Thai students document fight against ‘unjust’ shrine demolition

When King Rama VI founded Chulalongkorn University in 1899, the first institution of its kind in Thailand, he endowed it with acres of land across Bangkok. Since then, shopping malls, banks and high-rises have sprung up in areas leased to commercial developers by the university.

In the middle of it all stands a small Chinese shrine that has become a battleground for university administrators, students and local residents.

“I never thought this type of thing existed in my university,” said Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a Chula alumnus. As a political science student, he discovered the Chao Mae Thap Thim shrine only when he learned from local residents that the university wanted to destroy it to make way for a housing development.

“I thought it’s a very dreadful…injustice to people who’ve already lived here for a long time,” he said. “I wanted to do something. The caretaker had already made a banner to protest, but she didn’t dare do it herself.”

On the day of the planned demolition in June 2020, despite the pandemic, Mr Chotiphatphaisal and other students demonstrated outside the shrine to try to save it. The bulldozer never came.

Four years later, the university’s property management company is in the middle of a legal battle to demolish the shrine and evict its caretaker. The university has offered to relocate it, but the caretaker – and many in the local community – want it to remain where it is. The shrine has become a symbol of an older way of life in a city that has evolved at a rapid pace, spurred on by the university’s own development projects.

In their efforts to preserve the shrine, students not only demonstrated, they also spread the word on social media. Mr Chotiphatphaisal was elected president of the students’ union, and he used the platform to make a public statement in support of the shrine.

His actions could have endangered his student status, he said. Thai universities operate a behavioural policy whereby students begin with 100 points, and points can be deducted for infractions of university rules, including breaching the peace on or off campus. A student who loses too many points could be suspended or expelled.

“I was very afraid at first because I didn’t want to lose any points,” Mr Chotiphatphaisal said. “But when I went to meet the caretaker herself [I saw] she doesn’t have anything. She is a poor woman.

“If I lose my points, I just lose something that does not matter at all. But if she loses the shrine, she will not have the cultural roots, and also she will not have her home.”

While there is not much Mr Chotiphatphaisal, who graduated from the university earlier this year, can do to fight in court, he is continuing to negotiate with the university outside the legal proceedings.

Throughout the process, he and a fellow student, Settanant Thanakitkoses, documented the battle against the university, relying on a small budget and video-savvy friends to do so. The resulting film, The Last Breath of Sam Yan, was released in 2023 and sold to Thai Netflix. It recently won the Suphannahong National Film Award, a prestigious accolade in Thailand.

“We thought that when we made this documentary, the shrine might [soon] be gone. We just want to document everything…for future generations,” Mr Chotiphatphaisal said. “But surprisingly, the shrine still exists for younger people to go see [for] themselves. So the film [has] become not just the document of the past, but the document of now, of the future that will come.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com