Nong Khai

Nong Khai was founded in 1827, when Siamese forces suppressed the rising of King Anouvong of Vientiane and moved populations from the Lao side of the Mekong to settle the right bank. The new town, laid out near an older village, became the administrative seat for a wide stretch of the river and kept a garrison. In the 1880s Siamese troops fought the Haw bands raiding the upper Mekong, and the obelisk in the town centre commemorates those campaigns.

The frontier hardened with the Franco-Siamese treaties of 1893 and 1904, which made the Mekong the boundary and put Vientiane on the French side. Nong Khai, until then part of a single Lao world spanning the river, became a border post, though families, monks and traders kept crossing by boat. French-influenced shophouses from that period still stand back from the promenade. After 1975 the town received refugees from Laos, and camps in the province housed thousands for years afterwards.

The turning point of the modern town was the Friendship Bridge, opened in 1994 with Australian support, the first bridge across the lower Mekong; a rail link over it followed in 2009. Trade, customs business and traffic to Vientiane reshaped the town's eastern edge, while the riverside kept its guesthouses and market. Nong Khai has since grown modestly as a border and tourism town, with the concrete figures of Sala Kaeo Ku, begun in the 1970s by the mystic Bunleua Sulilat, becoming its best-known sight.

Nong Khai's culture is Lao in nearly everything but citizenship. Isan, a form of Lao, is spoken in the market and at home, temples are built and decorated in a Lao manner, and festivals mirror those held across the water. Vietnamese families, whose ancestors moved along the river during the colonial period and the wars that followed, form a visible community, with their own associations, Catholic congregations and restaurants, and Chinese merchant families run many of the shophouses.

The river shapes belief. The naga, the serpent spirit of the Mekong, appears on temple stairways, shrines and shopfronts, and the fireballs seen rising from the water at the end of Buddhist Lent each October are understood by many as the naga's doing, though explanations for them are disputed; the nights draw crowds from across Thailand to the riverbank. Boat racing follows the same season, with village crews and long carved hulls. The Songkran procession of Luang Pho Phra Sai, the gold image at Wat Pho Chai, is the town's other great gathering.

Everyday manners are gentle and indirect. Voices stay low, disputes are avoided, and the evening habit is a slow walk along the promenade, a meal by the water and early nights. Bunleua Sulilat's sculpture park, strange and homemade, is treated by many local people as a place of devotion rather than a curiosity, and visitors are expected to behave there as they would in a temple.

The municipality holds a few tens of thousands of people, with a few hundred thousand more in the province, and the town has the unhurried feel of a small place with a big frontier attached to it. Work comes from provincial government, schools and a university campus, the hospital, cross-border trade and customs, agriculture in the surrounding districts, and a steady trickle of tourism along the river.

Mornings begin before dawn with alms rounds and the fresh market; offices and schools start early; the heat empties the streets at midday; and the promenade fills again at sunset with exercisers, families and food carts. Much of the trade in the Tha Sadet market depends on goods and shoppers moving across the bridge, and lorry traffic to Laos and onward to China is now a constant on the eastern bypass.

The province shares Isan's structural problems — low farm incomes, drought and uneven rains, debt, and young people leaving for work in Bangkok or abroad — with the addition of a border economy that rises and falls with the state of relations and trade. The Mekong itself is a concern: upstream dams have made the river's levels less predictable, and unusually clear or low water is now a regular topic among fishermen and riverside residents.

Nong Khai eats Isan food with a stronger Lao and Vietnamese accent than most of the region. Meals turn on khao niao, sticky rice eaten by hand, with som tam pounded with chilli, lime and fermented pla ra, grilled chicken, and larb or nam tok of minced and sliced meat dressed with lime, mint and roasted ground rice. The river supplies the local difference: catfish, carp and other Mekong species appear steamed with herbs, grilled in salt crust, or in tom yum and sour soups, and freshwater weed pressed into sheets with sesame, kaipen, is eaten as a snack in the Lao manner.

Vietnamese dishes are a town speciality. Naem nueang, grilled pork sausage wrapped at the table in rice paper with herbs, green banana and starfruit, is the meal families order for celebrations; kai krata, eggs fried in a small pan with pork and sausage, is a standard breakfast with bread and strong iced coffee; and rice-paper wrappers dried on bamboo racks are a local industry in villages upriver towards Si Chiang Mai.

Snacks and sweets follow the river as well: khao lam, sticky rice with coconut steamed in bamboo; sai krok Isan, the sour fermented pork sausage; and mango with sticky rice in the hot season. Drinks are beer poured over ice, lao khao rice spirit, and cold coffee sweetened with condensed milk. The riverside restaurants along Rim Khong Road are the place the town eats out, with the water and the far bank in view.