Travel and Tourism in Thailand

Bangkok: The City of Angels

Bangkok, known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon — the full ceremonial name in the Thai language is actually the longest place name in the world, a forty-one-word description of the city's glories that every Thai schoolchild is expected to memorize — is one of the great cities of the modern world. Home to more than ten million people within the city proper and perhaps twice that in the greater metropolitan area, Bangkok is Thailand's political, economic, cultural, and spiritual center, and the point through which the vast majority of international visitors enter the country. It is a city of bewildering contradictions and irresistible energy, where air-conditioned mega-malls rise beside century-old street food markets, where seven-lane expressways roar above neighborhoods of wooden shophouses and ornamental canals, where Buddhist temples with golden spires stand on corners in business districts, and where one of the world's most sophisticated fine-dining scenes coexists with the best street food culture on the planet.