Khon Kaen

Khon Kaen was founded in 1783, when a Lao noble led a group of families from the east to settle near the marshes at the centre of the plateau, under Siamese authority. The settlement moved several times as water supply and flooding dictated before fixing on the present site by Bueng Kaen Nakhon. The city takes its name from the old chedi of Phra That Kham Kaen, about 30 kilometres north-east in Nam Phong district, around which the earliest religious life of the district gathered.

For more than a century it remained a small administrative and farming town. Its transformation began in the 1960s, when the Thai government, with American support during the Cold War, chose it as the development centre for the northeast: the Friendship Highway was built up from Bangkok through Korat, Khon Kaen University opened in the mid-1960s as the first institution of higher education in the northeast, the Ubolratana Dam was built on the Nam Phong river as the region's first hydroelectric scheme, and hospitals, colleges and government offices followed. The population multiplied within a generation.

Since then the city has become the region's centre for education, medicine and conventions, with the university's Srinagarind teaching hospital and a cluster of research institutions. It has also been a centre of northeastern political identity, strongly represented in the movements that shaped Thai politics from the 2000s. Recent decades have brought shopping malls, plans for a light rail line across the district, and a steady expansion of housing estates into the rice fields around the city.

Khon Kaen is an Isan city with a student population, and both halves show. Isan, a form of Lao, is the language of the market and the home; mor lam, the sung verse driven by the khaen mouth organ, is played at temple fairs and in electric form at concerts, and the university has done much to record and teach it. Luk thung country music fills the same stages. The city's Songkran street festival and its silk fair are the two events that draw the whole region.

Silk is the provincial craft. Mat mi, in which threads are tied and dyed before weaving so that the pattern emerges on the loom, is made in villages such as those of Chonnabot, and the November festival combines silk stalls with Phuk Siao, a ceremony in which older people tie threads round the wrists of younger participants. Temple murals in villages around the city, painted in a naive local style, are another regional art, and the province's dinosaur finds have become an unlikely part of local identity, appearing on signs and souvenirs.

Social manners are provincial Thai: indirect, quiet and averse to confrontation, with respect for monks, teachers and elders. Because the city lives by its university and hospitals, it is used to outsiders and comparatively relaxed; evening life around the lake and the walking street is family-centred and ends early by Bangkok standards.

About 114,000 people live in the city municipality and about 417,000 in the Mueang Khon Kaen district that forms its urban area, which makes Khon Kaen the fourth-largest city in Thailand. Work is concentrated in the university, colleges and schools, the teaching hospital and other medical institutions, provincial government, conventions and trade fairs, retail, and the sugar, rice and cassava processing that link the city to the farms around it.

The daily rhythm is that of a hot-country city: markets before dawn, offices and classes early, a quiet and shuttered middle of the day, and an evening that moves to the lake path, the food stalls and the malls. Students and hospital staff keep parts of the centre busy late, and weekends bring temple visits, trips to the reservoir and family meals at riverside and lakeside restaurants.

The city has grown faster than its infrastructure. Traffic, flooding of low streets after heavy rain, and water supply in drought years are recurring problems, and air quality worsens in the burning season. As in the rest of Isan, many families depend on members working in Bangkok or abroad, though Khon Kaen itself draws young people in from the countryside for study and work, which makes it younger and more mobile than the province around it.

Khon Kaen eats Isan food, and a meal begins with khao niao, sticky rice taken by hand from a woven basket. Som tam, green papaya pounded with chilli, lime, garlic and fish sauce, is ordered in degrees of ferocity, the strongest with pla ra, the fermented fish sauce that gives the region's cooking its depth. Gai yang, chicken flattened and grilled over charcoal, larb and nam tok, salads of minced or sliced meat with lime, mint and roasted ground rice, and sai krok Isan, the sour fermented pork sausage, complete the standard order.

Freshwater fish from the Nam Phong river and the reservoir appear grilled in salt crust, steamed with herbs and in tom yum; soups such as tom saep are hot, sour and offal-rich; and seasonal stalls sell crickets, silkworm pupae and red ant eggs, which are treated as delicacies rather than curiosities. Noodle dishes and rice porridge come from the city's Chinese-Thai shops, and the night markets add grilled skewers, fried chicken and mango with sticky rice.

Sweets are coconut and rice based, including khao lam steamed in bamboo, and the province is known for its mulberry products — a by-product of silk growing — as juice and jam. Drinks are beer over ice, strong iced coffee sweetened with condensed milk, and lao khao, the white rice spirit, which appears at village celebrations. The lakeside restaurants at Bueng Kaen Nakhon and the weekend walking street are where the city eats out.