30 July is World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. This year the United Nations has pointed the day directly at a crime that runs through job adverts, bank accounts and border towns a few hours from here. Most business owners…
From a rooftop bar on Nimmanhaemin in the second week of March, Doi Suthep is not there. The mountain rises to the west of the old city, more than a kilometre above it. For roughly 10 weeks each year it…
In a competition hall in Rome during the first week of July, a 12-year-old Year 7 student from Thailand sat down at a keyboard alongside 713 other finalists from 54 countries. When the International STEM Olympiad Grand Final closed on…
The footpaths around the moat have fresh paint. Cables that sagged across shopfronts for years have been bundled and reclipped. Billboards near the old gates are coming down. The city is getting ready, and this time the preparation is not…
From most rooftops in Chiang Mai you can see the Doi Suthep range to the west and temple spires in every other direction. That geography and that cultural density just placed the city third in the world in Travel +…
In a converted farm building in the Mae On valley, 40 minutes east of Chiang Mai Old City, a single-origin cacao bean is fermented, roasted and pressed into a finished bar without leaving the property. The output at the Skugga…
Thai Roots: A CMBN Research Series, No. 1 Published 26 June 2026, Thailand’s national Sunthon Phu Day Each 26 June, schools across Thailand hold ceremonies for a man who spent two stretches in prison, was homeless for years, and began…
In 2020, Janna Hanover watched two things happen at once. A city went into lockdown. And a close friend packed up and left Chiang Mai because she could not bear the people she was working with any longer. The lockdown…
Vietnam sits at 38th in the world for AI adoption. Malaysia is 29th. Singapore is second. Thailand is 89th, placed in the same cohort as Nicaragua and Iran by the report Global AI Adoption in 2025: A Widening Digital Divide,…
Luke Bartlett moved to Chiang Mai this year after visiting in 2024 and deciding to stay. The move came with the usual friction: neighbourhoods to evaluate, apartments to inspect, landlords to negotiate with. But one variable that proved genuinely difficult…