Old Phuket Town
Tin money built these shophouse terraces and the families who made it were Hokkien. We walk it late in the day and eat Baba food, not island food.
Where
Phuket
Best time
November to April for the dry season; a Sunday evening if you want the walking street with it.
Phuket had tin long before it had tourists. Through the nineteenth century Hokkien Chinese labour and Hokkien Chinese capital worked the island's alluvial deposits, and the money came ashore as a town: two-storey shophouses in the Sino-Portuguese manner, arcaded at street level so a pedestrian could walk a whole block out of the sun, with European mouldings on the fronts and Chinese ancestral halls behind them.
The families who built it are still here, and they are Baba — Peranakan, in the wider term used across Penang and Melaka. Hokkien fathers, Thai and Malay mothers, four or five generations in. It shows in the food more than anywhere: moo hong, pork belly stewed slowly with black pepper and garlic; mee hokkien; o-tao, oysters and taro fried into egg on a flat pan.
The town spent the eighties and nineties being ignored, which is what saved it.
How to read a shophouse front
The pattern repeats down Thalang, Dibuk and Krabi roads and is worth learning. The arcade at ground level is the five-foot way, a continuous covered walkway required by ordinance so that nobody had to leave shade or rain cover. Above it sits the family floor, its windows shuttered in louvred timber, its plasterwork borrowing pilasters and stucco swags from the Straits Settlements.
The buildings are narrow and very deep, and most hold an air well halfway back — an open shaft pulling light and air into the middle of the plan, collecting rainwater at its base. Soi Romanee, a short lane of pastel fronts that was the town's brothel street a century ago, is the most photographed stretch and the least representative.
The Vegetarian Festival, which is not about vegetables
For nine days in the ninth lunar month, usually falling in late September or October, Phuket keeps the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, known in English as the Vegetarian Festival. The dietary observance gives it the name and the town does go meatless — yellow flags outside every stall, a whole cuisine that surfaces for a week.
The rest is harder to describe politely. Devotees at the Jui Tui and Bang Neow shrines enter trance and pierce their cheeks with objects that grow larger every year, then process through the streets under continuous firecracker fire. It is loud, bloody and entirely sincere, and it is not staged for visitors. We will tell you honestly whether it suits your party.
Where the town eats
Phuket's island restaurants and Phuket Town's kitchens are two different cuisines. In town the register is Hokkien-Thai: a bowl of mee hokkien from a shop that has done nothing else since the sixties, khanom jeen with a southern fish curry for breakfast, a-pong pancakes crisped in a copper pan on a corner, coffee drawn through a cloth sock in a room with marble tables and a ceiling fan.
On Sunday evenings Thalang Road closes to traffic and becomes a walking street, which is enjoyable and a great deal busier than the rest of the week. Any other evening the same street is nearly empty by nine.
How We Visit
Our way in
We come in the late afternoon, when the light is on the shophouse fronts and the heat has gone out of the arcades, and we walk rather than drive — the old grid is four or five streets and a car only gets in the way. A guide from the town opens the parts you would not otherwise find: a family house still lived in, a shrine courtyard mid-ceremony, the back lane behind the pretty one. Then dinner where the town eats. If your dates fall across the Vegetarian Festival we will say so, and plan around it or into it.
Questions
What travellers ask
Is Old Phuket Town worth visiting?
Yes, and it is the part of Phuket most visitors miss entirely. The old town is four or five streets of Sino-Portuguese shophouses built on nineteenth-century tin money, still occupied by the Baba families who built them, with a food culture — Hokkien-Thai rather than island Thai — that exists nowhere else in Thailand. Late afternoon into the evening is the hour to walk it.
When is the Phuket Vegetarian Festival?
In the ninth lunar month, which usually falls in late September or October, so the dates move each year. It runs for nine days. The whole town eats meat-free, and at the Jui Tui and Bang Neow shrines devotees enter trance, pierce themselves and process through the streets under firecrackers. It is intense and genuinely religious rather than staged, and worth knowing about before fixing those dates.
What should you eat in Old Phuket Town?
Moo hong — pork belly stewed with black pepper and garlic — is the dish the town is known for, along with mee hokkien noodles, o-tao (oysters and taro fried with egg), and a-pong pancakes from a street pan. Breakfast is khanom jeen with a southern fish curry. The old coffee shops still brew through a cloth filter. All of it is town food, quite distinct from what the beach resorts serve.
Journeys That Include This
Ask about Old Phuket Town
We build it into a journey written from scratch around your dates, rather than fitting you to a fixed itinerary.
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