Ayutthaya

Ayutthaya was founded in 1351 by King U Thong, later Ramathibodi I, on an island in the floodplain where the Chao Phraya, Lopburi and Pa Sak rivers meet. The site was defensible, reachable by seagoing ships and surrounded by rice land, and the kingdom that grew from it absorbed Sukhothai and pushed west and east against Burmese and Khmer neighbours. A ring of walls, a grid of canals and a royal palace on the north bank took shape, and successive kings raised temples as merit and memorials.

By the 17th century it was one of the largest and richest cities in the world, with a population sometimes estimated at several hundred thousand and trading links to China, Japan, Persia, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. Foreign quarters stood outside the walls, each with its own churches, mosques or shrines, and King Narai employed the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon as a senior minister before a revolution in 1688 expelled French troops.

In April 1767, after a long siege, Burmese armies took and burned the city. Temples were looted, Buddha images stripped of gold and beheaded, and the court scattered; the capital was never rebuilt here. Taksin regrouped at Thonburi and the Chakri kings built Bangkok in Ayutthaya's image instead. The ruins were quarried for brick and overgrown for a century, then surveyed and restored from the early 20th century. The historical park was inscribed by UNESCO in 1991, and in 2011 flood water entered the city and inundated the park, forcing evacuations.

Ayutthaya's identity rests on being the old capital: the city's art, court language and temple architecture set the standard that Bangkok deliberately copied, and Thai schoolchildren arrive by the coach-load to see where it happened. The Ayutthaya style — tall slim prangs derived from Khmer towers, bell-shaped chedis, crowned Buddha images in royal dress — is visible here in its home ground, and the loss of the city in 1767 remains a defining episode in the national story.

It was a cosmopolitan place, and traces remain. The Chinese community that worships at Wat Phanan Choeng has been here for centuries; there is a Portuguese settlement site with a Catholic burial ground on the south bank, a Japanese village site where Yamada Nagamasa's community traded in the 17th century, and a Dutch East India Company trading post. Descendants of Muslim merchant families live in the villages around the island.

Everyday customs are those of the central plains. Merit-making at temples structures the year, monks collect alms at dawn along the town's streets, and Loy Krathong and Songkran are the two big public occasions. Dressing in rented Thai costume to be photographed among the ruins has become popular with Thai visitors and is accepted, within the same rules of modesty that apply anywhere else.

Some tens of thousands of people live in the city municipality on and around the island, a number that has been falling since 2005. Life is provincial and unhurried compared with Bangkok: the market opens before dawn, schools and government offices fill the morning, and the town is quiet by mid-evening outside the guesthouse lane. Most residents live off the historical park, on the eastern side of the island and in the districts across the rivers.

The local economy has two halves. Tourism supports hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, boat and bicycle hire and a large body of guides, and it is vulnerable to any interruption in visitor numbers. Rather larger, and less visible, are the industrial estates on the mainland around the province, which assemble electronics and vehicle parts for Japanese and other manufacturers and draw workers from across Thailand and from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. Rice farming continues on the surrounding plain.

Water shapes everything. The rivers carry barges of sand and rice, houses on the banks stand on stilts or floating pontoons, and flooding is a recurring threat — in 2011 flood water reached the city and the historical park and broke into the industrial estates, disrupting manufacturing supply chains far beyond Thailand. Preserving the ruins while the town grows around them is a continuing tension, as is traffic on the island's narrow roads at weekends.

Ayutthaya's signature is the giant freshwater prawn, kung mae nam, split and grilled over charcoal so the head fat runs into the flesh, served with a lime-and-chilli seafood sauce. Riverside restaurants around the island build their menus on it, alongside river fish such as snakehead and catfish, grilled in a salt crust or turned into sour curries. Kuay tiao reua, boat noodles in a dark broth spiced with cinnamon and star anise, are eaten in small bowls here as in the canal country to the south.

The sweet the town is known for is roti sai mai: a soft thin pancake wrapped around fine threads of spun sugar in pale pink, green and yellow, sold in plastic bags from roadside stalls and taken home as a gift. Ayutthaya also has a long association with egg-yolk sweets — foi thong, thong yot and thong yip, made with syrup and yolks — which are credited to Maria Guyomar de Pinha, of mixed Portuguese, Japanese and Bengali descent, who cooked in the court kitchens in the reign of King Narai.

Everyday eating is central Thai. Hua Ro market sells curries by the bag, grilled chicken and sticky rice, fried fish and fruit; the night stalls on Bang Ian Road do noodles and grilled meats. Chinese-Thai shophouses serve pork noodles and boiled rice soup in the morning, and coffee stands offer the strong sweet oliang, iced black coffee, and cha yen, orange tea with condensed milk.