3 Hours in Bangkok: Baan Krua, a resilient community crafting its own future

Go across a canal from Bangkok’s swanky speakeasies and megawatt malls to find a tangle of tiny lanes weaving through a community long written off as forsaken and impoverished.

While visitors flock to tour the Jim Thompson House, few cross a nearby footbridge to where it all began in a claustrophobic maze of homes once filled with looms weaving silk. Decades after Thompson’s mysterious 1967 disappearance, the perception endures that Baan Krua’s prosperity and future vanished along with its foreign benefactor.

But this rustic labyrinth today is full of surprises, from a home to monster chickens and puppets to remarkably friendly old-timers ready to guide visitors to the few artisans still weaving silk on antiquated teak looms.

“We are not a poor community,” said Meena, the 54-year-old secretary of Jamiul Khairiyah, one of the many mosques in Bangkok’s…