The Silk King
The best-known American in the picturesque kingdom of Thailand is a greying, well-tanned onetime architect named James H. W. Thompson, 52, who has almost singlehanded saved Thailand's vital silk industry from extinction. When Jim Thompson arrived in Thailand in 1945 as an OSS officer (and stayed on as political adviser to the American minister), silk weaving as a local industry had almost died under the onslaught of cheaper and more durable machine-made silk. Today, almost every ship or plane that leaves Thailand carries Thai silk to some 17 countries, and Thompson's Thai Silk Co. alone employs more than 2,000 Thais in the business of silk growing, dyeing, spinning and weaving. From sales of $36,000 in 1948, Thompson boosted his company to $650,000 in sales last year, hopes to do even better this year.
Jim Thompson got into the silk business because he had an esthetic eye for the glowing colors and uneven texture of the Thai silks. Says he: "It disturbed me that production of this wonderful material had stopped." He left the Army and diplomatic service, took 500 samples to New York, where the silk drew raves from designers, decorators and fashion editors. Thompson lined up an importing firm to handle the silk in the U.S., went back to Thailand and began operating with $700.
He rounded up some 200 silk weavers, most of whom had taken up other trades, supplied them with the raw silk and dyes to turn out finished products on their crude home looms. The silks became so popular with the diplomatic colony and tourists (many of whom ask for "Jim Thompson's place" as soon as they arrive in Bangkok) that Thompson quickly expanded, in 1950 formed his own company with $12,000 capital. Though he is its biggest stockholder, he took pains to make the company a Thai enterprise, accepted only four Americans among his 36 stockholders. His company was soon paying healthy dividends, and Thompson bought two mulberry plantations in northeast Thailand to provide his silk.
So good a job has Jim Thompson done for the Thailand silk industry that he has lured in many Thais. More silk shops have been opened in Bangkok recently than any other business, including one reported to be backed by the wife of Thailand's strongman, Marshal Sarit Thanarat.
- Find this article at:
Millions from the Mulberry Bush
One of the best advertisements for Thailand's soft, nubby silk cloth is the country's delicately beautiful Queen Sirikit, who has her gowns designed by Balmain. Thai silk is also used lavishly by other high-fashion designers such as Pauline Trigère, Anne Fogarty, Tina Leser and Adele Simpson. Lately the Thais have taken to producing their own dresses and sportswear, and have not only made Bangkok into a much-copied fashion center but also created a flourishing business.
Bangkok now has 156 silk shops, which export their goods to 60 countries, ring up a yearly volume of $4,000,000—a considerable amount for Thailand. Silk has been a golden enterprise ever since a onetime U.S. intelligence officer, Jim Thompson, revived the dying art of weaving in 1948 and made himself a bundle of bahts by selling bright bolts of cloth to tourists (TIME, April 21, 1958). Thompson is still the largest producer, but he has attracted plenty of competition from entrepreneurs who sell finished dresses as well as the cloth. Gaining fast are two firms that combine Thai craftsmanship with U.S. design and market their goods to stores from the U.S.'s Bergdorf Goodman and I. Magnin to London's Liberty and Paris' Lanvin.
Help from Rockefellers. One of the firms is headed by San Francisco-born Lewis Cykman, 52, who came to Bangkok to make ice cream, instead went into the silk trade, expanded with financial help from the wife of the late Prime Minister Sarit. Though she has dropped out, Cykman's Star of Siam is now worth about $500,000. His plant works two shifts daily, weaving silks for his four Bangkok stores, three foreign branches and his busy export trade. Next Cykman intends to sell public shares to help finance a 100-loom weaving plant in northeast Thailand.
Down the street from Cykman's main salon is a larger competitor: Design Thai, which is financed by the Rockefeller brothers' International Basic Economy Corp. and masterminded by chic Jacqueline Ayer, 33, a Negro from New York, who came to Bangkok by way of Paris' Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Vogue magazine (for which she was a fashion illustrator). She worked out methods for printing intricate designs on Thai silk, imported tailors and pattern makers from Hong Kong, and put 60 local girls to work sewing. Says she: "I designed on the run—in planes, taxis and airports." What she produced was a loose-fitting line of at-home gowns (retail: $70 to $100) and rajah pajama sets in gold and hot pink ($110), as well as simply cut dresses ($70 to $90) based on an Indian village design.
Competition from Communists. Demand is so brisk that garment makers have trouble getting enough silk for their needs. Because many Thai farmers prefer raising livestock to tending mulberry bushes, and some Buddhists have qualms about killing silkworms, production has held at about 500,000 Ibs. a year (v. 300,000 lbs. in 1939). Manufacturers are trying to persuade farmers to boost output, and have inadvertently sold some other people on the profitable prospects of Thai silk. In the sincerest form of flattery, Communist China has introduced an imitation Thai silk for sale in Hong Kong.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,834018,00.html
A Walk in the Jungle
The Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, 140 miles north of Kuala Lumpur at an elevation of 5,000 ft., is one of Southeast Asia's most fetching health resorts. Its climate is mild by day and cool by night, and its lush vegetation includes thick jungles, clouds of brilliant flowers and mile after mile of tea plantations. There last week on vacation went one of Southeast Asia's best-known businessmen, American James Thompson, 61. Tired from a round of business, which included the opening in Bangkok three weeks ago of a new, two-story headquarters for his $1.5 million-a-year silk business, Thompson came to the Highlands as the guest of Dr. and Mrs. T. G. Ling of Singapore.
A resident of Thailand since 1946, Thompson had almost singlehanded made Thai silk and its shimmering colors world-renowned, and thus created a major export asset for the grateful Thais. But Thompson was more than a businessman; he was also a collector of Oriental objets d'art who filled his opulent Bangkok home with priceless porcelains and religious figures. He loved to roam through the jungle, searching for old ruins and occasionally kicking up a Buddha's head. One afternoon last week, when his hosts had retired to rest, he left their house without a word and went for a walk into the jungle. This time, Jim Thompson did not return.
Massive Manhunt. Alarmed when he did not show up by dark, the Lings called the police, who launched the most massive manhunt ever seen in the Malayan mountains. Some 300 soldiers and police using tracker dogs fanned out through the jungle. Helicopters swooped over the treetops. The searchers were soon joined by 30 aboriginal tribesmen of the area, through which both tigers and bandits are known to roam. Back in Bangkok, a Portuguese Jesuit brother with a reputation for clairvoyance picked out a likely spot on a map, and the commander of U.S. Army Support in Thailand, Brigadier General Edwin F. Black, flew off to Malaysia with it in the distant hope the it might help. Even a local witch doctor tried, and failed, to divine Thompson's whereabouts.
Thompson's friends and Malaysian officials at first suspected—even hoped, as the least of several evils—that he had been captured by local bandits, who sometimes seize Chinese merchants for ransom. But offers of substantial rewards, printed in local newspapers, failed to produce any response. Thompson was accustomed to the jungle, but the forest around Cameron Highlands is so thick and its trails so numerous and meandering that local authorities estimated that it would take a full regiment of men working for about a month to comb the area. The only clue came from a cook in a Lutheran-mission bungalow, who said that she had seen Thompson standing on a nearby plateau for about 30 minutes. Then, she reported, "suddenly he disappeared." By week's end, no trace of him had been found.
Seven Teak Houses. The scope and intensity of last week's search showed the respect and affection that Southeast Asia felt for Jim Thompson. A Princetonian from Greenville, Del., Thompson was an architect when World War II began. He went to Asia as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, liked the area so well that he stayed on when the war ended. Fascinated by the silk spinners he saw when traveling in rural Thailand, he collected samples of their work in a suitcase, brought them to New York and persuaded fashion designers to use them. He went back to Thailand, started his business with $700 and contracted with the dying silk industry, whose 200 scattered weavers worked on ancient handlooms, to turn out fine silks that he stamped in brilliant colors and designs. His success inspired some 130 competitors, eventually produced thousands of jobs for the Thais.
Divorced in 1946 and never remarried, Jim Thompson entertained lavishly and often at his Bangkok home, created out of seven traditional Siamese teak houses. He never tired of showing visitors his collection of ancient Buddhas, Thai paintings and blue and white Oriental porcelains, opened his house to a twice-weekly tour whose proceeds he gave to charity. His will leaves his house and its treasures to his family in the U.S. But Jim Thompson, whether or not he survives his walk in the jungle, has left the Thais an even more priceless gift: a pride in Thai craftsmanship, announced around the world in banners of the iridescent silks that he made famous.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,843518,00.html
Air of Intrigue
Ever since Thai Silk King James Thompson vanished without a trace while vacationing in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia (TIME, April 17), his friends have grown increasingly suspicious about the disappearance. The biggest search that the highlands have ever known failed to produce a trace of Thompson. No word of his presence has filtered down from the aborigine villages of the highlands. There has been no sign of Thompson's remains, which would certainly attract birds of prey. Hoping against hope, Thompson's friends have therefore concluded that he may still be alive, the abducted victim of some international intrigue.
Last week, to back up their hopes, an anonymous group of Thompson's friends doubled, to $25,000, the previous reward for information that would lead to his return alive (and offered $10.000 for proof of his death). Thompson's Bangkok-based silk company sent back to the highlands for another careful look Richard Noone, 49, a British officer in SEATO who was once an adviser to the Malayan aborigines department. Noone, who knows the dialects and habits of the area's tribes, brought along a North Borneo border scout and an aborigine witch doctor. Thompson's friends flew in Peter Hurkos, the psychic Dutch crime detector who directed his talents toward solving the Boston Strangler case without notable success in 1964. "Thompson is alive," declared Hurkos. "He has been abducted to another country, but he is not being held for ransom. I would stake my neck on this."
Political Abduction? Thompson's friends, who include former OSS agents (Thompson first came to Thailand when working for the OSS) and other men with experience in intelligence work, feel that he could have been kidnaped for a ransom not yet demanded. But they lean toward the belief that he was abducted for political motives. What political motives? They are not sure, but feel that he may be the prisoner of Communists who wish to use him as some sort of intermediary or in a propaganda ploy. They point out, for example, that Thompson knew many of Ho Chi Minh's agents at the time of the Japanese defeat in World War II.
These vague speculations gain some credence from a couple of suspicious events that occurred a few days before Jim Thompson disappeared from a friend's home in the highlands. On the way there, the driver of Thompson's taxi was mysteriously switched, whereupon the taxi headed for a garage for repairs. There, Thompson and his traveling companion were asked to take another taxi that already contained two men, but refused to share the ride. Friends figure that this may have been an abortive kidnap attempt. On the day that Thompson disappeared, a caravan of five cars was seen going up the usually traffic-free road to the highlands and coming down three hours later— right after Jim Thompson vanished.
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899490,00.html
Recent Comments