Chitra Konantakiert's father Jiang Guo sailed away from the shores of Teochew-speaking Guangdong 70 years ago and washed up on the banks of the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok in a leaky boat.

Within a few days he was hawking fishheads around Chinatown. Within a few years he ran his own shop and a few years later he could afford to send his four children to the best local and overseas schools.

Today his glamorous daughter, who neither speaks nor reads her father's native language, has become a TV personality-cum-expert in Thailand on the culture of her ancestors. Her celebration of her Chinese roots is one example of the re-emergence of ethnic pride in a community which struggled for years to meld seamlessly into the Thai community.

``Long ago, in order to own property and to acquire Thai nationality, the Chinese community had to adopt Thai names,'' explains Chitra. ``That was the deal.'' Her Thai family name was obligingly concocted by a Buddhist monk.

The Chinese language and overt displays of Chinese culture were also frowned on by the army generals who mostly ruled Thailand in the 30 or so years between the early 1940s and the 1970s.

First, they didn't want to upset the Japanese and later the Chinese revolution led to fear of communism. This cut off contact with what was, until the late 1940s, still regarded as the motherland for many Chinatown inhabitants.

Chitra has written 18 books on Chinese culture - all in Thai. Her most popular book, Chinese Kid, has been reprinted 27 times since it was first published nine years ago.

``It's about basic cultural knowledge children should know,'' says Chitra. ``It is also popular among Thai girls who find themselves marrying into a Chinese family.''

As one of the few people to write about Chinese culture in Thailand, she was in demand on Bangkok TV shows April 5 to explain the significance of the Ching Ming Festival, which is not a holiday but manages to coincide in Thailand with Chakri Day, commemorating the establishment in 1782 of the current royal dynasty and the founding of Bangkok: a date synonymous with the birth of Chinatown.

Like Chitra, most second- and third-generation ethnic Chinese speak Thai as their first and perhaps only language. Many have intermarried and dispersed into the wider community, and yet Bangkok's Chinatown is not only probably the oldest in the world but perhaps also the most genuinely original and commercially vibrant.

Although it was poverty and political upheaval which sent waves of Chinese abroad in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Bangkok's Chinatown has its origins in the mid 17th and 18th centuries.

When the old Siamese capital of Ayutthaya, 75 kilometers north of Bangkok, was sacked by Burmese invaders in 1767, a small colony of Chinese merchants re-established themselves on the banks of the Chao Phraya river in what was then the village of Bangkok.

They moved there in support of General Phraya Taksin, who was half Chinese, says Chitra, and who made himself king and eventually defeated and expelled the Burmese.

The present Chinatown dates from 1782, when Taksin's successor, King Rama I, chose Bangkok as his dynasty's capital and moved the original colony downstream half a kilometer to build his palace.

According to Taiwan's Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, there are an estimated 35 million ethnic Chinese scattered around the world today. The largest percentage of these - 26.7 million - are in Asia.

The largest migrations to Thailand were in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but records were kept only from 1918. The biggest single-year influx was 15,460, in 1927, with virtually all immigrants coming from areas with access to the sea: Hainan, Canton (Guangdong), Hokkien. The biggest language group were the Teochew.

But most so-called Chinatowns these days are sanitized replicas of one-time ethnic ghettos, shells retained to entertain tourists. In my home town of Manchester, England, for example, a Chinatown complete with a fancy gateway arch sprouted up a mere 18 years ago. Today, there must be at least 50 restaurants there serving up the heavy, rich-sauced Cantonese food the British like but which would be mostly unrecognizable in Shenzhen. A braised lamb chowmein, for instance.

Singapore, which is 77 percent Chinese, felt obliged to re-invent a Chinatown with a few brushed up shophouses, firecracker festivals and expensive restaurants for visitors. The natives must be very bemused.

By contrast, Bangkok's Chinatown is so real it can hurt the senses: the eyes smart from the blue smoke swirling in the air - a consequence of high-flame wok cooking and fumes from aging Vespa motor scooters. The nostrils might flare in fright at the fresh food alleys where live chickens are plunged squawking into boiling cooking water to order. They don't harbor bird-flu worries there.

  

Unlike so many modern-day Chinatowns, this one is not about ethnic Chinese food - it's about small metal foundries, oily secondhand engine repair shops; textiles, gold, gemstones, herbs and spices, and wholesaling of everything from drainpipes to sundrapes, from mounds of sun-dried fish to stacks of saucepans.

Chitra, who has an MBA from the United States and runs several businesses, reckons Bangkok's Chinatown is busier and bigger today than it was a few decades ago, with some 100 Chinese medicine shops with one of the biggest selections of ingredients to be found anywhere in the Chinese medicine world.

The area is mostly but not only Chinese, although they run most of the businesses, especially the gold shops. But Indian Sikhs handle the silk trade and others from the subcontinent have cornered gemstones, sometimes with marketing flair: ``If it shines, we have it,'' reads one shop sign.

Most of Chinatown's bustling business streets are little more than narrow sois, alleys no wider than a Hong Kong second bedroom, where the sun hardly shines because the buildings almost touch.

The streets are so crowded - with people, display stalls, three-wheeled tuk-tuk motorcarts, overloaded barrows and motorbikes - they make Causeway Bay look like a ripening paddy field. And yet, you can inch along and never be jostled or clumsily bumped: a miracle of space respect never learnt in Hong Kong.

Chinatown is known to Bangkokians by the name of its main street, Yaowarat. ``It means `young king','' explains Chitra. ``It is in honour of a visit made by the great 19th century King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, who approved the Chinese community's expansion with a new road, which the Chinese called Yaowarat.''

Many original Yaowarat shophouses are still there, but nowadays the upper floors often house stock or employees, says Chitra. The families who made good opted for less cluttered parts of town.

Also there's less manufacturing and more wholesaling today. ``Chinatown is Thailand's wholesale warehouse,'' says Bangkok businessman Anan Chitranukroh. ``Goods are distributed all over the country from there. It is very important today.''

A vital help in Yaowarat's trading prowess has been its proximity to the Chao Phraya, Thailand's biggest river, which has provided a natural distribution highway.

But Yaowarat is not a desolate night-time lockup quarter, as police captain Apichatpong Imphet showed me on a meandering tour among some of the resident families he is on nodding terms with.

The area has remained largely immune from the kind of high-rise redevelopment which has plagued many other places in Asia, not least Hong Kong. Its jumble of old buildings is mostly owned by individual families, denying property developers easy access. Some of the architecture is worth a second look, like the Tang To Kang gold shop and Bangkok Bank branch on opposite corners of the junction between Sampeng Lane and Mangkorn Road.

Songwat Street packs tiny homes, gem shops, scrap yards, a Buddhist temple, a mosque, and Chinese-style seafood restaurants along its short length parallel with the river.

Apichatpong met me at Plabplachai police station at the end of Songwat Street, wary at first but slowly warming to my theme. It's not easy for a farang (foreigner) to know a policeman in Bangkok - unless you first know a local card sharp to secure an introduction.

Don't tell anyone, but the police in Thailand condone, control, participate in and take a cut from the Thais' illegal but obsessive gambling.

``Why do you want to know about our Chinatown,'' he asked with one of the infamous 13 Thai smiles - the one which exudes suspicion.

When I said I merely wanted to write nice things, he almost burst the buttons on his skin-tight dark khaki uniform shirt as his chest swelled.

``I am one-quarter of Chinese. The mother of my father came from China,'' he said in imprecise but passable English learnt as part of a short scholarship he won to the United States. ``But he married a Thai and I heard only a few stories from my old grandmother. I think she was from Canton.

``Very good people here. No trouble and sometimes a little ...'' He grinned, rubbing his fingers together in the international sign for baksheesh.

There is certainly plenty of respect for the policeman's uniform, and the locals are mildly curious about the foreigner in tow, but business is business and Vespa scooters piled dangerously high with goods weave endlessly between pedestrians.

By now I was getting tired of the blue smoke, the noise, the crowds, all the smiles and the bows. I needed refreshment, but a foaming glass of local Singha beer was not to hand.

``I will take you somewhere to feel better,'' said Apichatpong. ``We must have some Kaidam tomyaacheen!''

He led me up dim narrow sois where oysters were sizzling in giant woks and the smell of garlic and pepper - a link with Teochew - was heavy in the air, and live chickens and less familiar feathered birds fretted in tiny cages. This is a place where Hong Kong's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals would become positively apoplectic watching butcher Kamdee Chotimook slaughter poultry to order. He can dispatch 35 in 10 minutes.

We also passed stalls where fat-faced, middle-aged women in aprons pounded pestles making the spicy-sour som tam green mango salad, or stirred the original Chinese-Thai fusion dish, pad thai, a concoction of fried rice noodles, beanshoots, peanuts, shrimps and chillies.

We emerged on Yaowarat Road where policemen in helmets, dark glasses and face masks aimlessly blew whistles at the frenzied traffic, and pulled up outside the curiously named Shangarila restaurant.

Inside was a time-warped Art Deco ambience, with respectful, severely uniformed staff - and two large bowls of double black chicken soup with Chinese herbs.

It tasted bitter and slightly medicinal, but it revived me. For many Thais, such a delicacy doesn't come cheap at 150 baht (HK$30).

But the police captain wasn't paying. In Bangkok they rarely do.