City

Bangkok

Bangkok assaults every sense before it earns your affection — temple gold and exhaust fumes, monks at dawn and night markets at midnight, the Chao Phraya sliding wide and brown past skyscrapers and spirit houses. John Burdett's Royal Thai Detective novels made this city's moral complexity readable: Buddhist compassion coexisting with corruption, tradition and capitalism locked in a permanent negotiation conducted over bowls of boat noodles. Alex Garland set The Beach on Thai shores and made Bangkok the last threshold of ambivalence before paradise turns dark.

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