When Chulalongkorn University announced plans to redevelop Bangkok’s Sam Yan district into a “Smart City”, few expected that a tiny Chinese shrine tucked behind student dormitories would spark one of the city’s fiercest debates about heritage and belonging. The Chao Mae Thapthim shrine, dedicated to Mazu, the sea goddess revered by Chinese seafaring communities, has become the unlikely heart of a dispute that pits property logic against moral geography.
For the university’s Office of Property Management (branded as PMCU), which owns the land, the shrine stands in the way of a mixed-use complex that promises economic growth and urban renewal. Its plan proposes relocating the shrine, claiming that development and preservation can coexist. But lawsuits, eviction orders, and public criticism soon turned it into a larger question: who decides what forms of faith and memory deserve a place in Bangkok’s future?
Background
The historic shrine sits on land owned by Chulalongkorn. The shrine’s roots go back over 150 years, predating the university itself. Since then, it has been a locus of community life and collective memory. In 1957, the university sought to reclaim a stretch of land between the National Stadium and Rama IV Road, but residents refused to leave. Three years later, a fire broke out—yet the shrine miraculously survived even as nearby houses were destroyed. In 1970, the community raised funds to rebuild it in Sam Yan.
Since the 2000s, PMCU has pursued a major redevelopment scheme around Sam Yan, branding it as a “Smart City” hub of student housing and commercial projects on the university’s 385 rai of revenue-generating land. When the shrine’s lease expired in 2015, the university sought eviction of its longtime caretaker. In 2020, the conflict intensified when students formed a human chain and launched networked campaigns to defend the shrine. At stake is more than a piece of land: the struggle symbolises the tension between heritage rights, community identity, and the imperatives of urban redevelopment in Bangkok’s central precincts.
What began as a local grievance has thus evolved into a civic cause. In 2023, student activists led by Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal produced The Last Breath of Sam Yan, a documentary tracing the shrine’s contested history and the surrounding community’s quiet struggle to remain. The film, which won recognition at local festivals and international screenings, reframed the issue as more than a land dispute. It became a statement about accountability, gentrification, and the right of ordinary citizens to define heritage on their own terms.
Through screenings, petitions, and court interventions, the campaign around Chao Mae Thapthim turned cultural defence into civic participation. Students, residents, and alumni engaged with public debate not through protest alone but by producing knowledge—documentaries, essays, and social-media narratives—that challenged official definitions of progress. In this sense, heritage became a language of citizenship.
But the shrine’s visibility also exposes an uncomfortable truth about how Bangkok chooses what to remember. Heritage protection in the city is deeply uneven. Certain sites—those that appeal to middle-class nostalgia or cosmopolitan ideals of multiculturalism—attract broad sympathy and institutional support. Others fade quietly, their losses rationalised as the cost of development.
Chao Mae Thapthim survives in public memory partly because it fits an attractive story: a multicultural landmark, a university neighbour, and a symbol of faith under threat. Yet the same moral energy was not extended to communities like Mahakan Fort, whose century-old wooden homes were demolished in the name of beautification. In Chinatown, where Talad Noi enjoys partial preservation, many shrines and shophouses have quietly vanished, while others survive thanks to the maze of narrow alleys and fragmented plots that frustrate real estate developers.
Activists tend to focus on emblematic sites because they crystallise multiple narratives: religion, state power, and urban injustice, but this spotlight effect leaves other endangered sites invisible. These overlooked sites function as what Michel Foucault called “heterotopias”—spaces that exist both within and outside the rationalised order, tolerated as traces of the past yet excluded from the modern aesthetic the “Smart City” seeks to project. The politics of visibility reproduce inequality in heritage protection, privileging iconic battles over diffused cultural landscapes.
A university as urban developer
Chulalongkorn University’s role in this story is emblematic of a broader transformation in Thailand’s urban governance. Once a symbol of national learning and public service, the university has increasingly become a corporate landlord managing some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in central Bangkok. Established on former royal land and granted extensive leasehold property in central Bangkok, the university today acts as one of the city’s most influential landlords.
Over the past two decades, PMCU has redeveloped large sections of Sam Yan, Siam Square, and Suan Luang into commercial zones filled with malls, hotels, and condominiums. These projects are justified through the rhetoric of development and public benefit, but they often marginalise the very communities that sustained the area for generations. Affordable food stalls, auto parts shops, and small grocery stores were evicted or displaced due to rising rents and commercial redevelopment by PMCU. People who had lived in these areas for generations were bound to move out of the Sam Yan area because of soaring annual rents—a direct consequence of PMCU’s real estate developments. Since 2004, the university has raised the monthly rent of Siam Square to 80,000–160,000 baht/unit. The university also shortened the rental period of any contract to 5-10 years. While PMCU has promoted the “Smart City” initiative as a model of sustainable and innovative urbanism, the resulting gentrification and displacement of longstanding communities in Sam Yan and surrounding districts point to the contradictions of this model: state‑linked institutions reproducing inequality even as they promote innovation and sustainability.
The logic extends beyond commercial redevelopment. Rajamangala University of Technology Tawan-Ok’s Uthenthawai Campus, which has long resisted Chulalongkorn’s attempts to reclaim its land, recently faced pressure to relocate. Authorities cited student violence as the reason, even as other institutions with similar issues remain untouched. Such selective enforcement shows how moral narratives about order and safety can also be mobilized to clear space for capital.
Heritage as moral geography
The Chao Mae Thapthim dispute is not only about a shrine. It illuminates how faith, memory, and space are governed in contemporary Bangkok. Urban planning, often presented as a neutral technocratic process, is also a moral one—it defines what is valued, what is tolerated, and what must disappear.
By insisting that spiritual life can simply be moved or replicated elsewhere, planners overlook the ritual ecology that sustains such places: caretakers, worshippers, informal vendors, and the rhythms of daily devotion. Heritage, in this view, is not a fixed object but a living relationship between people and place.
When that relationship is severed, something larger than architecture is lost. The moral geography of the city—its invisible map of care and belonging—shrinks a little more.
The struggle around Chao Mae Thapthim resonates across Southeast Asia, where redevelopment collides with living heritage. In Singapore, the exhumation of Bukit Brown Cemetery ignited public debate over how a “smart” nation remembers its dead. In Penang, UNESCO-listed clan jetties stand as photogenic remnants of Chinese migration but face slow cultural erosion under the weight of tourism. In Ho Chi Minh City, thousands petitioned to save a colonial-era building from demolition, turning urban nostalgia into civic action.
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If policymakers truly seek to balance development with cultural continuity, they must move beyond preserving facades. Heritage protection should extend to the ritual and social life that gives these spaces meaning. Universities and state agencies overseeing redevelopment could consult local caretakers and heritage scholars before approving relocations, ensuring that development does not erase living traditions.
Courts, too, need frameworks that recognise intangible cultural value alongside property rights. Otherwise, communities defending sacred or historic sites will remain at a disadvantage, their claims dismissed as sentiment rather than substance.
Finally, the civic engagement seen in the Chao Mae Thapthim campaign deserves recognition. Documentary-making, social-media advocacy, and student organising are not peripheral to policy—they are forms of public reasoning that enrich democratic life.
What Chao Mae Thapthim tells us
As of late 2025, the legal case over Chao Mae Thapthim remains unresolved. Lower courts have sided with Chulalongkorn University, but appeals and public attention continue. The outcome will determine more than the shrine’s fate. It will signal whose voices carry moral weight in Bangkok’s march toward modernisation.
Whether the shrine stands or is relocated, its story has already revealed the tensions that shape the contemporary city: between heritage and progress, faith and profit, memory and erasure. The fight for this small sanctuary is a reminder that what we choose to preserve ultimately reflects who we believe we are.
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