Opinion – Morning Glory Fighting for Survival: The Shrine, the Students, and the Workers Bangkok Forgot

In Bangkok, “progress” often arrives as a luxury condominium. Old neighbourhoods disappear. Small shops vanish. Communities are told to move aside for a more modern city.

But progress always has a price. At Chulalongkorn University’s Block 33 development project in Sam Yan, we are now seeing who is being forced to pay it.

For years, Block 33 was known mainly as a conflict over the Chao Mae Thapthim Shrine at Saphan Lueang, a historic Chinese shrine surrounded by a construction site. A small community of caretakers, students, and conservationists tried to protect it from being displaced by a university-led real estate project.

Some saw it as a simple conflict: an old shrine versus a new condominium. But the shrine sits in the middle of the site. As the project dragged on, it began to reveal something larger: a failure of governance, responsibility, and care.

The project is reportedly worth more than 2.7 billion baht (approximately US$90 million). Chulalongkorn University has reportedly paid around 1.8 billion baht to the contractor. Yet the condominium remains unfinished, delayed by more than 700 days. Buyers have reportedly had to be refunded. Now another truth has emerged: some workers building the project say they have not been paid for more than a year.

On 18 June 2026, students from several Thai universities joined construction workers from the Block 33 site to petition the Labour Committee of the Thai Parliament. The workers said Power Line Engineering Public Company Limited, the main contractor, had failed to pay their wages for more than 12 months.

Many workers kept working while payments were delayed again and again. Some could not pay their children’s school fees. Some could no longer support their families. Some fell into debt. Some households broke apart. Many eventually gave up, resigned, and left without proper compensation.

But one worker, Auntie Pha, refused to disappear quietly.

While waiting for her wages, she struggled to support her family. At times, she survived by picking morning glory and ivy gourd leaves growing around the construction site to cook as food. A woman helping build a multi-billion-baht condominium in central Bangkok was left to gather vegetables beside the very site where her labour was being used.

That image should shame us. It should also awaken us.

After the case reached Parliament and student media reported on it, Chulalongkorn University reportedly said it had only recently learned of the unpaid wages. The university then appears to have pressured the company to pay two women workers, including Auntie Pha.

That payment matters. But it raises a harder question: is the university solving the problem, or trying to make the story end here?

What about the other workers? What about those who already left, resigned, or were too afraid to speak? Will all unpaid workers be found and fully compensated? Or will only the most visible victims be helped so the scandal can disappear?

Block 33 is no longer only about a shrine. It is about what happens when public land is turned into commercial development without public accountability.

Chulalongkorn University is not an ordinary private landlord. It is one of Thailand’s most powerful public universities. Its property office, PMCU, manages valuable land in central Bangkok. For years, PMCU has treated land in Sam Yan as an asset to be developed and monetised. But land is never only land. Around Block 33 were communities, small shops, workers, shrines, food stalls, memories, and ways of life.

How many communities around Sam Yan have had to disappear in the name of development? How many cultural spaces have been treated as obstacles? Who will calculate the value of a shrine that cared for unpaid workers when institutions failed them?

PMCU can calculate rent, land value, construction costs, and projected returns. But can it calculate the value of care, memory, and community? If it cannot, then it should not decide the future of Sam Yan alone.

Yet this story is not only about institutional failure. It is also about what ordinary people can build when institutions fail.

Students who were often dismissed as troublemakers stood beside the workers. They listened to their stories. They helped bring the case to Parliament. The Unlock, a local student media outlet, reported what powerful institutions had ignored. The shrine community offered food, support, and dignity when workers had nowhere else to turn.

Together, students and the shrine community helped Auntie Pha open a small drink stall in front of the shrine. It is called “Phak Bung Su Tai” — “Morning Glory Fighting for Survival.” Most of the profit supports her and other workers still waiting for wages.

A small drink stall may seem insignificant beside a multi-billion-baht condominium. But morally, it tells us more about Bangkok than the tower does.

It is not charity. It is solidarity.

It is not only survival. It is civic imagination.

It is a small model of what a democratic city could be: students standing with workers, heritage becoming care, public space becoming mutual aid, and invisible suffering becoming impossible to ignore.

This is why conservation cannot be separated from justice. To conserve a shrine is not only to protect an old building. It is to protect the relationships, memories, rituals, and care that make a city human.

This is also why the student movement matters.

For years, students who questioned Chulalongkorn’s development model were criticised, misunderstood, or portrayed as obstacles to progress. But now it is clear that the student movement was not the problem. It was one of the few forces trying to reveal the problem.

Without students, the shrine’s story might have been reduced to nostalgia. Without the shrine community, the workers might have remained invisible. Without student media, the university might never have admitted what it did not know. Without workers like Auntie Pha, the human cost of development might never have reached Parliament.

This is how democracy begins: not as an abstract ideal, but as an act of attention.

It begins when people notice suffering that others have normalised. It begins when students refuse to accept that reputation matters more than justice. It begins when a shrine becomes a shelter, when a drink stall becomes a lifeline, and when a community insists that progress without compassion is not progress at all.

The Parliamentary Labour Committee has now called both Power Line Engineering and Chulalongkorn University to explain. That is necessary, but not enough.

All affected workers must be identified, including those who have left the site. All unpaid wages must be paid in full. Workers must be protected from pressure, intimidation, dismissal, or being forced to sign documents they do not understand. Chulalongkorn University and PMCU must disclose the contract, the contractor selection process, and the labour protection measures for Block 33. There should also be an independent review of how public university land is used for commercial development.

A city is not built only by developers, planners, or university executives. It is built by workers. It is sustained by food sellers, shrine caretakers, students, cleaners, guards, aunties, uncles, and communities that rarely appear in official development plans.

I feel fortunate to have been part of this struggle. Not because it is easy, or because victory is guaranteed, but because it has shown me another kind of politics is still possible: one rooted in care, solidarity, and the courage to see the humanity of those whom development makes invisible.

In front of the Chao Mae Thapthim Shrine, a small stall called “Morning Glory Fighting for Survival” now stands in the middle of this unfinished development. Around it is a luxury condominium that has not been completed. Behind it is a public university that says it did not know. Beside it are workers still waiting for justice.

But there is also something brighter there: students, workers, caretakers, and community members refusing to abandon one another.

This is the work that deserves to be protected, supported, and expanded.

Empathy is not a soft alternative to politics. It is the beginning of any politics worth having. As Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

In Sam Yan, amid concrete, delay, unpaid wages, and institutional denial, students, workers, caretakers, and community members have chosen to pay attention. That attention has become solidarity. That solidarity has become action.

It is the path of compassion.

And it is the path we must choose.