Mandarin Oriental Bangkok



Several years later a partnership of Danish captains opened a replacement hotel. In the 1970s the board of the Oriental Hotel decided with the opening of the new River Wing, upon 1876 as the official establishment date of the Oriental Hotel.

At the end of the war a six-person partnership each contributed US$250 to buy the hotel. The partnership consisted of Germaine Krull (1897–1985), Prince Bhanu, General Chai Prateepasen, Pote Sarasin (a Thai lawyer) and John Webster and Jim Thompson, two Americans who had served in the Organization for Strategic Security (OSS) and who had stayed on in Thailand. Krull took the position of manager in 1947, despite no prior experience in the hotel field. Born in Poland, she had been best known as a photographer during the 1920s before service in the Pacific as a war correspondent for Agence France Presse. Badly run down after its wartime service, the partnership immediately began restoration and restocking of the hotel which offered to put Thompson’s an opportunity to use his architectural and artistic abilities.


In 1958 the ten-storey Garden Wing was built. It featured the city’s first elevator and was home to the Le Normandie Restaurant. In 1967, fearful that Thailand would fall to the communists, Krull sold her share to Italthai which at the time was well on its way to becoming one of the country’s most significant mercantile groups eventually totally some 60 companies involved in almost all aspects of the Thai economy.