Pattaya

Pattaya was a fishing village on an open bay for most of its history, with a few hundred families, coconut plantations behind the sand and no road worth the name. Its modern life began in 1959, when a party of American servicemen driving down from a base at Korat rented houses at the south end of the beach and word of the bay spread. The air base at U-Tapao and the naval facilities at Sattahip brought many more on leave, bungalows and bars followed, and the Vietnam War gave the village an economy built on visitors almost overnight.

When the American forces left in the 1970s the resort did not collapse, as many expected, but turned to European package tourism. Hotels rose along the bay through the 1980s, and the resort acquired both a reputation as a cheap holiday coast and a notoriety for its sex industry. Growth ran ahead of drainage and sewerage, and by the late 1980s pollution of the bay had become serious enough to threaten the trade; treatment plants, a rebuilt promenade and the periodic replenishment of the beach with imported sand followed.

Since the 1990s the resort has widened its appeal, adding gardens, theme attractions, golf courses and convention space, and drawing very large numbers of Chinese, Indian and Russian visitors alongside Europeans. Pattaya has been administered as a special self-governing city since it was granted city status in 1978, unusually for Thailand, and the Eastern Economic Corridor programme has brought motorway and rail projects, a rebuilt U-Tapao airport and a wave of high-rise residential building along the coast. Tourism collapsed during the pandemic years and has since returned.

Pattaya is the least typically Thai of Thailand's cities, and makes no secret of it. Signs appear in Thai, English, Russian, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic; whole streets specialise in one nationality's food and shops; and a large foreign population of retirees, remote workers and long-stay visitors lives alongside Thai residents, most of whom have come from elsewhere in the country to work. Many of the staff in bars, kitchens and hotels are from Isan, and Isan music and food are as much part of the city as anything coastal.

The nightlife is the city's best-known feature and its most criticised. Cabarets with elaborate costumes and lip-synched revues are a long-running Pattaya institution, and the bar strips draw a great deal of attention, but the resort's daytime economy — beaches, gardens, shopping, golf, conferences, medical treatment — is now larger.

Underneath, the Thai calendar holds. Pattaya and neighbouring Naklua celebrate Wan Lai, extending the Songkran new year with their own days of water throwing and sand-pagoda building at the temples in April, and Loi Krathong floats are launched from the beach in November. Chinese shrines in Naklua hold their own festivals, and the temples still receive the morning alms round a few streets from the bars. Visitors are expected to dress properly away from the sand and to treat temples, monks and images of the monarchy with respect.

About 120,000 people are registered as residents of Pattaya City and about 351,000 in the greater Pattaya area, but no reliable total exists and the real figure is thought to be around half a million once migrant workers from Isan and Myanmar, foreign residents and long-stay visitors are counted. The wider Chon Buri province, one of the wealthiest in the country, adds industrial towns, the container port at Laem Chabang and the factories of the eastern seaboard just up the coast.

Nearly everything in the city depends on visitors, directly or at one remove: hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, taxis and boats, and behind them construction, property management and healthcare. Condominium building has been the other great business, and towers now run almost unbroken along Jomtien and up the hill. Hospitals here treat many foreign patients, and international schools serve the resident families.

The rhythm is unlike a Thai provincial town's. Markets and street food open early for workers; the beach fills late in the morning; the hottest hours are quiet; the evening brings the night markets and the bar strips, which run into the small hours, so that whole districts sleep through the morning. Long-running local issues are traffic, flash flooding in the streets behind the beach after heavy rain, water supply, the quality of the sea water, and the dependence of so many livelihoods on a single industry.

The bay's own cooking is seafood, and the most Thai of it is found in Naklua and along Jomtien: prawns and squid grilled over charcoal, whole fish steamed with lime, garlic and chilli or fried with turmeric, blue swimmer crab in curry powder, and mussels in a batter of egg and flour. Seafood is usually eaten with nam chim seafood, a sharp dipping sauce of chilli, garlic, lime and fish sauce.

Chon Buri's specialities reach the city too. Khao lam, sticky rice with coconut milk roasted in a length of bamboo, is sold on roads north towards Bang Saen, and the chilli-garlic sauce named after the town of Si Racha, half an hour up the coast, is on most tables. From the workers who staff the resort come the Isan dishes eaten everywhere: som tam pounded to order, gai yang grilled chicken, sticky rice in baskets and fermented pork sausages, sold from carts and grills along Soi Buakhao and the market lanes.

Pattaya also eats the world. Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants cluster near the centre, Russian shops sell rye bread and pelmeni, and there are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German and Scandinavian kitchens, many opened by residents. Fruit stalls sell durian, mangosteen and rambutan from the orchards of Chanthaburi and Rayong in the April to June season, along with the mango and sticky rice sold by the box on every beach road.