Upstairs at Phuket's first Chinese school, Chinese is still taught

On Krabi Road in Phuket's old town, the Phuket Thai Hua Museum occupies a two-storey Sino-Portuguese building completed in 1934, or 2477 in the Thai Buddhist calendar. It was built for the first Chinese school in Phuket province, founded by Hokkien migrants. Since its restoration, Chinese is still taught upstairs, and the ground floor is divided into 13 exhibition rooms.

Most of Phuket's beaches are on the west coast. The old town is in Phuket Town, on the east side. In the nineteenth century large numbers of Hokkien Chinese came here for tin, many of them by way of Penang. They mined, traded and built shrines, and they brought the Sino-Portuguese shophouse with them: a row of two- or three-storey buildings with a shop on the ground floor and a covered walkway along the front.

The shophouses cluster along Thalang Road, Dibuk Road and Soi Romanee. The walls are painted mint green, butter yellow and pale blue, some of them faded. The windows have wooden shutters, and there is plaster moulding over the doors. The covered walkways link up from shop to shop and keep the sun off the pavement. On Sunday evenings Thalang Road closes to traffic and becomes a walking street.

On ordinary days a common lunch in the old town is Hokkien noodles: thick yellow noodles with sliced pork, prawns and greens in hot broth, usually with a small dish of chillies in vinegar on the table.

There are several Chinese shrines in the old town, and two of them, Jui Tui and Bang Neow, are the centres of the Vegetarian Festival processions and rituals. The festival runs from the first to the ninth day of the ninth lunar month. Yellow flags printed with the character for vegetarian food hang outside the shrines and along the arcades, and many noodle stalls and food shops put up the same flags and switch to meat-free cooking.