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Phuket Town - Phuket Hotels and Travel Guide
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Phuket Town
Phuket Town is the provincial capital of Phuket Province. Phuket Town is the largest town in Phuket Province. It has a population of 63,000 and is the economic hub of the island. For the most part just an ordinary, scruffy provincial Thai town, it's hardly a major tourist attraction, but the Chinatown area is worth a quick look and there are some great Thai-style shopping opportunities too. Overall, accommodation and food in the town is cheaper than near the beaches, and can provide a refreshing change of pace.
Buses and songthaews connect Phuket Town to major beaches around the island, and start from Thanon Ranong at the Ranong market. The most popular service is the one to Patong Beach (20 baht, 45 minutes) which leaves every 30 minutes between 07:00 and 18:00. Fares to other beaches range from 15 to 30 baht. If you miss the last bus back a taxi will cost 200-400 depending on your bargaining skills.
Phuket International Airport is 30 km to the north of Phuket Town, about 30 minutes by taxi or 45 minutes by shared minibus.
Phuket Town is just a little too big to be covered comfortably on foot. There's little organised public transport as such, but motorbikes and four wheel tuk-tuks whizz about looking for fares.
Phuket Town's low-key attractions are mostly related to its colourful Chinese history and heritage, found in the Chinatown area on the north-western side of the city around Thanon Thalang.
Jui Tui and Put Jaw Temples
Corner of Thanon Ranong and Soi Phuthon (just west of the Ranong bus terminus). Put Jaw is the oldest Chinese Taoist temple in Phuket, first built over 200 years ago and dedicated to the Goddess of Mercy (Kwun Im), while the adjacent and connected Jui Tui is its larger, more modern annex. If you have a question that is puzzling you, ask it and throw the two red mango-shaped pieces in front of the altar in the air: if they land the same side up the answer is "no", while if they land on different sides the answer is "yes". Free entry but donations welcome.
Wat Mongkol Nimit
Thanon Dibuk. A classical Thai-style temple with a soaring roof and lots of colourful glass tiling.
Phuket Culture Museum
at Rajabhat University. It's free and very informative. Phuket's history is told in pictures and still scenes.
Phuket Sino-Portuguese Style
A Century ago the capital of Phuket was a scruffy and relatively insignificant little village, far smaller than the town of Thalang in northern Phuket and of little importance to the island. With the expansion of tin mining last century in central Kathu District, laborers and their overloads started to settle in the regions and the town began to take shape.
It was a felicitous choice for the narrow river meandering through the settlement flowed out to sea in a sheltered, shallow bay – ideal for a small port. Old records mention how shallow draught boats used to sail up into the town, though it is hard to imagine such a sight when looking at what remains nowadays of the narrow, silty canal, but the port prospered as it provided an ideal outlet for ships carrying tin, while fishing – previously organized only on a small scale – began to gain commercial importance.
Today Phuket town is a bustling communications and administrative center with a haphazard but comfortable blend of old and new, paralleling the development and economic fortunes of its citizens.
While the largely agrarian, Thais preferred the rural areas of Thalang district and the Muslim Thais favored the littoral, the Sino-Thais-businessmen for the most part, settled in Phuket town where, today, over 50,000 inhabitants are of Chinese origin.
It was under the Phuket governor Praya Rasada Korsimbi, in the first couple of decades of this century, that the modern town of Phuket – indeed, the island as a whole – began to blossom. Today he is still remembered with reverence by some of the town elders while his heirs have continued in diverse ways to make their mark on the evolution of Phuket.
Little remains of 19th century Phuket, building materials were usually natural ones, such as wood and palm thatch, which perished with passage of time. In addition, there was a tendency among those early Chinese to demolish rather than to relocate when they wanted a more modern property. And most of what was not razed went up in a flaming inferno at the beginning of the century.
Those streets in the heart of the capital named after neighboring provinces to which they once led Krabi, Phang Nga, Ranong have few single-story shop houses, complete with irregularly tiled roof and attractively painted in those familiar pastel shades of dusky ping, peppermint green and egg shell blue, found throughout Chinese inhabited Asia. The solid, double storey shop houses, which might at first glance seem antiquated, are rarely older than 50 years for they are suffering, not from age, but neglect. Those intricate decorative details in balustrades, cornices and friezes that characterize. Sino-Asian architecture are crumbling and, sadly, fading like a forgotten flower garden.
It is slightly different on the outskirts, where a number of imposing private houses, built in the Sino-Portuguese Colonial style, evoke vision of the earlier era of prosperity. But some of those too merit a face life which by now would probably be more structural than cosmetic. All these tangible reminders of Phuket’s history are in danger of disappearing.
In a town existing for over 100 years, it is difficult to find any structure that dates back more than a half century. Government House, constructed over 70 years ago, has the distinction of being not only the oldest extant building but the first building in Thailand to be made out of concrete. With its 99 doors and two lone windows, it remains an impressive, airy structure reminiscent of colonial Cambodia. This likeness was not lost on the move world who recently chose it to represent a Cambodian palace in “The Killing Fields”.
Just across the tree-lined road stands the Provincial Court, a graceful, Portuguese Colonial building. Under its elegant snowy white cornice is inscribed the Thai date of its completion, 2459 or, in the Christian calendar, 1916. Thus these two civic building are said to be the oldest ones in town.
At the other end of the tire scale, interspersed among the shop houses, are a few modern buildings, functionally simple in style and devoid of unnecessary decoration. The phase of modern architectural development dates from the time when Phuket town became a provincial and all those facilities expected of such a capital hospitals, telecommunication buildings, banks, restaurants, hotels and travel agencies reflect this latter day expansion. One modern anomaly, however, is the Rasada Arcade. Small balconies, arches and dazzling white paint work set aside this complex from its more mundane neighbors.
Phuket Town Hotels
- Price($)
- 26
- 29
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- 38
- 23
- 35
- 31
- 36
- 57
- Rating
- ***
- ****
- ***
- ***
- ***
- ***
- ***
- ***
- ***
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