Tomahto, tomayto / pagoda, stupa

Regardless of whether they are graduates of MIT or merely the University of Life, Thais are a superstitious bunch. Many barbershops close on Wednesdays as local wisdom has it that a haircut in the middle of the week is as good an idea as shoving a fork into a power socket. Many, irrespective of sex, age, or class, wouldn’t dream of scheduling a caesarean or wedding reception without consulting a professional soothsayer. And just about every other building — be it a simple hovel out in the boondocks or a glittering skyscraper smack bang in the city centre — has a shrine for its guardian spirit, whom you’re supposed to pay homage to every now and again (red fantas being the preferred offering, though in some cases cheroots will also do).

A CIVIL SERVANT IN BURMA (1913): “The country is full of pagodas, monasteries, theins, images of the Buddha, zayats.” © IWM SE 1019

And then there are amulets. Believed to imbue their wearers with divine protection, mention of these talismans is almost de rigueur in Thai veterans’ accounts of WWII and the Cold War. Such is their popularity that one mall on the outskirts of Bangkok even has entire floors dedicated solely to shops specialising in charms. And if that isn’t proof enough, there’s also the fact that one of the country’s most-read dailies has a dedicated column in lieu of a theatre section.

PEEPS AT MANY LANDS, BURMA (1908): Not only on the river-banks do these pagodas crown the hills, but in every town and village throughout the country; and in many remote districts, far from present habitations, some shrine, however simple, has been raised.

That amulets are so widely collected is nothing but a blessing for wargamers, as without them we’d never have readymade stupas available on Lazada for as cheap as £3 a piece. Made of acrylic plastic and a hollow core designed for the placement of amulets, these storage cases are Thai in style, though with a bit of a squint they’d pass muster as Burmese or Laotian fanes.

Stupas galore: a diorama depicting 17th Century Siam at the National Museum in Bangkok.

Unlike the Angkorean ruins or giant Buddhas so beloved of many a gaming table, stupas are ubiquitous throughout Theravada Southeast Asia in both rural and urban settings. They feature not only quite heavily in accounts of the Burma campaign (though they are invariably referred to as pagodas), but also on French unit badges and recruitment posters. Which is all the weirder that most wargamers appear not to have picked up on their existence, as in all my years of lurking on the internet I’ve only ever seen one modelled for the tabletop.

For the smallest stupas, I drew inspiration from the trio of whitewashed stupas that mark the Three Pagodas Pass — a defile in the Tenasserim mountains straddling the Thai-Myanmar border renowned for its role in the Burmese-Siamese wars that raged intermittently throughout the four centuries that preceded the slow-motion demise of the Konbaung Empire at the hands of the British — and had them grouped in a triangle, reckoning it a livelier configuration than a straight-laced row. They were undercoated in VPA Dark Rubber and drybrushed with successive coats of VMC Light Grey and VGC Dead White.

Measuring a staggering 140mm tall, the largest of the bunch has been given an attention-grabbing coat of VGC Glorious Gold washed with Army Painter Strong Tone ink to represent the numerous gilded stupas that abound throughout the region, particularly in Myanmar. The plinth is a 3d-printed design downloaded off Thingiverse and was touched up using the same choice of colours as that of the smallest models featured above.

The M-sized stupa sports an inverted combination of the preceding specimen, with the gilding being confined to the structure’s tip. The pedestal is the same as the largest stupa’s ; if memory serves me right, it was actually designed to base a Dr Who sculpture.

The sheer ubiquity of these monuments means you can plop them anywhere on the table and they would neither look out of place nor unrealistic. If you think the above scene improbable, just look up the Sule Pagoda in Yangon or the That Dam Stupa in Vientiane.

And finally, a size comparison picture with 20mm Thais from Elhiem Figures in the foreground. As per the overlong introduction, the models are available from a number of sellers on Lazada, the Alibaba-owned, Southeast Asian version of Amazon. Give them a try!

Entrenchments

Early War Miniatures may be best known for their unrivalled catalogue of obscure military hardware (I mean, who else does Norwegian field and mountain guns, in any scale?), but their vacuform terrain pieces aren’t half bad either. Being made of plastic, these field fortifications are incredibly light, a welcome difference from the far heavier resin emplacements available from other manufacturers.

First up is a large infantry strongpoint with “built up banks, piled sandbags riveted with wooden posts and wooden wattling” in the words of proprietor Paul Thompson. They come two to a bag and admittedly don’t look like much in their natural state, but they do paint up quite nicely.

The trick is to lather all of the exposed ground with sand. This adds an extra layer of detail which can then be brought out via drybrushing. For painting I relied upon the emulsion equivalents of my go-to colours for bases, namely Vallejo Game Colour Earth and Bonewhite. Consequently a basecoat of Nippon Paint’s Friar Tuck was applied, followed by a dry brush of Natural Oak.

The pieces was then flocked with my own custom blend of “meadow” static grass from Noch mixed with a potpourri of Woodland Scenics Fine Turf (specifically Burnt Grass, Green Grass, and Yellow Grass). Tajima 1 grass tufts were then added as a final touch to lend the pieces that extra bit of oomph.

The same method was used on the smaller sanger pieces, as the rest of the pictures will attest. For the gun pit’s wooden planks a basecoat of Foundry Bay Brown Shade was followed with drybrushings of Vallejo Gold Brown and Stonewall Grey, as per a tutorial from the Wargames Table. Sandbags were painted Vallejo Sand Yellow and washed with Army Painter Soft Tone inks.

So they you have it, smashingly simple readymade dug-in positions for those of us too timid to muck about with foamboard, mdf, and a modicum of imagination.

More village houses

February saw the completion of two more of the Thai House Model kits. You’d have thought assembling them would be a breeze by now, but in my misguided complacency I actually ended up breaking all three houses’ roofing beams during their fittings, so delicate and paper-thin are the pieces. Which has naturally drained any enthusiasm I have for the other kit awaiting construction (oh, the things one does in the pursuit of accuracy!).

Though there is no question Tamiya Dull Red produces excellent results, they say variety is the spice of life and so two other of the company’s spray paints were employed. The two-house compound was sprayed with Tamiya Red Brown and given successive drybrushes of VPA New Wood and a lighter 2:1 mix of VPA New Wood and VMC Desert Sand. The roofs were doused in VMC Orange Red, after which a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink was applied. A final highlight of VMC German Orange was then drybrushed on to bring the tiles into relief.

By contrast, the poorer man’s house is a monotone affair with no attempt having been made to distinguish the roof. A different spray can was used for the basecoat, namely Tamiya Linoleum Deck Brown, though the subsequent highlights utilised the same Vallejo colours mentioned above, which probably accounts for why the difference between the two schemes is so negligible.

Fans of Rapid Fire! will be pleased to know that the smaller house is capable of, er, housing an entire company of Japanese. No mean feat, given the beefed-up size of such units at the start of the Pacific War.

Traditional Thai house

Sarissa Precision’s Far East huts are all the rage these days, but while they may be well and good for semi-isolated jungle dwellings in the middle of nowhere, I wanted something a little more refined and affluent, the sort of well-off housing you’d expect of a market settlement laying astride a trunk road leading to somewhere.

This wasn’t as tall an order as you would think. As it turned out, there are certain benefits to living where I am, even if a jar of Branston Pickle does cost thrice as it would in Blighty: safety from the pandemic’s worst ravages (with the death toll currently standing at 61) and, more pertinently, a thriving cottage industry specialising in miniature houses that cater to doll collectors and spirit worshipers(!).

I had initially intended on getting custom-built structures that would only require a paint job to bling things up. But incredibly enough, none of the many makers I contacted had any opening in their commission queues. Which meant turning to kit manufacturers.

My first port of call was Art-Dee, a one-man band (aren’t they all?) from whom I had previously sourced a train station. But despite my entreaties, the proprietor saw no point in scaling down his line of easy-build houses, which, being 1/50 scale, are more suited to 28mm.

That left Traditional Thai House Model, whose simplest kit consists of close to two hundred laser cut pieces.

With prices upwards from £34.50 they are by no means cheap, but in addition to the uniqueness factor (always great for rationalising a purchase!), there’s also the fact that the kits are made of actual teakwood. In other words, the mithril of wood, prized for its durability and imperviousness to termites. And as anyone who has tried to procure teak furniture will let you know, this material will cost you an inheritance. Now whether that justifies the kits’ price tags is debatable, but it’s not like one is spoilt for choice…

Equally debatable is the quality of the instruction sheet. Personally I would have sworn a lot less had the individual steps been broken down further as I repeatedly discovered that some pieces would have fitted more snugly had it been made clearer that another combination ought to have preceded their positioning. Combined with the multitude of pieces, this was nothing short of an arduous build, the model house equivalent of religious self-flagellation or those fiddly resin AFVs produced by obscure European brands. That being said, the result is nevertheless well worth the effort.

The assembly having greatly tested my patience, I could not wait to move on to other projects and so opted for a simple paint scheme using Tamiya’s Dull Red spray, a near-match for the “barn red” employed by the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok. This was followed by a quick wash of Army Painter’s Dark Tone, topped with a generous drybrush of a light sandy colour whose identity I have forgotten.

Basing was a similarly simple affair. A piece of hobby foamboard weighed down by washers that also helped make up for the uneven stilts (damn the instructions!) was cut to size, bevelled, and textured before undergoing a base coat of Tamiya JGSDF Brown and a drybrush of VGC Bonewhite.

Livening things up is a pair of water jars which I have placed out in the open, by the staircase. Though today’s pollution has made their function decorative, “back in the day” these earthenware jars were used to collect rainwater from which one could either drink or shower.

For pots there is an anonymous Chinese line of architectural accessories readily available on ebay and AliExpress. These are neither cheap nor spectacular, requiring some effort to touch them up. Well, a lot of effort actually, as what I had in mind are dragon motifs not unlike the ones below.

But as luck would have it, Traditional Thai House Models unexpectedly released exactly what I needed while my ebay order was slowly making its way from Shenzhen. Clearly targeting railway modellers, they come pre-painted and are of a dragon-bearing design ubiquitous to landed properties in Thailand.

In the end I decided on making use of the aforementioned goodies I had ordered from China to add an extra dash of colour to the house. Thus began my first and near-disastrous attempt at Ming pottery: a basecoat of VMC London Grey followed by drybrushed highlights of VMC Sky Grey and VMC Cold White. For the pattern — intended to portray a never-ending tree branch but which instead ended up vaguely suggesting mythological beasts (at least to my charitable eye) — an unshaken bottle of VMC Dark Blue was relied upon. Unshaken being the operative word, as it’s the watery thinness we would otherwise curse that’s key to a passable mimicry of blue and white porcelain.

As a finishing touch, a flowery tuft from another local firm, GG Diorama, was added to the vase in imitation of the amazing work done by The Tactical Painter.

Originally meant to house a clothesline, the corner patch in the back was requisitioned for banana trees that Traditional Thai House Models had gifted me in recompense for a misplaced order. Though they are much too flimsy to last long on a tabletop battlefield, the inclusion of fruits on some of the trees was too good of a thing to shelve.

A quick word on usage: as each of the six countries that make up mainland Southeast Asia has its own distinctive style of architecture, versatile this building isn’t. Using it for games set in Burma, Malaya, or Vietnam would be akin to plopping a Russian orthodox church into the middle of Oosterbeek. Or populating a Normandy board with Mediterranean houses for that matter. Thankfully there’s much of an overlap between the Thai and Cambodian vernaculars, so that’s me sorted out.

And last but not least, some propaganda shots featuring some Elhiem Thais.

So there you have it, the beginnings of a village. That is, if I can work up the courage to put together the three other kits awaiting my attention.

Museum Siam

Opened in 2008, the Museum Siam features state-of-the-art displays primarily aimed at kids (think lots of games, interactive screens, and photo props). While it doesn’t quite achieve its self-professed mission of deconstructing Thai national identity, the museum does offer a number of fantastic dioramas.

Of these, the most impressive are the three that depict the long-destroyed kingdom of Ayutthaya that flourished between the 15th and 18th centuries.

Some of the set-ups wouldn’t look too out of place on a WWII tabletop.

This drum tower probably won’t, however.

Whereas this warehouse is too Thai (and of a style that had probably disappeared by the 1920s).

Piers like this, on the other hand, still exist, and can probably be found elsewhere in the region.

A large samurai contingent existed in 17th century Siam, for the sharp-eyed among you are wondering about the presence of kimono-wearing figures.

There is a massive diorama devoted to early 20th century Bangkok. Sadly it lacks the craftsmanship of the previous diorama.

Funnily enough the semi-fascist period that saw the refinement of modern Thai nationalist thought is only briefly glossed over.

The examples of Thai Second World War propaganda more than make up for it though.

My favourite of the bunch: the June 1941 cover of Modern Thai magazine celebrating the annexation of territories gained at the end of the Franco-Thai War.

Colonial Architecture of Indochina: Savannakhet

Lying astride the mighty Mekong is Savannakhet, Lao’s second largest city and the birthplace of Kaysone Phomvihane, the bullnecked éminence rouge of the Pathet Lao. A good embodiment of what Martin Windrow calls “the ultimate Buddhist languor of Laos” (a rather orientalist comment if there ever was one), Savannakhet has a wonderfully atmospheric old quarter graced with colonial mansions and shophouses. Sadly the chief reason for their existence is poverty and not conservation, and apart from a few beautifully restored ones it’s unlikely they’ll see out the decade.

Colonial architecture of Malaya (part II)

Housed in a magnificent printing house built in 1899, the recently-opened Kuala Lumpur City Gallery offers an impressive diorama showing what the city centre would have looked like back in the day.

Malayan architecture

All wargames-related activity have ironically been suspended ever since my moving to the Holy Land of wargaming; that being said, this blog still warrants a long-overdue update. So here are a bunch of displays present in the various museums that dot Melaka’s old quarter.

But because Melaka’s something of a time capsule (not unlike Luang Prabang and Hoi An) equally inspiring examples can be found outside on the streets:

Ayutthaya Historical Study Centre

A small but spectacular museum dedicated to the Siamese capital’s 17th Century heyday. Hopefully these amazing dioramas will inspire a few gamers to put in a little more effort on the accuracy front (no giant Buddhas plopped in the middle of a field please!).

jungle!

More jungle pieces. Note that many of them have yet to be flocked.