The Little Tea Shop That Became a Public Space

In the basement of Chamchuri Square, a few steps from Sam Yan MRT, there is a small tea shop called CiliC. It is easy to miss. These days, especially inside Chamchuri Square, more and more spaces are occupied by chain stores, franchises, or businesses backed by larger capital. Small independent coffee and tea shops are becoming increasingly rare.

CiliC is one of the few places that still feels run by a person rather than by a brand manual. That person is P’Ink, “P’” being the Thai way of addressing someone slightly older with both familiarity and respect.

She has run the shop for more than eight years. CiliC was one of the early cheese tea shops in Thailand, and at its best it could make around 20,000 baht a day. Today, on some days, sales are only a fraction of that.

But what makes CiliC important to me is not really the tea. It is what P’Ink allowed the shop to become.

Over the years, people have used it for board games, flower arranging, Korean fan meetings, small gatherings, book launches and discussions. Sam Yan Press has organised events there on Wittgenstein and the philosophy of war, and sometimes nearly sixty people have squeezed into the shop. P’Ink charged us almost nothing.

Morning Glory Collective, which works with workers around the Chao Mae Thapthim Shrine, also received her help. P’Ink helped develop a pomegranate tea recipe so the group could sell drinks to raise money for workers.

CiliC became a place of connectivity. People who would otherwise have little reason to meet somehow encounter one another there. A customer becomes a friend; a student comes to listen to a discussion and later organises one. It is, in a modest sense, a laboratory of living together.

None of this is part of the normal job description of a tea shop owner. Yet in practice, P’Ink has been quietly contributing to the civic and social infrastructure of Sam Yan for years, without really being recognised for it.

The Room Before CiliC

My relationship with CiliC began through another small room nearby.

When Sam Yan Press was still young, our office was a tiny room of around twenty square metres in the basement of Chamchuri Square. It had once been used by staff of the food court. The owner of the food court, himself a former student activist, allowed us to use it.

The “secret room” in the basement of Chamchuri Square during one of our meetings. I am in the red T-shirt. On the right, closest to me, are Baimai Ketkanok, one of the founders of REDEM, and Ford Tattep, in the black T-shirt, a co-founder of Free Youth and one of the most prominent activists of Thailand’s 2020 protest movement. The room became an informal meeting place for activists and students, the first official home of Sam Yan Press, and also an early base for Delicious Democracy cookies, which later grew into a restaurant.

When I had conflicts with the university and had few safe places to meet people, that room became important. During the political movement around 2020, many student activists passed through it. Penguin Parit came there. Ford Tattep of Free Youth used it. Thai and Taiwanese students met there to talk about what later became known internationally as the Milk Tea Alliance.

Students met, slept, argued, planned things and sometimes simply hid there. For a period, it was one of those places that was never officially important, but somehow became important anyway.

Later the food court was forced to close. Eventually even the entrance to our old room was sealed with concrete.

That little space disappeared.

Around that period, I came to know P’Ink. She too was fighting to survive. After Samyan Mitrtown opened nearby and then Covid hit, businesses in Chamchuri Square suffered badly. P’Ink helped organise more than thirty tenants to ask for lower rent and was among those who petitioned Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. Eventually, the rent was reduced.

That was when I began to see her differently. She was not simply someone selling tea. She was a fighter.

She Was Never Fighting Only for Herself

Once P’Ink told me that a large Chinese tea chain was preparing to rent space on the first floor of Chamchuri Square. When she saw it, she burst into tears and immediately called one of the building managers.

Why, she asked, did they keep bringing in more tea and coffee chains when so many existing shops were already struggling? Why was there no policy to think about the balance of businesses in the building? What would happen to the independent shops already there? And what would happen to their workers if more of them were forced to close?

What struck me was that she was not speaking only about CiliC.

She was worrying about everyone.

The university and the mall could look at rental income and occupancy rates. P’Ink was thinking about shopkeepers, workers and the lives built around those businesses.

She did not begin as a particularly political person. Her politics came gradually, from running a shop, listening to customers and hearing young people talk about how uncertain they felt about their futures. It came from watching other shopkeepers struggle. It came from dealing with institutions that often seemed to understand space primarily through money.

Perhaps this is how many people become political: not because they begin with an ideology, but because they begin to care about the people directly in front of them.

Sam Yan Has Seen This Before

There is something fitting, and perhaps unsettling, about all of this happening inside Chamchuri Square.

Long before the mall and the glass towers, this part of Sam Yan was made up of communities, markets and shophouses. The transformation did not happen overnight. The project that eventually became Chamchuri Square was first conceived decades ago as a major development on Chulalongkorn University land. Construction began, stalled during the economic turmoil of the 1990s, and the unfinished towers stood for years.

The university later revived the project and eventually developed and managed Chamchuri Square itself. It was an important turning point: Chulalongkorn was no longer simply leasing land to outside operators, as had long happened elsewhere, but becoming an increasingly ambitious manager and developer of its own urban property.

The building finally opened in 2008, shortly after Chulalongkorn became an autonomous university. In the years around this period, the university’s commercial districts became much more aggressively redeveloped. Rents rose, old businesses disappeared and small tenants increasingly had to compete with chains and larger capital.

The official language surrounding development often invoked education, research, innovation and the public good. But beneath such language remained a very old question: when land becomes more valuable, who gets to remain?

Chamchuri Square itself had displaced an older urban landscape. And what happened here would later feel familiar elsewhere in Sam Yan: old communities giving way to larger developments, commercial pressure pushing out smaller tenants, and a university increasingly behaving like a major real-estate institution.

This makes the survival of a place like CiliC inside the building almost paradoxical. Chamchuri Square represents one vision of urban development, but in a small corner of its basement an independent tea seller has been creating the kind of community life that large developments often promise but cannot manufacture.

And Sam Yan has seen this before.

In 1967, during military rule, Sulak Sivaraksa founded the Suksit Siam bookstore in this neighbourhood. It was a small independent bookshop, but selling books was only part of what happened there. Students, writers and young intellectuals came to meet and talk about politics, education, literature, Buddhism and freedom. Some of those young people would later become important figures in Thai intellectual and political life.

Suksit Siam in its early days, on the site that is now part of Chamchuri Square. Founded in Sam Yan, it became an important gathering place for young students and intellectuals in the years leading up to the 14 October 1973 uprising

Suksit Siam belonged to an extraordinary literary world. Angkarn Kalayanapong, now regarded as one of Thailand’s great modern poets, was closely connected to Sulak’s circle. Allen Ginsberg, during his visit to Bangkok, worked with Sulak on English translations of Angkarn’s poetry. The bookstore also published important Thai writers including Suwanni Sukontha, while thinkers from abroad such as Ivan Illich passed through this small intellectual circle.

We tend to recognise places like this only after they disappear. Looking backwards, we call them important cultural institutions. But at the time they were simply shops. Someone rented a shophouse. Someone put books on the shelves. Young people began hanging around. They talked, argued, met visitors and exchanged ideas.

Nobody needed to declare it “social infrastructure.”

It became social infrastructure because people used it that way.

Of course, CiliC is not Suksit Siam, and P’Ink never opened a tea shop intending to create an intellectual institution. But in its own modest and accidental way, something similar happened. A small commercial space became more than commercial.

Who Pays for Public Life?

P’Ink has told me many times that she wanted to stop, and I understand why. Running a small independent shop in an area increasingly dominated by larger businesses is exhausting. You worry about every slow day. You fight over rent. You see customers disappear. You watch the neighbourhood changing around you.

Earlier this year, when I returned from Harvard to Thailand to deal with my conscientious objection case, one of the first places I went was CiliC. It felt natural to go there. I was happy to see P’Ink again, but this time she was unusually serious.

She told me that she was thinking of finally ending the shop.

She could no longer see much of a future in continuing while carrying the costs and uncertainty. I tried to persuade her to stay a little longer. Not because I thought she had an obligation to sacrifice herself for us—she had already given enough—but because I knew that a place like CiliC mattered to young people, perhaps more than she realised.

In a city where affordable and welcoming places simply to meet, sit and talk are increasingly difficult to find, losing another one matters.

Luckily, she agreed to continue for a while longer.

I do not know how long that “while” will be.

Students are one reason she has remained for so long. Some first came to CiliC while they were still in secondary school, then returned as university students. Some graduated and came back years later. Some returned with their children. They told her that CiliC felt like home.

P’Ink has tried almost everything to keep it alive: new drinks, board games, fan meetings, collaborations, activities, anything that might keep people coming together.

Universities often speak proudly about community, civic engagement and public life. But here is someone who has actually created those things, day after day, with a few tables and a tea counter, and she has received almost no recognition for doing so.

Instead, she has had to struggle simply to remain there.

In societies with stronger public provision, at least some of this work is carried by libraries, parks, community centres and other publicly supported spaces. In Thailand, much of it is left to private individuals who receive almost no support for doing it.

A café owner lets students sit for hours. A bookstore hosts discussions that could never afford a commercial venue. A shopkeeper allows activists to use a space even when there is little money to be made.

Yet every month, that person still has to find the rent.

This is why I think what people like P’Ink do requires a particular kind of courage. They are privately financing something that produces public value.

Space in Bangkok is scarce. Independent space is even scarcer.

These days, when I am around Sam Yan, I go to CiliC almost every day. Of course I like the drinks, but that is not the main reason. I go because I feel a kind of moral obligation.

For years, P’Ink gave students, activists, publishers and young people something increasingly scarce in Bangkok: a place to sit, to talk, to organise, to meet someone unexpected, or simply to remain for a while without being pushed to consume more.

She created connectivity without calling it that. She built a small laboratory for living together without ever setting out to build one. The least I can do is buy a drink.

So I will keep going. If the shop has one month left, I will go. If it has one week left, I will go. And if there is a final day, I will be there too.

Because if CiliC disappears, Bangkok will not lose another tea shop. Bangkok has plenty of tea shops. Chamchuri Square will certainly find another tenant. Perhaps another chain will move in. Perhaps the new business will generate more revenue per square metre.

But what disappears with CiliC cannot be replaced so easily.

We lose a person who remembers our names; a room where sixty young people can somehow fit together to discuss a book; a place where a student can sit for hours without feeling unwelcome; and a small business owner who came to worry not only about her own survival, but about other shops, their workers and the young people who gathered around her.

More than half a century ago, Suksit Siam bookstore showed that a shop in Sam Yan could become a place where a generation met, argued and imagined another society. Decades later, our tiny room in the basement became something similar for a brief moment. CiliC, without intending to, has carried something of that tradition forward.

Some places sell drinks. Some places sell books. Some places look insignificant until we realise how many lives have crossed inside them.

And some places become part of the life of a city.

CiliC became one of those places.

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在距离三彦地铁站仅几步之遥的Chamchuri Square地下一层，有一家名为CiliC的小茶馆，很容易被人错过。如今，尤其是在Chamchuri Square内，越来越多的店铺被连锁店、加盟店或拥有雄厚资本的企业占据，小型独立咖啡茶馆则越来越少见。

CiliC是少数几家仍然给人以人为本、而非照本宣科的餐厅之一。这家餐厅的老板是P'Ink，“P”是泰语中对长辈的亲切而尊敬的称呼。

她经营这家店已经超过八年了。CiliC是泰国最早的芝士奶盖茶店之一，生意最好的时候每天能赚到大约2万泰铢。如今，有些日子，销售额只有当时的零头。

但对我来说，CiliC 的真正价值并不在于茶本身，而在于 P'Ink 让这家店发展成如今的模样。

多年来，人们在这里玩过桌游、插过花、举办过韩国粉丝见面会、小型聚会、新书发布会和研讨会。Sam Yan出版社曾在这里组织过关于维特根斯坦和战争哲学的活动，有时店里会挤满近六十人。P'Ink几乎没收我们任何费用。

与昭湄塔普提姆神庙周边工人合作的“晨曦之光”组织也得到了她的帮助。P'Ink 协助开发了一种石榴茶配方，以便该组织能够出售饮品，为工人筹集资金。

CiliC 成了一个连接彼此的场所。原本几乎没有机会相遇的人们在这里相遇。顾客变成了朋友；学生来旁听讨论会，之后又组织了一场。从某种意义上说，它是一个共同生活的实验室。

这些都不是茶馆老板的常规工作内容。然而实际上，多年来，P'Ink一直在默默地为三岩的市政和社会基础设施建设做出贡献，却鲜为人知。

Cilic 之前的房间

我与 CiliC 的缘分始于附近另一间小房间。

山岩出版社成立之初，我们的办公室只是昌丘里广场地下室一间大约二十平方米的小房间。这间房间以前是美食广场工作人员的办公场所。美食广场的老板本人曾是一名学生运动人士，他允许我们使用这间房间。

这是我们某次在Chamchuri广场地下室的“秘密房间”里开会时的照片。我穿着红色T恤。右边离我最近的是REDEM的创始人之一Baimai Ketkanok，以及穿着黑色T恤的Ford Tattep，他是Free Youth的联合创始人，也是泰国2020年抗议运动中最杰出的活动家之一。这个房间后来成了活动家和学生的非正式聚会场所，也是Sam Yan Press的第一个正式办公地点，同时也是Delicious Democracy饼干的早期基地，后来发展成了一家餐厅。

当我与学校发生冲突，又鲜少有安全的聚会场所时，那间房间就变得至关重要。在2020年前后的政治运动期间，许多学生运动人士都曾到访过那里。企鹅帕里特（Penguin Parit）也曾到访。自由青年（Free Youth）的福特·塔特普（Ford Tattep）也曾使用过那里。泰国和台湾的学生也曾在那里会面，讨论后来在国际上广为人知的“奶茶联盟”。

学生们在那里见面、睡觉、争论、策划事情，有时甚至只是躲藏起来。有一段时间，它属于那种官方上并不重要，但不知何故却变得重要的场所。

后来美食广场被迫关闭。最终，就连我们以前房间的入口也被水泥封死了。

那块小小的空间消失了。

大约在那个时期，我认识了P'Ink。她当时也在为生存而挣扎。Samyan Mitrtown在附近开业后，又遭遇了新冠疫情，Chamchuri广场的商户们遭受了重创。P'Ink帮助组织了三十多位租户要求降低租金，并与其他租户一起向玛哈·扎克里·诗琳通公主请愿。最终，租金得以降低。

从那时起，我对她的看法开始改变。她不再只是个卖茶的人，她是个斗士。

她从来都不是只为自己而战。

P'Ink 曾告诉我，一家大型中国茶饮连锁店准备租用 Chamchuri Square 一楼的店面。她看到后，顿时泪流满面，并立即打电话给大楼的管理人员。

她问道，为什么在这么多现有店铺已经举步维艰的情况下，还要不断引进更多的茶饮咖啡连锁店？为什么没有政策考虑大楼内各类商户的平衡？那些已经入驻的独立店铺该怎么办？如果更多店铺被迫关门，他们的员工又该何去何从？

让我感到惊讶的是，她不仅仅是在谈论 CiliC。

她担心着所有人。

大学和购物中心可以关注租金收入和入住率。而P'Ink则考虑的是店主、员工以及围绕这些商铺形成的生活。

她最初并非一个特别热衷政治的人。她的政治意识是逐渐形成的，源于经营店铺的经历，倾听顾客的心声，聆听年轻人诉说对未来的迷茫。也源于目睹其他店主的挣扎。更源于与那些似乎只用金钱来衡量空间的机构打交道。

也许很多人走上政治道路是这样的：不是因为他们一开始就抱有某种意识形态，而是因为他们开始关心眼前的人们。

Sam Yan 以前见过这种情况

这一切发生在查姆丘里广场，这既合情合理，又令人不安。

在购物中心和玻璃幕墙高楼拔地而起之前，三岩这片区域曾是居民区、市场和商铺的聚集地。这种转变并非一蹴而就。最终成为 Chamchuri Square 的项目，早在几十年前就已构想，计划在朱拉隆功大学的土地上进行大规模开发。项目开工建设，但在上世纪 90 年代的经济动荡中被迫停工，未完工的高楼大厦矗立多年。

后来，朱拉隆功大学重启了该项目，最终自行开发和管理了查姆丘里广场。这是一个重要的转折点：朱拉隆功大学不再像其他地方那样简单地将土地租赁给外部运营商，而是逐渐成为自身城市地产的雄心勃勃的管理者和开发商。

该建筑最终于2008年落成，就在朱拉隆功大学成为自治大学后不久。在此期间，大学的商业区经历了更加积极的改造。租金上涨，老商户纷纷倒闭，小租户不得不与连锁店和大资本展开日益激烈的竞争。

官方在谈到发展问题时，经常会提及教育、研究、创新和公共利益。但在这种表述背后，仍然存在一个由来已久的问题：当土地变得更有价值时，谁能留下来？

查姆丘里广场本身就取代了原有的城市景观。而这里发生的一切，后来在三岩的其他地方也屡见不鲜：旧社区让位于大型开发项目，商业压力迫使小型租户搬迁，大学也越来越像一家大型房地产机构。

这使得像CiliC这样的空间能够在建筑内部生存下来显得近乎悖论。查姆丘里广场代表了一种城市发展的愿景，但在其地下室的一角，一位独立茶商却营造出大型开发项目常常承诺却无法实现的社区生活。

山姆·严以前就见过这种情况。

1967年，在军政府统治时期，苏拉克·西瓦拉克萨在这个街区创办了素克西暹书店。这是一家小型独立书店，但卖书只是它众多功能的一部分。学生、作家和年轻知识分子经常来这里聚会，探讨政治、教育、文学、佛教和自由等话题。其中一些年轻人后来成为了泰国知识界和政界的重要人物。

素实暹罗（Suksit Siam）早期位于如今的占楚里广场（Chamchuri Square）的一部分。它创立于三岩（Sam Yan），在1973年10月14日起义爆发前的几年里，成为年轻学生和知识分子重要的聚集地。

苏克西特暹罗书店属于一个非凡的文学世界。如今被誉为泰国现代伟大诗人之一的安卡恩·卡拉亚纳蓬与苏拉克的圈子关系密切。艾伦·金斯伯格在访问曼谷期间，曾与苏拉克合作翻译安卡恩的诗歌。这家书店还出版了包括苏瓦尼·苏孔塔在内的泰国重要作家的作品，而像伊万·伊里奇这样的外国思想家也曾是这个小型知识分子圈子的成员。

我们往往只有在这些地方消失后才会意识到它们的存在。回首往事，我们称它们为重要的文化机构。但当时它们只是普通的店铺。有人租了一间店面，有人把书摆上了书架，年轻人开始聚集于此。他们聊天、争论、接待访客、交流思想。

没有人需要把它定义为“社会基础设施”。

它之所以成为社会基础设施，是因为人们那样使用它。

当然，CiliC 不是 Suksit Siam，P'Ink 开茶馆的初衷也并非要打造一个文化机构。但不知不觉中，类似的事情却发生了。一个小小的商业空间，最终超越了商业的范畴。

谁来为公共生活买单？

P'Ink曾多次跟我说过她想关门，我理解她的感受。在一个大型企业日益占据主导地位的地区经营一家小型独立店铺，实在令人疲惫不堪。你会担心每天生意不好，会为租金问题争吵，会眼睁睁看着顾客流失，会眼睁睁地看着周围的街区发生变化。

今年早些时候，我从哈佛回到泰国处理我的良心拒服兵役案时，最先去的地方之一就是CiliC。去那里感觉很自然。很高兴再次见到P'Ink，但这次她异常严肃。

她告诉我她正在考虑最终关闭这家店。

她觉得继续承担这样的成本和不确定性，未来已经不复存在。我试图说服她再留一段时间。并非因为我认为她有义务为我们牺牲自己——她已经付出够多了——而是因为我知道像CiliC这样的地方对年轻人来说意义重大，或许比她自己意识到的还要重要。

在一个越来越难找到价格合理、氛围友好的聚会、坐下来聊天场所的城市里，失去这样一个场所意义重大。

幸运的是，她同意再继续工作一段时间。

我不知道这段“时间”会有多长。

学生们是她长期留在这里的原因之一。有些学生中学时就来过CiliC，后来上了大学又回来了。有些学生毕业后几年又回来了。还有些学生带着孩子回来了。他们告诉她，CiliC让他们感觉像家一样。

P'Ink 几乎尝试了一切方法来维持它的生存：推出新饮品、桌游、举办粉丝见面会、开展合作、组织活动，任何能让人们聚在一起的事情。

大学常常自豪地谈论社区、公民参与和公共生活。但这个人却日复一日地用几张桌子和一个茶水柜台，真正地创造了这些，却几乎没有得到任何认可。

相反，她却不得不苦苦挣扎才能留在那里。

在公共服务体系较为完善的社会中，至少部分此类工作由图书馆、公园、社区中心和其他公共场所承担。而在泰国，大部分此类工作则由私人承担，他们几乎得不到任何支持。

咖啡馆老板允许学生一坐就是几个小时。书店举办那些根本负担不起商业场地费用的讨论会。店主允许活动人士使用店面，即使这样做几乎没有利润可图。

然而，每个月，这个人仍然要支付房租。

这就是为什么我认为像P'Ink这样的人所做的事情需要一种特殊的勇气。他们用私人资金资助一些能够创造公共价值的项目。

曼谷的空间很稀缺，独立空间更是稀缺。

最近，只要我在三岩附近，几乎每天都会去CiliC。当然，我喜欢那里的酒，但这并非主要原因。我去那里是因为我感到一种道义上的责任。

多年来，P'Ink 为曼谷的学生、活动家、出版商和年轻人提供了一个在曼谷越来越稀缺的地方：一个可以坐下来、交谈、组织活动、结识意想不到的人，或者只是待一会儿而不会被催促消费的地方。

她创造了人与人之间的联结，却并未刻意如此称呼。她搭建了一个小型的共同生活实验室，而这并非她刻意为之。我至少可以请她喝一杯。

所以我会继续去。如果这家店还有一个月关门，我会去。如果只剩一周，我会去。如果到了最后一天，我也会去。

即使CiliC倒闭，曼谷也不会再少一家茶馆。曼谷的茶馆多得很。Chamchuri广场肯定能找到新的租户。或许会是另一家连锁店入驻。或许新店每平方米的收益会更高。

但是，随着 CiliC 的消失，有些东西却无法轻易被替代。

我们失去了一位能记住我们名字的人；一个能让六十个年轻人聚在一起讨论一本书的房间；一个能让学生坐上几个小时而不会感到不受欢迎的地方；以及一位小企业主，她不仅担心自己的生存，还担心其他商店、他们的员工以及聚集在她周围的年轻人。

半个多世纪前，Suksit Siam书店证明了三岩街的一家小店可以成为一代人相聚、辩论、畅想另一种社会的地方。几十年后，我们地下室的小房间也曾短暂地成为过类似的场所。CiliC无意间延续了这种传统。

有些地方卖饮料，有些地方卖书，有些地方乍看之下毫不起眼，直到我们意识到有多少人生轨迹曾在其中交汇。

有些地方会成为城市生活的一部分。

CiliC 也成了其中之一。

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