Why Phuket is so different from Bangkok: The north-south divide of Southeast Asia

Phuket (Photo: Mike Swigunski via Unsplash)

Thailand, like most developing Southeast Asian countries, is a bundle of contradictions. It is an unsettling mix of business with leisure, rural landscapes with glossy high-rises, malls and shopping arcades, traditional local Thai food as well as glamorous beach parties.

It is infamous for both its raw and classical Thai mythic traditions and knowledge systems rooted in ancient Sanskrit traditions as well as its raunchy and amorous sex parties that Europeans throng towards on its beaches. In the main old town of Bangkok, for instance, you can catch a glimpse of the Thai khon dance, which is performed by artists at the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre. Khon, the masked dance of Thailand, is based on stories that run parallel to many that are found in Indian mythology and is an adaptation of the Ramayana.

Sukhumvit (Photo: Norbert Braun via Unsplash)

In the crowded suburbs at the north of Bangkok, on the other hand, are narrower and more colourful streets filled with modern-day nightlife and discotheques and pubs at every metre and every corner, tourists thronging in and out of restaurants. This Thai suburb called Sukhumvit is also where middle-class apartments are found with its migrating urban working population living in it.

Unlike in the old town of Bangkok that is filled with classical and ancient heritage and architecture and the more affluent locals who own their own properties, the city’s suburbs brim with cosmpolitanism. Even in the narrow village lanes tucked inside the old town are night markets filled with cheap street food where you can taste pad thai, enter shady sex parlours, watch culturally subversive slapstick shows, and swig multiple glasses of beer in cheap bars.

Bangkok (Photo: David Gardiner via Unsplash)

Phuket’s architecture is similar. The costlier beach hotels on the island’s suburbs have a wide group of tourists residing in it with all-night parties, high in decibel, around them while its main town is deserted after 8 pm with no food available anywhere around your hotel for miles. In its main town, you may find a room for as little as Rs 500 a night and a dorm bunk bed for a measly Rs 150 a night, but there won't be any action around you.

What is the reason for these cultural contradictions that are eerily parallel and metaphoric to the ones we see in Delhi and Mumbai, where the old town of south Mumbai maintains the heritage architecture while the suburbs around Bandra teem with restaurants, entertainment, nightlife, Bollywood, and food, and where rickshaws brush shoulders with BMW cars on the elite roads of south Delhi?

Colonial wars that were fought over Asia between the US and China during the Vietnam War in the 20th century is the impeding factor that lies behind the division between the northern and southern parts of most Asian townships from Mumbai and Delhi to Phuket and Bangkok, something that has been psychologically projected on to Thailand’s development, too, particularly following the culture wars between the US and China in Vietnam as well as that in Korea where its southern and northern parts were divided.

Both Vietnam and Korea are two countries whose north and south were engulfed into a civil divide during the last century, but this colonial relationship has become a universal 21st century cultural symbol that will stay within cultural politics for a while.

Bangkok (Photo: Bao Menglong via Unsplash)

As Taiwan and other countries try to individuate from these dichotomies of China and the West and find its own unique identity, the larger cultural landscape of Asia is morphing into something new, too. But on the other hand, as a “tourist”, you may still want to experience the traditional Thai rural life or pump your adrenaline in the cheap nightlife offered by its shady sex markets, or you may want to relax and unwind on its pristine beaches to tan your skin.

Choose what suits you best. But if you are also one of those with an intellectual curiosity to know more about the place you are landing into, you would want to see all these shades of life in one breath during your hectic trip before you get back to your routine and your work.

And if you do, you too may find that the new individuation of Asia at the end of the pandemic lies not in a Taiwan, a Thailand or a Sri Lanka as much as in the eye of the global citizen who can balance oneself amid all of these cultural dichotomies and also find the right personal and professional balance during a post-pandemic work-from-anywhere trip.