Chiang Rai

Chiang Rai claims to be the oldest of the northern capitals: King Mangrai founded it in 1262, naming it after himself, before he moved on to take Hariphunchai and establish Chiang Mai in 1296. The town on the Kok River remained a northern outpost of Lanna, and its temples kept a reputation out of proportion to its size — Wat Phra Kaew is said to be the place where the Emerald Buddha, now enshrined in Bangkok, was discovered inside a chedi split by lightning in 1434, before it travelled through Lampang, Chiang Mai, Laos and finally the capital.

Like the rest of Lanna, Chiang Rai fell under Burmese rule in the 16th century and stayed there for about two hundred years. It was recovered late in the 18th century and resettled in the 19th, and was administered from Chiang Mai until it became a province in its own right in 1910. The far north long remained remote, reached by river and mule track rather than road.

For much of the 20th century the province was known chiefly for the opium grown in the hills of the Golden Triangle and for the armed groups that moved it. Royal development projects from the 1970s onwards, above all at Doi Tung, replaced poppies with coffee, tea, macadamia and flowers, and the highland communities gradually gained schools, roads and, in many cases, citizenship. Since the 1990s the town has drawn attention instead for the work of artists born in the province — Chalermchai Kositpipat's white temple and Thawan Duchanee's black house — and for tourism towards the Mekong.

Chiang Rai is a Lanna town, speaking kham mueang and keeping the northern calendar of temple fairs, but it is also the most ethnically mixed province in Thailand. Akha, Lahu, Lisu, Hmong, Mien and Karen communities live in the hills, Shan families have crossed from Myanmar for generations, and Yunnanese Chinese descended from Nationalist soldiers hold the tea villages around Mae Salong. Churches, mosques and Chinese shrines stand alongside Buddhist monasteries.

Art has become the town's public identity. Chalermchai Kositpipat has built and rebuilt Wat Rong Khun since 1997 as a personal work rather than a commission, and his students have carried the style into other temples, including the Blue Temple; Thawan Duchanee's compound of black timber halls took decades to assemble. The provincial arts scene that grew up around them supports galleries and studios across the town.

Everyday manners are those of the north: greetings with a wai, a softer and slower speech than Bangkok Thai, and unhurried courtesy in shops and offices. Festivals follow the Buddhist year, with Songkran, Loy Krathong and the lantern releases of Yi Peng, while Shan communities hold Poy Sang Long processions before boys enter the monkhood. Coffee and tea culture, a direct result of the crop-replacement projects, is now part of local pride.

About 70,000 people live in the municipality and well over a million in the province, so Chiang Rai functions as a market and service town for a large rural area. Agriculture underpins the economy: rice and maize in the valleys, coffee, tea, lychee, longan and temperate vegetables in the hills, and increasingly organic and speciality crops sold to Bangkok. Tourism, government offices, hospitals and Mae Fah Luang University provide most of the salaried work.

The rhythm is small-town. Fresh markets open before sunrise, offices and schools start early, and the town is quiet by mid-evening apart from the night bazaar and the student streets around Ban Du. Many families keep land in a village and return for planting, harvest and temple festivals. Cross-border trade with Myanmar and Laos, and the Mekong wharves at Chiang Saen, bring lorries and traders through the province.

Current concerns are largely environmental and regional. The burning season fills the valley with smoke from February to April; floods along the Kok and Mekong have damaged riverside districts in recent years, and contamination of the Kok River from mining upstream has become a public issue. The war in Myanmar, just across the border, affects trade, brings people seeking safety and has made drug trafficking a persistent problem for the province.

Chiang Rai eats northern Thai food with an extra Shan and Yunnanese layer. Khao soi, egg noodles in coconut curry broth under a nest of crisp noodles, is as common here as in Chiang Mai, and khanom jeen nam ngiao — fermented rice noodles in a pork and tomato broth flavoured with dried kapok flowers — is a local speciality eaten at breakfast. Sticky rice accompanies grilled meats and the chilli pastes nam phrik num and nam phrik ong, with crisp pork rind for scooping.

Sai ua, the herb-heavy grilled pork sausage, is bought by weight at the morning market, as is naem, a sour fermented pork. Shan cooking contributes tofu dishes and noodle soups from the border districts, while the Yunnanese villages around Mae Salong serve steamed buns, black chicken soup and braised pork leg with Chinese pickles. Mekong catfish and river fish appear on menus in the border towns, grilled whole with salt and lemongrass.

Drinks reflect the hills. Arabica coffee from Doi Chang and Doi Tung is roasted in the town, and oolong tea from Mae Salong is sold loose in the market. Local fruit — lychee in May and June, longan later in the summer, and strawberries in the cool season — fills the stalls, and cold sweet drinks of Thai tea and roasted-rice water are sold everywhere in the heat.