Central Thailand Culture & Language

What the world recognises as Thai culture is very largely the culture of this plain, exported outward by a centralising state and then by restaurants.

Temple architecture

The central style is the gilded one: steep tiered roofs with chofa finials curling from the gable ends, gold leaf, mirror mosaic and coloured glass. Wat Phra Kaew inside the Grand Palace is its most extravagant expression, and Wat Pho holds a 46-metre reclining Buddha and the inscriptions that codified traditional Thai medicine and massage.

Classical performance

Khon, masked dance-drama telling episodes of the Ramakien — the Thai version of the Ramayana — is UNESCO-listed and was a court art, with years of training behind every gesture. Alongside it sit lakhon dance, shadow puppetry and the piphat percussion ensemble.

River culture

The Royal Barge Procession, using gilded vessels rowed by uniformed crews chanting in time, is staged rarely and is among the most striking ceremonies anywhere.

Craft

Benjarong porcelain, nielloware, gold leaf beaten in Bangkok’s old quarters, and the silk that Jim Thompson revived commercially after the war.

Literature and the Ramakien

Rama I had the Ramakien written down in full at the founding of Bangkok, and its episodes run in painted panels for more than a kilometre around the cloister of Wat Phra Kaew — probably the longest continuous narrative painting anywhere. Sunthorn Phu, working a generation later, wrote the epic poem Phra Aphai Mani and is the poet Thai schoolchildren still learn; his verse forms shaped the language’s idea of what poetry sounds like.

Thai-Chinese Bangkok

Yaowarat’s shrines, vegetarian festival and gold shops reflect generations of Teochew settlement, and much of Bangkok’s commercial character comes from it.

Thai as spoken here is the standard variety — the central dialect became the national language, so what you learn from a phrasebook is what is spoken on this plain.

English is widely spoken in Bangkok’s hotels, restaurants and transport, and reasonably in Ayutthaya and Kanchanaburi. In the provincial towns and markets it thins quickly, and a translation app earns its keep.

Chinese dialects, particularly Teochew, are spoken by older Thai-Chinese families in Yaowarat.

Thai is tonal with five tones, and the same syllable at different pitches means entirely different things — which is why a mispronounced word gets a blank look rather than a guess.

Useful: sawatdee khrap from a man and sawatdee kha from a woman, khop khun for thank you with the same particle, mai phet for not spicy, tao rai for how much, and mai pen rai — never mind, it’s fine — which does a great deal of work.