Bangkok: City of Angels

Thai men are expected to shave their heads and don monastic robes temporarily at least once in their lives. Some enter the monkhood twice, first as 10-vow novices in their preteen years and again as fully ordained, 227-vow monks sometime after the age of 20

Portuguese priest Fernao Mendez Pinto was the first to use the epithet “Venice of the East,” referring not to Bangkok but to Ayuthaya, in a letter to the Society of Jesus in Lisbon in 1554, but two hundred years later the term came to be used to describe the new Bangkok capital as well. I

mementoes of national pride to the city and helped found the country's first fine arts university. Americans established Siam's first printing press along with the kingdom's first newspaper.

Chao Phraya River and was originally meant for horse carriages and rickshaws. A tramway was added later, and today it is one of the busiest streets in Bangkok.

Whatever the reason, Bangkok's ability to maintain Siam's independence meant that the kingdom was free to draw upon the talents of any architect or transport developer in the world, a freedom that helps explain the enormous variety—planned and unplanned—in the capital today.
Germans were hired to design and build railways emanating from the capital, while the Dutch contributed Bangkok's central railway station, today considered a minor masterpiece of civic Art Deco. Italian sculptor Corrado Feroci contributed the four-winged Democracy Monument and other memen

lum Riverbank), named after the trees which grew there in abundance. As the first monarch of the new Chakri royal dynasty—which continues to this day— Phaya Chakri was later dubbed King Rama

serve the Burmese court.
Four years after this devastating defeat at the hands of the Burmese, the Siamese regrouped under Phaya Taksin, a half-Chinese, half-Thai general who decided to move the capital farther south along the Chao Phraya River, closer to the Gulf of Siam. Thonburi Si Mahasamut, founded two hundred years earlier by a group of wealthy Thais who had turned it into an important trade entrepôt during the height of Ayuthaya's power, was a logical choice.
Fearing Thonburi was vulnerable to Burmese attack from the west, in 1782 Taksin's successor Phaya Chakri moved the capital across the river to a smaller settlement known as Bang Makok (Olive

An Asian power finally subdued the capital when the Burmese attacked in 1765, destroying most of Ayuthaya's Buddhist temples and royal edifices. Many Siamese were marched to Pegu, where they were forced to

Thai rulers in the 18th and 19th centuries made liberal use of Chinese businesspeople to infiltrate European trading houses, a move that helped defeat the colonial designs of the Europeans. The Thai monarchy also accepted the daughters of rich Chinese families into the royal court as consorts, thus deepening political connections and adding a Chinese bloodline that extends to the current Thai king.