For once, centenaries are colliding. The Thai Red Cross has reached its 100th year, and so has Lumphini Park, Bangkok’s first official patch of green. The timing feels cinematic: an organisation built on compassion sharing an anniversary with a park that has, for better or worse, witnessed the city’s contradictions for a century. Between joggers dodging monitor lizards at dawn and pensioners playing chess in the shade, Lumphini has aged with enviable poise.
It’s here, from December 11-21, that the annual Red Cross Fair sets up camp. What began in 1923 at Sanam Luang has become one of Bangkok’s most enduring traditions, a jumble of generosity and spectacle where food stalls, raffles and performances rub shoulders. This year the theme invites visitors to arrive in traditional dress – sinh skirts, sabai scarves, the whole ensemble – not as some empty nod to heritage but as a chance to see how culture wears itself in the present tense.
The fair is deliberately excessive. Over 100 vendors, charity-run food booths, prize-packed games, craft stalls, exhibitions and enough fried snacks to test the limits of digestion. One moment you might be holding skewered squid, the next you’re elbow-deep in a lucky draw, then somehow watching a performance under the glow of neon fairy lights. There’s a reason families mark the dates in calendars with more certainty than New Year’s Eve plans.
The fair is easily accessible by public transport via nearby BTS Skytrain stations at Ratchadamri (exit 4) and Sala Daeng (exit 6), and MRT stations at Silom (exit 1) and Lumpini (exit 3). If you're coming by bus, take numbers 4, 13, 45, 47, 50, 62, 74, 76, 77, 141, 504, 505, 514, 547 or A3. A free shuttle service also runs every 30 minutes from the National Stadium and Benchakitti Forest Park to Lumpini. If you're driving, there's parking space for up to 750 cars at the park, so good luck.
A hundred years on, the Red Cross Fair is less about nostalgia and more about continuity. It’s proof that joy and duty can live side by side, that tradition doesn’t always fossilise, and that in a city hooked on reinvention, some things are worth keeping the same.