Word: teak
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...Seven Teak Houses. The scope and intensity of last week's search showed the respect and affection that Southeast Asia felt for Jim Thompson. A Princetonian from Greenville, Del., Thompson was an architect when World War II began. He went to Asia as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, liked the area so well that he stayed on when the war ended. Fascinated by the silk spinners he saw when traveling in rural Thailand, he collected samples of their work in a suitcase, brought them to New York and persuaded fashion designers to use them. He went...
...composed of flexible laboratory spaces, spanned by floor-tall Vierendeel trusses, which, like punched-out beams, permit the tons of laboratory plumbing to pass through. Separated from the labs by stairways and passageways that serve as open terraces for outdoor seminars are the angled studies, each with adjustable teak jalousies turned toward a view of the nearby Pacific. Below the building's court are travertine marble seats, which recall the elegant ease of ancient Rome, of the academy where philosophers might debate...
...lush and smiling realm of Their Majesties King Bhumibol (pronounced Poom-ee-pone) Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit, which spreads like a green meadow of stability, serenity and strength from Burma down to the Malaysian peninsula-the geopolitical heart of Southeast Asia. Once fabled Siam, rich in rice, elephants, teak and legend, Thailand (literally, Land of the Free) today crackles with a prosperity, a pride of purpose, and a commitment to the fight for freedom that is Peking's despair and Washington's delight. The meadow inevitably has its dark corners, notably the less fecund northeast, where Red insurgency...
...endowments that first attack the senses, opulent gifts of nature nurtured by a benign history. In the gentle air and lemony Siamese sunlight, rice, corn and coconut palms flourish, as do 28 kinds of bananas and 750 varieties of orchids. In the north, worker-elephants still pull the great teak logs from the forest with an efficiency no machine yet invented can match; mangoes, sugar and rubber plants thrive in the south. Along the great, glittering emerald rice fields of the fertile, canal-veined central plain where over a third of the 30 million Thais live, smiling, polygamous peasants lounge...
...sport shirts gather to chiao-chi-transact business in as pleasurable a manner as possible. In clubs such as the Chins Shan (Green Mountain) and Lo-t'ien (Happy Sky), the walls echo to the rattle of mah-jongg stones and the click of poker chips on black teak tables. Plenty of business is consummated as well...