Category · 15 articles
Bangkok
Infrastructure, history, neighbourhoods, the things you walk past.
Bangkok before the Skytrain: the 31 years the city chose cars
Bangkok had electric rail in 1894, scrapped it in 1968, and didn't get it back until 1999. What happened in between — and the thousand concrete pillars still standing as evidence.
Why Bangkok floods — and why it's mostly not the rain
Bangkok sinks up to 3cm a year, sits on a river that falls 1.5m per 100km, and filled in its canals for roads. Around 70% of projected flood cost increases by 2050 come from subsidence, not sea level rise.
Bangkok scams: the pattern behind all of them
Every Bangkok tourist scam works the same way — it interrupts you before you reach the real thing. Learn the pattern and you're protected against the ones nobody's invented yet.
Why Bangkok has no city centre
Bangkok's business district has moved four times in seventy years — river to Silom to Sathorn to Sukhumvit. It isn't a place. It's a moving average, and the transport network decides where it sits.
Why Thai addresses make no sense (and why they actually do)
Soi 20 can be a mile from Soi 21. House 150/1 sits next to 89. Thai addresses aren't a map — they're a chronology, which explains everything.
Thailand has 14,800 7-Elevens. That's not a fun fact, it's infrastructure.
Thailand has more 7-Elevens per person than any country on Earth — 14,800 of them, all run by one company. It stopped being a shop chain a long time ago.
Why no shadow may fall on a spirit house
Thai spirit houses follow strict placement rules — specific directions, a minimum height, and no shadow from any building or tree. In a city of towers, that last rule explains everything.
Thirteen digits: what a Thai ID number actually tells you
Every digit of a Thai ID number means something — including whether your parents registered your birth on time. It's on your card for life.
The air-conditioned town square
Bangkok has 8.2 million square metres of retail supply. That isn't consumerism — it's the only public space in a city where outdoors is too hot, too polluted or underwater.
The hole in the ice
The ice with a hole through it is the drinking ice. Thailand manufactures it at ฿0.80 a kilo in factories producing 670 tonnes a day, and delivers it daily to everywhere.
No word for please
Thai has no everyday word for "please" and doesn't need one. Politeness lives in the pronoun and the final particle — which is why Thais sound blunt in English.
Nobody else is called this
Thai law requires every surname to be unique to one family. If you meet someone with your surname, you're related. That single rule explains more than it looks like.
The last fifty metres
Bangkok's water authority says its tap water meets WHO drinking standards. It does — at the plant. What happens after that is why the whole country buys water.
Six gongs in the evening
Thai hour-words are the sounds the instruments made. โมง is a gong. ทุ่ม is a drum. ตี is the act of striking one. The clock was a temple, and the words survived it.
The bottle stays
Thai drinks come in bags because the glass bottle is worth more than the drink. It solved two real problems in the 1950s and created a bigger one since.
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