Bangkok

Bangkok — Krung Thep, the City of Angels — is the high-octane capital of a kingdom that has never been colonised. Here, gilded temples and canal-side markets share the same skyline as glass towers and luxury malls; monks in saffron robes walk streets that never stop moving; tuk-tuks dart past two-century-old palaces. The Chao Phraya river, which gave the city its life, still threads through it all — the slowest, oldest thing in a capital that never slows.

It is loud, hot, fragrant and utterly electric. You don't visit Bangkok. You fall into it.

Bangkok was not always a capital. For four hundred years the heart of the kingdom was Ayutthaya, eighty kilometres to the north — until the Burmese sacked it in 1767. The survivors regrouped downriver at Thonburi, on the west bank of the Chao Phraya, and in 1782 King Rama I crossed the water to the east bank and started again.

He built a palace, a temple for the Emerald Buddha, and a wall. The city grew along its canals — Bangkok was a Venice of the East long before it was a city of skyscrapers, with floating markets, water taxis and riverside temples. Traders came from China, India and Europe; monks walked the same streets they walk today.

The canals are mostly filled in now, the walls are gone, and the city has swallowed both banks and run for miles in every direction. But climb Wat Saket at dawn, or ride the river at sunset, and the old city is still there — gold on the water, saffron in the streets, the Chao Phraya still the slowest, oldest thing in a capital that never stops.