Thailand is the one country in South-East Asia that was never a European colony, and much of what surprises visitors follows from that: the calendar, the alphabet, the way the state presents itself and the fact that so much of daily life was never interrupted.
Here are ten things that tend to catch people out.
- Bangkok has the longest place name in the world. Its full ceremonial name, beginning Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, runs to over a hundred and sixty letters. Thais simply say Krung Thep, „city of angels".
- The year is 2569. Thailand counts from the Buddhist era, five hundred and forty-three years ahead of the Western calendar.
- The name means „land of the free". Prathet Thai replaced Siam in 1939, and the country was never colonised.
- Each day of the week has a colour. Yellow is Monday's, the day King Bhumibol was born — which is why the whole country turns yellow on royal anniversaries.
- The longest reign of any Thai monarch lasted seventy years. Bhumibol Adulyadej ruled from 1946 to 2016.
- Pad thai was a government project. It was promoted in the 1940s to cut rice consumption and to build a national cuisine — and it worked.
- Durian is banned from the metro. Signs in the Bangkok BTS forbid it by name, alongside pets and open drinks; hotels ban it too.
- A stone Buddha head grew into a tree. At Wat Mahathat in Ayutthaya a sandstone head, fallen when the city burned in 1767, is now held in the roots of a fig — and photographing it means crouching below it.
- Almost every building has a spirit house. The little shrine in the corner of the plot rehouses the spirit displaced by the construction, and it is fed daily.
- The monsoon does not arrive everywhere at once. The Andaman coast is wet from May to October, while Koh Samui on the Gulf side gets its rain from September to December.
Smaller things stay with you too: that 7-Eleven is on almost every corner and sells hot food at three in the morning; that a shop with the shutters half down is usually open; and that people will walk you to where you asked for directions rather than explain the turning.
And one thing no list conveys: the smell of charcoal, lemongrass and frying garlic that comes up from the street at dusk, long before any of the stalls are in sight.