The Thai Silk King Who Walked Into the Jungle and Never Came Back
By Easter weekend of 1967, Jim Thompson was one of the most famous Americans in Asia. Born in Delaware in 1906 and trained as an architect, he had served in the Second World War with the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. When peace came he stayed on in Bangkok and did something improbable: he took Thailand's fading hand-woven silk trade and turned it into a world-famous luxury industry. The press crowned him the Thai Silk King, and his teak house on a Bangkok canal, packed with Southeast Asian art, was already a landmark. Today it is a museum.
On Friday 24 March 1967, Thompson travelled with his longtime friend Connie Mangskau to the Cameron Highlands, a cool hill resort in Malaysia, where they were guests of Dr T. G. Ling and his wife at a bungalow called Moonlight Cottage. On Easter Sunday, 26 March, after church and a picnic lunch, the others retired for an afternoon nap. Thompson, then 61, apparently set off alone for a walk. He left behind his cigarettes, though he was a committed smoker, and the pills he carried for painful gallstone attacks. He was never seen again.
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