Grand Palace and Wat Phra Kaew

The Grand Palace is not a building but a walled town of two hundred and eighteen thousand square metres, raised in 1782 when Rama I moved the capital to this bank. Kings lived here until 1925; they no longer do, but the state still uses it for ceremonies, which is why a wing sometimes closes without warning.

You come in for Wat Phra Kaew, the temple of the Emerald Buddha, which fills the first third of the compound. The statue is sixty-six centimetres tall, carved from jade rather than emerald, and set so high you can barely make it out — that is normal, nobody really sees it. What you look at are the walls: a painted gallery of a hundred and seventy-eight panels unrolling the Ramakien over nearly a kilometre.

The rest of the compound is the palace itself, including the Chakri Maha Prasat — a European building crowned with three Thai roofs, an 1882 political compromise that became the symbol of the city.