With a never-ending stream of new high-rise apartment blocks being built, sometimes it seems like they’ll be nothing left of the ‘old’ Bangkok.
Most of the city’s original wooden homes have disappeared – swallowed up by offices, shopping malls and condos.
But this pensioner is taking a stand against that, refusing to sell her crumbling 152-year-old teak house – even for a staggering 85 MILLION Thai baht ($2.5MILLION).
Kannika Chomsiri, 79, was born in the house, which was built originally by her great grandfather.
When developers bought neighboring land, they thought that Kannika would be quick to sell up.
But the retired police lieutenant refused.
Property developers pleaded with her to sell her ‘virtually worthless’ property – ramping up the offer each time they visited.
Even with big money on the table, Kannika, who became a nun after retiring, insisted that she wanted to stay in the house with her three sons, one daughter and five grandchildren.
The company developing the area instead built a strange looking, 24-storey L-shape apartment block around her home, as the couldn’t buy her land. A second building is going up directly in front of the pensioner’s house, and there’s a recently finished apartment block directly to the left.
It means that the grandmother and her family are living in the shadow of three huge new tower blocks.
‘The noise is a nightmare and it’s not nice looking out and seeing concrete walls, where once there were fields,’ Kannika told PackThailand.com
‘Most people would sell. But this was my parents’ home, and my grandparents’ home, and their parents lived here too.
