Who ruled Bangkok?

Bangkok sits on the low, flat delta of the Chao Phraya River, about 30 kilometres from where the river enters the Gulf of Thailand. Much of the land it stands on was mud and mangrove until relatively recent times, and for centuries the city was laced with canals and lived on the water. It began as a riverside customs post for the inland capital of Ayutthaya and became the royal capital of Siam only in 1782; since then it has been the centre of the kingdom's modernisation, its politics and its rapid growth into one of Asia's great metropolises.

Earlier states held the wider region. The Mon kingdoms of Dvaravati flourished in central Thailand in the later first millennium CE, and the Khmer Empire extended its power over the area around Lopburi in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, but the site of Bangkok itself was then still forming from river silt. By the fifteenth century the Ayutthaya Kingdom kept a toll station at a bend in the river where Bangkok now stands, and a town grew up around it, its orchards giving rise to the name Bang Kok, often explained as "village of wild plums" or "village of olives". A canal cut in the 1540s straightened the river, leaving the town on both banks.

In the 1680s King Narai allowed French engineers and troops to build and garrison a fort at Bangkok. Resentment of the foreigners helped fuel the palace revolution of 1688, after which Siamese forces besieged the French garrison until it withdrew, and the kingdom turned away from closer ties with Europe for more than a century.

When a Burmese army destroyed Ayutthaya in 1767, the general Taksin rallied resistance and made the fortified town of Thonburi, on the west bank, his capital. In 1782 he was deposed and his successor, the general Chao Phraya Chakri, crowned as Rama I, moved the capital across the river to the east bank. The city pillar was raised on 21 April 1782, the date counted as the city's founding. Rama I modelled the new capital on Ayutthaya, building the Grand Palace and the temple of the Emerald Buddha on a moated island, now known as Rattanakosin, and moving the Chinese merchant community downstream to Sampheng. The capital gave its name to the Rattanakosin Kingdom, and its Thai ceremonial name, shortened to Krung Thep, is the one Thais use; foreigners kept the old name.

The city grew on rice exports and Chinese immigration. The Bowring Treaty of 1855 opened Siam to free trade with Britain, and western merchants and consulates followed. King Mongkut and especially King Chulalongkorn, who reigned from 1868 to 1910, remade the capital with paved roads, railways, tramways, ministries and a new royal district at Dusit, adopting western techniques partly to keep the colonial powers at bay. Siam was never colonised, though French gunboats forced their way up the river in 1893.

In 1932 a group of officials and officers seized power in Bangkok and ended absolute monarchy. During World War II Thailand allied with Japan, and Allied aircraft bombed the city. After the war Bangkok expanded at great speed, boosted by American spending during the Vietnam War, and many canals were filled in to build roads. The city has also been the stage of Thailand's political struggles: student-led protests toppled a military government in 1973, students were massacred at Thammasat University in 1976, and further crackdowns followed in 1992 and 2010, along with repeated coups.

Greater Bangkok now holds more than ten million people and dominates Thailand's economy, government and culture.