Will gentrification respect city's people?

The neo-palladian edifice of the Customs House stands derelict on the bank of the Chao Phraya River near the Oriental Hotel in this 2015 file photo. The Treasury Department has already leased the 127-year-old building to a developer. The building is being refurbished to be a six-star hotel. (Photo: Panupong Changchai)

We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.

At sunset, another call for prayer echoes from this mosque, established by an Indonesian merchant on the bank of the Chao Phraya in the 1850s. Around 1888, during the reign of King Rama V, the mosque was relocated a few hundred metres inland to make way for the Customs House, one of the riverside's most majestic structures.