Bastion of City Life : Shophouse--Business Also Home in Asia

Prateep Cholchartrakul sat on his chair outside the appliance shop, passing the time with neighborhood friends and watching the traffic grind by on Bangkok’s busy Sukhumvit Road.

His wife, Sudarat, handled customers at the front counter and, at the rear of the shop, a son and a daughter bent over the repair bench. A jumble of blow-dryers and steam irons filled the showcase, and an assortment of lighting fixtures hung from the ceiling.

For 26 years, the cramped little building has been both home and business for the Cholchartrakuls and their five children. They are a shophouse family.

From a Common Mold

Across Southeast Asia, the shophouse remains a durable bastion of daily commerce and urban life. With minor variations, blocks upon blocks of the flat-roof structures seem the product of a common mold: 4 meters wide and 12 deep (13 feet by 40 feet), two or three stories high, sharing common walls in a series like Western row houses. The open ground floor houses the business, secured at night by a metal grill. The floors above are home and warehouse.

In Hanoi and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where goods are scarce, noodle shops, beauty salons and bicycle mechanics do what business there is in shophouses. The shophouses of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, bustle with trade and subcontracted industrial work. Even among the ultramodern high-rises of Singapore, some shophouses remain. And the government there has a project to preserve several shophouse blocks in the old Chinese district for history’s sake.

In Bangkok, where new office buildings and department stores lunge skyward, more than half the businesses are still found in shophouses, said Charatsri Teepirach, director of the city’s Comprehensive Planning Division.

“But the growth rate of new shophouses has declined in the past 10 years,” she noted.

Property Now Too Valuable

Commercial property in the city has become too valuable for shophouse construction, and as education and business opportunities increase, fewer children want to stay on in the little family stores.

In urban Asia, the pattern of American metropolises is starting to take hold. Commercial cores are becoming daytime zones, the workers leaving each night for homes and apartments farther out, each evening rush hour depleting the soul of the inner city.

“In most big cities, commerce and residential areas are separated absolutely,” Charatsri agreed, but noted that some--she mentioned Osaka and Kyoto--are looking into ways to lure back a 24-hour population.

“In Bangkok, we mixed the two uses, commercial and residential, in the shophouse.” Now, she lamented, the pattern is changing here, too.

In a side-street shophouse, Ou Kang Ngor and her husband sell stationery and assorted dry goods in their ground-floor store. On a recent visit, business was slow, and the goods on her shelves indicated that it had been for some time. The colors on a boxed inkwell were fading, and when it was lifted the shape of its box was outlined in dust. Her only customers came for a four-cent service, a photocopy on the Fuji machine that she installed last year.

She took a 20-year lease on the shophouse 10 years ago, for $11,500 up front and $8 a month. There was a school nearby, and she figured a stationery store would do well. Now, she said, old customers come in, but increasingly the neighborhood’s business is going to a Japanese-owned department store nearby.

Three of her five children have abandoned the family business; one is an office clerk, another works for a tour agency and the third has a job at a cannery.

Her 23-year-old son Tawee still helps out, but he is also studying business management at Ramkamhaeng University.

“I’d like to open a business center,” he said, to provide services for other commercial enterprises. “And most of my friends at university want to go into other businesses, too, and own their own homes.”

But as he straightened the stock, working in the shop as he has since he was 10, Tawee reflected on shophouse life.

“Thais are like this,” he said. “The children have to help. We have to struggle.”

Kitchen Behind Curtain

He led a visitor on a tour of his home, a carbon copy of tens of thousands of others in Bangkok. At the rear of the ground floor, separated from the shop by a curtain, were the kitchen and a small dining table.

Stairs, center-worn by years of use and lined with boxed inventory, led to the second-floor family quarters, a bedroom over the shop and a plain teak-floored living room with its leatherette couch and chairs. The third floor was filled with more stock.

This is where Tawee grew up, working in the shop and playing in a small back alley. It is his culture.

“My ancestors were all merchants,” he said.

“Maybe, by the time my mother gets us through school, she’ll be ready for a rest herself,” the young man mused.

Almost as predictable as the shape of Southeast Asian shophouses is the small Confucian shrine at the rear of the store. Throughout the region, the businesses almost invariably are run by Chinese families.

Origin May Be Chinese

No authority interviewed could place the origin of the shophouse, but most suspected it came from China with the waves in migration into Southeast Asia over the past centuries.

The structures were present in Bangkok almost from its founding slightly more than 200 years ago. Even before the Chinese, the Thais built stilted, wooden row houses of their own along the main street of a town. The Chinese introduced the brick and mortar.

Here as elsewhere, maintaining big estates and an army of servants became too expensive, and landowners sold or leased frontage property to small merchants who erected shophouses.

In Bangkok, even the trade followed a pattern, with the goldsmiths clustering along one street and cloth merchants on another. A drive through the city today will reveal whole blocks of shophouses dedicated to specific wares: eyeglasses, lumber, plumbing supplies. In areas where auto parts and motors are sold and serviced, the streets have become open-air garages, dark with grease and stray engine parts.

But just a block or two away, cranes and workmen are putting up new office buildings and department stores, a development that has changed consumer habits from browsing and bargaining in the shophouses to the convenience of one-stop shopping, even at higher, fixed prices.

A new shophouse in the central shopping district sells for more than $600,000, according to real estate agents, but even then banks are reluctant to grant loans for a structure with an uncertain economic future.

As the rising property values force out the small merchant, the shophouses lead the way to cheaper land, lining the highways to suburban districts in the ribbon development that bedevils urban planners.

Moving to Countryside

And in Thailand’s countryside, the new structures in growing towns are shophouses finding their economic niche, a series of storefronts like those of the American frontier.

“This is still the only way to get population density along the commercial street, where every meter is expensive,” said Kiat Chivakul, head of the department of urban and regional planning at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

A colleague, Nipand Wichiannoi, said that in Bangkok, developers turned to townhouses--residential structures without any business--about 1980, meeting the growing demand among younger people for living quarters away from the rattle of traffic and the sound of customers in the shop below.

With consumers turning to department stores and younger Thais to residential districts, older shophouse blocks are coming down, though some small merchants hang on by renting out living space to students and other non-family members caught by a shortage of affordable rooms.

Even the generational bonds of the Asian family are stretching. Nipand is conducting studies of home purchases by younger Thais.

“Most simply want to get away from their parents,” he said of his preliminary findings.

Together, working from the inner city outward, from the main streets to the back lanes, these forces may eventually squeeze out the shophouse culture of families growing, playing, working and dying in the same three floors, four meters across and 12 deep.