The Museum Links Project: Our Process

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Rattanakosin Historic Area, Bang Phlat District, Thonburi Area

This video takes you behind the scenes of Museum Links, a programme led by NDMI’s Museum Knowledge Development team. It follows the journey from first ideas to co-design with teachers from six schools, showing how learners use comparative maps, interpret historical photographs, and study present-day places on site. The film also showcases students’ work connecting their own discoveries to Modernising Siam—a way of learning history through exploration, evidence, and personal synthesis rather than memorising dates and names.

Reading Bangkok Through Maps and Photographs

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This talk, Reading the “City”, invites the audience to look at Bangkok—and Thai cities more broadly—through visual evidence such as maps, photographs, and urban landscapes. It presents the city as a layered space shaped by different historical periods, from the canal-based city of moats, palaces, and forts in the early Rattanakosin era to later phases of urban expansion. Drawing on field observation alongside the reading of different kinds of maps, including historical maps and aerial photographs, the lecture traces the growth of key areas such as Silom, Sathorn, and Charoen Krung, as well as the emergence of commercial land structures. In the final section, the speaker raises spatial questions that connect history with everyday experience—why Siam Square feels walkable, why tall buildings line the river, and how Ratchadamnoen Boulevard came into being—helping listeners better understand Bangkok’s past and present as part of the city they live in.