Mae Kha, or Kha Canal. Another problem is that for many years now there hasn’t been any real flow to the Ma Kha. What little water still follows its course is heavily polluted, odiferous, black and quite dead. Strewn with household refuse, non-biodegradable polystyrene and bits of packing cases from canal-side stores, the Khlong Mae Kha has become an open sewer flowing through the heart of Chiang Mai.

Judging from its name, the Mae Kha must once has been a fertile brook running by the vegetable gardens and orchards of Chiang Mai’s outlying villages. As any enthusiast for Tom Kha Gai - Thailand’s spicy chicken and galingale soup - will know, kha is a popular ingredient in Southeast Asian dishes, with a flavour and appearance somewhat similar to ginger. A quick check in an encyclopaedia informs us that kha, scientific name Alpinia Galanga, is cultivated from India to the Philippines, and in addition to being a tasty ingredient in many dishes it has long been used to ameliorate spleen trouble, herpes, earache, rheumatism, colic, dysentery and various skin problems. In Thailand it has traditionally been given to women as an infusion after childbirth; alternatively it is cooked with rice and eaten by mothers recently having had children.

In other words, a useful plant - but today precious little kha grows by the khlong of the same name. Instead, only the noxious water hyacinth, which blocks waterways and fouls propellers and fishermen’s nets from the Yangtze to the Nile, seems able to survive the pollution.

The Maenam Kha’s ecological downfall seems first to have come about as a result of the Siamese-Burmese wars for control over the Lan Na Kingdom in the late 18th century. In 1776, after more than two centuries of Burmese domination, King Taksin the Great recaptured Chiang Mai, though it was to remain unsettled for the next 20 years. Then, in 1787, King Rama I ordered Chao Kavila of Lampang to oversee the resettlement and reconstruction of Chiang Mai. By the turn of the century Kavila had achieved this aim, as part of which he extended the Chiang Mai fortifications southwards and eastwards towards the River Ping. A new outer wall was erected - Kavila’s "earthen ramparts" - and the Maenam Kha was in parts diverted to act as an outer moat. From this time the stream became known as the Khlong Mae Kha, and - we may confidently assume - it began to suffer from increasing pollution due to its extreme proximity to the city walls.

By the end of the 19th century Chiang Mai’s commercial centre had expanded southwards and eastwards, towards the banks of the Maenam Ping, and well beyond the course of the Khlong Mae Kha. Sometime around the turn of the century the outer gate, which marked the course of the Mae Kha by Wat Saen Fang, was torn down, and the outer moat - the Khlong Mae Kha - became an all but forgotten stream passing in the shadows beneath Chang Moi, Thapae, Loi Kroa and Sri Dornchai Roads.

During subsequent years - at least, until the present time - the continuing story of the Khlong Mae Kha has been all downhill. Ignored and abused, by the beginning of this century it had become an open sewer, a foetid and unsightly disgrace to the urban landscape, as well as - still more seriously - a potential health hazard. Projects were advanced in the 1990s to clean up the Khlong Mae Kha, and pumping stations were installed to flush clean water from the nearby River Ping through its narrow channel – yet these are never used, but stand idle as the black waters pass turgidly through. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, it’s certainly time to clean up the Khlong Mae Kha. The work has been started, but has ground to a halt. It’s not even a ’mega project’... And its something Chiang Mai needs more than a park for 200 elephants or another failing underpass.

As an afterthought, readers should consider that Chiang Mai - like Bangkok, and other cities of the Kingdom - is far from unique in facing the problem of polluted waterways. London once had many rivers, though few people nowadays know the name of more than one. Today the Thames is, once again, relatively clean - fish have come back after an absence of more than two centuries, and people who fall in no longer have to be rushed to hospital for tetanus injections - but what of the fate of London’s lesser rivers and streams? For example, how many people standing on the platform at London’s Sloane Square underground realise the purpose of the great, custom-made iron pipe which passes mysteriously over their heads? Yet this is the metal coffin of the Fleet River, doomed to run forever in the dark confines of a Victorian sewer.

Text by Andrew Forbes, images by David Henley. © CPA Media, 2007