Amphawa

Amphawa grew where a branch canal meets the Mae Klong, on the sea-facing edge of the central plains, as a trading and orchard settlement in the Ayutthaya period. Its canals carried coconut sugar, fruit and salt down to the Gulf and up towards the capital, and rows of wooden shophouses were built facing the water with their backs to the land, because the canal was the road.

The town's place in Thai history comes from the late 18th century. A local family of some standing here produced the woman who became Queen Amarindra, wife of the general who took the throne in 1782 as Rama I; their son, born in Amphawa in 1767, ruled as Rama II from 1809. The temple of Wat Amphawan Chetiyaram is traditionally held to stand on the site of that birth, and the memorial park beside it was created in the 20th century to mark it, with buildings furnished in early Rattanakosin style.

Roads reached the district in the 20th century and trade moved off the water. Shophouses emptied, younger residents left for Bangkok and the canal front decayed. From the early 2000s the community and the provincial authorities restored the timber row, revived a market on the canal and encouraged homestays. What followed was a tourism boom driven almost entirely by Thai visitors from Bangkok, and the arguments that come with it over crowds, prices and how much of the old working town survives behind the shopfronts.

Amphawa's identity is built on water and on royal association. The canal network of Samut Songkhram is among the densest in Thailand, and life is arranged around tides that push salt water up the Mae Klong twice a day; orchards of coconut, lychee and pomelo are irrigated by ditches that fill and drain with them. Old houses stand on stilts with steps down to the water and a spirit house in the yard.

The town is strongly Buddhist, with temples along the river holding merit-making ceremonies, ordinations and funerals attended by the whole neighbourhood, and boat-borne processions on festival days. Loy Krathong is a canal occasion here rather than a river-bank one, and the province's temples include several with long histories, among them the root-covered chapel at Wat Bang Kung, linked in local memory to King Taksin's campaigns after the fall of Ayutthaya.

The weekend market has given the place a second culture, one of design shops, cafés and photographs. Thai visitors come for nostalgia — the wooden shophouse, the boat kitchen, the sound of long-tail engines — and the town presents itself accordingly. Residents are used to strangers on their doorsteps and generally welcoming, but it remains a community of a few thousand people whose homes back directly onto the walkway, and quiet after the market closes is expected.

Amphawa town itself holds only a few thousand people, in a district of Samut Songkhram, the smallest province in Thailand. Weekdays are slow: the market stalls are shuttered, school runs and small boats cross the canal, and most work is in coconut sugar production, fruit orchards, fishing and shrimp ponds, salt pans towards the coast, or commuting to Mae Klong and the industrial towns closer to Bangkok.

From Friday afternoon the pattern reverses. Shutters come up, boats moor against the canal wall with charcoal braziers, and several thousand visitors arrive by minivan and car. Homestays and cafés occupy family shophouses, and a good part of household income is made in three days a week. The pressure shows in parking, rubbish and rising property prices along the canal, and in the way some old families have sold or leased their frontages.

The wider environment is a working estuary: mangrove at the river mouth, mudflats at Don Hoi Lot where razor clams are gathered, and fishing boats running into the Gulf. Coastal erosion, salt intrusion into the orchards and changes in water management upstream are live concerns, as is the future of the firefly populations, which depend on the lamphu trees along the banks and on darkness.

Seafood and river food define the table. Grilled prawns, squid and shellfish cooked in boats on the canal are the market's signature, eaten with a sharp seafood dipping sauce of chilli, garlic and lime. The province is known nationally for pla thu, short mackerel steamed and packed into round bamboo baskets at Mae Klong, eaten with nam phrik kapi, a shrimp-paste relish, and raw or blanched vegetables. Hoi lot, razor clams from the sandbar at the river mouth, are stir-fried with chilli paste or garlic.

Coconut runs through everything. Samut Songkhram's coconut palms supply nam tan maphrao, palm sugar boiled down in open pans at small local works and sold in discs, which sweetens curries and desserts across the central plains. Sweets on the canal include khanom krok, coconut-and-rice-flour pancakes cooked in a dimpled pan, kluay ping, grilled bananas in syrup, and coconut ice cream served in the shell with sticky rice and peanuts.

The everyday food is central Thai: noodle soups, fried rice, curries sold by the bag and rice-and-curry shops near the temple. Orchard fruit is sold by the roadside in season — pomelo, lychee, coconut and mango — and drinks are iced coffee, cha yen with condensed milk and fresh coconut water straight from the nut.