Bangkok

• 1. Introduction

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  Bangkok carries a ceremonial name so long it holds a Guinness World Records entry as the world's longest place name, at 168 letters. It begins Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya and continues far beyond what most people could memorize. Composed of Pali and Sanskrit roots, it translates as the city of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the Nine Gems, seat of the King, erected by Vishvakarman at Indra's behest. Most Thais who can recite the full name owe it to a single source. In 1989, the rock band Asanee-Wasan released a song titled Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, and its lyrics consist entirely of the city's full name, repeated throughout. The capital and most populous city of Thailand began as something far humbler. It traces back to a small trading post during the Ayutthaya era in the 15th century, a village on the west bank of the Chao Phraya River. How did a customs outpost become a megacity of 11.4 million people, holding 15.9 per cent of an entire nation's population? Why do skyscrapers here sway when earthquakes strike hundreds of kilometres away? And why does a city named for angels live under the threat of being submerged? The answers run through palaces and floodwaters, through traffic jams and street vendors, and through a name that means City of Angels.

• 2. From Outpost To Capital

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  In 1688, the town that would become Bangkok was the site of a siege in which the French were expelled from Siam, a customs outpost guarded by forts on both banks of the river. Its strategic location near the mouth of the Chao Phraya had been drawing trade and importance for generations. When Ayutthaya fell to the Burmese in 1767, the newly crowned King Taksin established his capital here, founding the Thonburi Kingdom. The shift to the eastern bank came in 1782, when King Phutthayotfa Chulalok, known as Rama I, succeeded Taksin and moved the capital to Rattanakosin Island. The City Pillar was erected on the 21st of April 1782, the date regarded as the foundation of Bangkok as a capital. The new city inherited Ayutthaya's ceremonial name and its sense of inheritance. Bangkok grew through international trade, first with China, then with Western merchants returning in the early to mid-19th century. The reigns of King Mongkut, Rama IV, from 1851 to 1868, and King Chulalongkorn, Rama V, from 1868 to 1910, brought the steam engine, the printing press, rail transport, and utilities, along with formal education and healthcare. The 20th century turned the city into a political stage. Siam abolished absolute monarchy in 1932, and Bangkok became the arena for power struggles between military and political elites. Allied with Japan in World War II, the city endured Allied bombing, then grew rapidly afterward on US aid and government-sponsored investment. Its role as a US military rest-and-recreation destination boosted tourism and established it as a sex tourism destination. The city in its modern form was created in 1972, with the formation of the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration.

• 3. A Name Without Certainty

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  Bang, written บาง, is a Thai word meaning a village on a stream, and the origin of the name Bangkok remains unclear even to scholars. One theory derives it from Bang Ko, where ko means island, a nod to the city's watery landscape. Another holds that it shortens Bang Makok, makok being the name of Elaeocarpus hygrophilus, a plant bearing olive-like fruit. The second theory draws support from history. Wat Arun, a historic temple in the area, was once called Wat Makok. Officially, the town carried a different label entirely. The Ayutthaya Chronicles record it as Thonburi Si Mahasamut, from Pali and Sanskrit, literally meaning city of treasures gracing the ocean, or simply Thonburi. Bangkok was likely only a colloquial name, yet foreign visitors adopted it widely and kept using it even after the new capital was established. Edmund Roberts, visiting as envoy of the United States in 1833, noted that the city had become known as Sia-Yut'hia since becoming capital, the name used in international treaties of that period. Today the city is officially Krung Thep Maha Nakhon in Thai, shortened colloquially to Krung Thep or the initialism Ko Tho Mo. Krung is a word of Khmer origin meaning capital or king, while thep comes from the Pali and Sanskrit deva, meaning deity. Translated as City of Angels, it invites comparison with Los Angeles, a comparably sized city with similar traffic woes. A more playful nickname also circulates: The Big Mango, a tongue-in-cheek echo of New York's Big Apple.

• 4. Seat Of A Nation

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  Chadchart Sittipunt won the city's most recent gubernatorial election on the 22nd of May 2022, after an extended lapse following the 2014 Thai coup d'etat. Unlike Thailand's other 76 provinces, Bangkok is a special administrative area whose governor is directly elected to a four-year term. The governor, with four appointed deputies, forms the executive body, implementing policy through a civil service headed by the Permanent Secretary. The city is divided into fifty districts, themselves subdivided into 180 sub-districts, with each district managed by a director the governor appoints. A separately elected Bangkok Metropolitan Council holds power over municipal ordinances and the city's budget. As Thailand's capital, Bangkok houses every branch of the national government, including the Government House, Parliament House, and the Supreme, Administrative, and Constitutional Courts. Sappaya-Sapasathan, where the National Assembly of Thailand convenes, is the largest parliament building in the world. The city is also the site of the Grand Palace and Dusit Palace, the official and de facto residences of the king. The city's identity is encoded in its symbols. Its seal shows the Hindu god Indra riding the divine white elephant Airavata through the clouds, holding his weapon the vajra, based on a painting by Prince Naris, a brother of King Chulalongkorn. The tree symbol is Ficus benjamina, and the aquatic animal is the giant barb, Catlocarpio siamensis. Adopted in 2012, the official slogan opens with the line: As built by deities, the administrative centre.

• 5. Built On Soft Clay

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  Bangkok sits on an average elevation of just 1.5 metres above sea level, in the Chao Phraya River delta on Thailand's central plain. The river meanders southward through the city and empties into the Gulf of Thailand about 25 kilometres south of the centre. Most of the area was originally swampland, drained and irrigated by canals known as khlong, built from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Until modern roads arrived in the late 19th century, the waterway network was the primary means of transport, and most people lived near or on the water. That earned the city its 19th-century name, the Venice of the East. Beneath the surface lies a top layer of soft marine clay called Bangkok clay, averaging 15 metres thick, over an aquifer system of eight known units. Extensive groundwater pumping caused subsidence, first discovered in the 1970s, which reached 120 millimetres per year in 1981. Management measures slowed it to 10 to 30 millimetres per year by the early 2000s, though parts of the city now sit a full metre below sea level. The same clay creates a strange vulnerability. It amplifies long-period ground motion that matches the resonant frequency of high-rises, so occupants of Bangkok skyscrapers have felt earthquakes centred hundreds of kilometres away in northern Thailand and Myanmar, despite the city sitting outside any seismically active zone. Seismic rules entered the building code only in 2007, leaving older structures at risk. The single hill in the metropolitan area, Phu Khao Thong, was an accident. King Rama III, who lived from 1787 to 1851, built a very large chedi at Wat Saket, but the soft soil could not bear its weight and it collapsed during construction. Over decades the abandoned mud-and-brick mound grew weeds and the shape of a natural hill, until concrete walls were added in the 1940s to stop it eroding.

• 6. Water And A Sinking City

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  In 2011, most of Bangkok's northern, eastern, and western districts flooded, in some places for over two months. Severe flooding had also struck in 1995. The city is prone to inundation because of its low elevation and inadequate drainage, often worsened by blockage from rubbish, especially plastic waste. Heavy downpours overwhelming the drainage and runoff discharging from upstream areas are the major triggers. The threat reaches further still. A study by the OECD estimated that 5.138 million people in Bangkok may be exposed to coastal flooding by 2070, the seventh highest figure among the world's port cities. Some fears hold that the city may be submerged by 2030. A study published in October 2019 in Nature Communications corrected earlier coastal-elevation models and concluded that up to 12 million Thais, mostly in the greater Bangkok area, face the prospect of annual flooding events. Climate compounds the danger. Bangkok has a tropical savanna climate under the Koppen classification, with temperatures ranging from an average low of 23.2 degrees Celsius in December to an average high of 35.7 degrees Celsius in April. September is the wettest month, averaging 335.9 millimetres of rain. The highest recorded temperature was 41.0 degrees Celsius on the 7th of May 2023, and the lowest was 9.9 degrees Celsius in January 1955. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies found that Bangkok had 193 days at or above 32 degrees Celsius in 1960, rising to an expected 276 such days in 2018, with forecasts of 297 to 344 days by 2100. The problems have grown serious enough that they have raised the issue of moving the nation's capital.

• 7. Economy And Endless Traffic

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  In 2022, Bangkok produced an economic output of 5.747 trillion baht, about 164 billion US dollars, giving a per-capita figure of 634,109 baht, more than twice the national average. Wholesale and retail trade is the largest sector, contributing 24 per cent of the city's gross provincial product, ahead of manufacturing and real estate. The Asian investment boom of the 1980s and 1990s drew multinational corporations to base regional headquarters here, attracted by lower labour and operating costs. Seventeen Thai companies appear on the Forbes 2000, all based in the capital, including PTT, the only Fortune Global 500 company in Thailand. The Stock Exchange of Thailand sits on Ratchadaphisek Road. The prosperity hides a divide. Bangkok has a Gini coefficient of 0.48, indicating high inequality, sharpest between unskilled lower-income migrants and middle-class professionals. By 2000, over one million people lived in about 800 informal settlements, including the large slums of Khlong Toei District. The city's most notorious daily ordeal is its traffic. Rapid growth with little urban planning produced a haphazard cityscape, and zoning regulations were not fully implemented until 1992. Streets follow no organized grid, and Bangkok's road surface area is only 8 per cent, against 20 to 30 per cent in most Western cities. In 2006 the city held 3,943,211 in-use vehicles, of which 37.6 per cent were private cars and 32.9 per cent motorcycles. Congestion grew so severe that the Thai Traffic Police trained a unit of officers in basic midwifery to assist deliveries that cannot reach a hospital in time. The first rapid transit system began operation only in 1999, despite proposals dating to 1975. The city now operates rail lines including the BTS Skytrain, the MRT, and others, with a master plan of eight main lines and four feeder lines totaling 508 kilometres set for completion by 2029. Traffic was the main source of the air pollution that reached serious levels in the 1990s, before cleaner fuel and emission standards cut particulate matter from 81 micrograms per cubic metre in 1997 to 43 in 2007.

• 8. City Of Angels And Visitors

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  In 2024, Euromonitor International ranked Bangkok the top tourism city in the world, welcoming a record 32.4 million visitors. MasterCard had earlier named it the top destination by international visitor arrivals, ahead of London, and Travel and Leisure magazine readers voted it World's Best City for four consecutive years from 2010 to 2013. The Department of Tourism recorded 26,861,095 Thai and 11,361,808 foreign visitors in 2010. Visitors come for the Grand Palace and temples including Wat Phra Kaew, Wat Pho, and Wat Arun, alongside the Giant Swing and the Erawan Shrine that show Hinduism's deep influence on Thai culture. Vimanmek Mansion is famous as the world's largest teak building, and the sprawling Chatuchak Weekend Market draws both tourists and locals. The street life is the city's living texture. It may hold over 100,000 hawkers, and while the administration authorised vending at 287 sites, most activity at another 407 sites is illegal. In 2015, with support from the ruling military junta, officials began clearing vendors to reclaim public space, evicting nearly 15,000 from 39 areas in 2016, which raised fears that gentrification would erase the city's character. Bangkok's reputation also carries a darker label. It has acquired the nickname Sin City of Asia for its level of sex tourism, with prostitution technically illegal yet common in massage parlours and hourly hotels. The city is the heart of Thai media, home to all national newspapers, including Thairath, which prints a million copies a day, and to the English-language Bangkok Post and The Nation. It hosts the country's oldest universities, Chulalongkorn, Thammasat, Kasetsart, Mahidol, and Silpakorn, founded between 1917 and 1943, and an estimated 200,000 medical tourists in 2011 made it the world's most popular destination for medical tourism. Even the festivals carry the city's spirit, none more vivid than Songkran from the 13th to the 15th of April, when traditional rituals give way to water fights across every street.