Eastern Thailand Culture & Language

Eastern culture is mainstream central Thai with several distinct local strands laid over it.

The gem trade

Chanthaburi’s weekend market is a genuine spectacle: dealers at folding tables along Si Chan Road, stones spread on white paper, loupes and folded envelopes changing hands, and transactions conducted with a formality and vocabulary of their own. The trade is dominated by Thai-Chinese and Burmese families and has its own conventions about sight, price and trust that outsiders are not really part of.

Vietnamese Catholicism

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception is the largest Catholic church in Thailand, built and rebuilt by Vietnamese refugees who arrived from the 1710s onward and again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The surrounding quarter has its own food and a community that has been here for three centuries.

Fruit culture

The orchards have their own calendar and festivals, and durian in particular is taken extremely seriously — varieties are argued over, and the best trees are known individually.

Khmer borderlands

In Sa Kaeo and eastern Trat, Khmer is spoken and the temple architecture and festivals show it.

Taksin’s region

King Taksin is remembered here with a particularity found nowhere else in Thailand, because this is where he rebuilt an army after Ayutthaya fell. Shrines to him stand in Chanthaburi, Rayong and Trat, his statue is on roundabouts across the region, and the anniversary of his coronation in late December brings ceremonies at the Chanthaburi camp site where the campaign was organised.

Fishing villages

The stilt communities at Bang Bao and Salak Kok on Ko Chang are working villages with their own crab and squid economy.

Thai as spoken here is close to the central standard, so a phrasebook works straightforwardly.

English is widely spoken in Pattaya, on Ko Chang and Ko Samet and in the resort areas, and much less so in Chanthaburi, Trat and the inland towns.

Khmer is spoken in the border districts of Sa Kaeo and eastern Trat, and Cambodian workers are a substantial presence in the coastal economy.

Vietnamese survives in the Chanthaburi community, and Russian is unusually common in Pattaya signage and services.

Useful Thai: sawatdee khrap or kha, khop khun for thank you, tao rai for how much, mai phet for not spicy, and aroy for delicious, which is always well received at a seafood stall.