Where to live in Ang Thong.

Ang Thong town is smaller than the province around it suggests. The town municipality was created by Royal Decree on 28 November 1936, enlarged to 6.193 square kilometres in 1994, and holds about 12,717 registered residents at roughly 2,130 people per square kilometre — urban density on a footprint you can walk across. It spreads over seven subdistricts, all of Talat Luang and Bang Kaeo plus parts of Pho Sa, Yan Sue, Ban It, Ban Hae and Sala Daeng, sitting on both banks of the Chao Phraya at three to six metres above sea level. It is here because Rama II's attempt to dam the river in front of the earlier site in 1813 failed, so the seat was moved to the mouth of Khlong Bang Kaeo. Everything a resident needs is close: the provincial hall on Thetsaban 1 Road, Ang Thong Hospital about five hundred metres south of it at 3 Thetsaban 6 Road in tambon Bang Kaeo, the Ang Thong College of Dramatic Arts immediately east of the hospital, Angthong Technical College on Thetsaban 10 Road, and Angthong Vechakarn 2 — the province's one private hospital — out on the Liang Mueang bypass in tambon Sala Daeng. Nine of the ten advertised long-stay buildings in Ang Thong are here.

Best for: Almost everyone considering the province: the only walkable centre, both hospitals, and virtually all the advertised housing

Chaiyo sits immediately upstream of the town, where the Chao Phraya enters Ang Thong from Sing Buri, and it carries the very first line of the provincial motto. Wat Chaiyo Worawihan houses Phra Maha Phuttha Phim — Luang Pho To — the image associated with Somdet Phra Phutthachan (To Phrommarangsi) and the origin of the Phra Somdet Ket Chaiyo amulets that the motto names before it names anything else in the province. It is one of the nine temples on Ang Thong's promoted pilgrimage circuit and the reason a steady stream of Thai visitors comes to this district. Chaiyo also holds something no other district does: Thailand National Sports University keeps its Ang Thong Campus at 39 Moo 8 in tambon Chaiyaphum, under the Ministry of Tourism and Sports, running bachelor's programmes in sport science and health, liberal arts and education, descended from the old Angthong Physical Education College. Tambon Chaiyaphum is also where the King of Chiang Mai camped at Ban Sa Ket before Naresuan routed his army in the 1580s. For a resident this is village country with a temple economy: nothing advertised for rent at all, and a short run into town for anything the district cannot do.

Best for: People with a vehicle who want riverside quiet close to the town, and anyone whose life connects to the temple or the university

This is where the province began. Before there was an Ang Thong there was Mueang Wiset Chai Chan on the Noi River, first named in the chronicles around 1584 when the future King Naresuan camped there on his way to fight at Suphan Buri, and an Ayutthaya-era frontier town whose river was itself the barrier against Burmese armies from the west. It was demoted to a district called Phai Cham Sin in 1896, and King Chulalongkorn later ordered its historic name restored. At 224.7 square kilometres it is the largest district in the province, and it holds the thing most visitors come for: the Great Buddha of Thailand at Wat Muang — Phra Phuttha Mahanawamintra Sakayamunee Sri Visejchaicharn, 92 metres high and 63 metres wide, seated in the Maravijaya posture, begun in 1990 and completed in 2008 on roughly 104 million baht of donations, the tallest statue in the country. Wat Si Roi commemorates the four hundred volunteer swordsmen Khun Rong Palat Chu raised here around 1759 and lost to the Burmese on the coast, and Wat Wiset Chai Chan carries the monument to Nai Dok and Nai Thong Kaeo, two Bang Rachan heroes who were men of this town, unveiled on 25 March 1977. One practical detail matters more than any of it: the Ang Thong provincial Immigration Office is not in the capital — it is at 1 Moo 8 in tambon San Chao Rong Thong here. Samko next door is the smallest district in the province, five subdistricts of farmland, and it advertises nothing.

Best for: People who want the cheapest advertised rooms in the province, the heritage, and a short drive to immigration rather than to the hospital

Pho Thong and Sawaeng Ha are the province's north-western half — fifteen and seven subdistricts of rice ground between the Noi River and the Suphan Buri line — and they hold three things worth knowing. At Wat Khun Inthapramun in Pho Thong an enormous open-air reclining Buddha lies without a hall around it; the Thai government's own tourism directory describes it as the second-longest reclining Buddha in the country after the one at Wat Bang Phli Yai Klang in Samut Prakan, and it is one of the two images the provincial motto means when it calls Ang Thong the city of two reclining Buddhas. Ban Bang Chao Cha, in the tambon of the same name, is the bamboo-basketry village that supplies the wickerwork line of that motto and one of the three crafts — court dolls, firebrick and wickerwork — Ang Thong is genuinely known for. And at Ban Khu Mueang in tambon Huai Phai, about four kilometres north of the Sawaeng Ha district office, there is a Dvaravati-period moat surveyed with the Fine Arts Department: the earliest evidence of settlement anywhere in the province. Sawaeng Ha is also where much of the Bang Rachan fighting of 1765–66 actually took place, even though the village itself lies over the line in Sing Buri. Nothing at all is advertised for rent in either district, there is no walkable centre worth the name, and a vehicle is not optional.

Best for: People with land, family or work already in the province, and anyone who wants rice-plain quiet at rice-plain prices

Pa Mok is the southernmost and smallest district, eight subdistricts where the Chao Phraya leaves Ang Thong for Bang Pahan in Ayutthaya, and it functions as the province's front door. Route 309 runs through it from Ayutthaya up to the town, which makes this the shortest hop in Ang Thong to a UNESCO World Heritage city, a regional hospital and the Northern Line railway — all three of which are in Ayutthaya province rather than this one. Wat Pa Mok Worawihan holds the second of Ang Thong's two great reclining Buddhas, and its best story is an engineering one: in 1726 King Thai Sa personally supervised moving the image about 150 metres back from an eroding riverbank, a job that took more than five months. Naresuan camped at Thung Pa Mok in the 1580s and again in 1592 on the way to the elephant duel at Don Chedi, and performed a river rite at tambon Ekkarat here in 1604 before his final campaign. The living craft is at Ban Bang Sadet, where a court-doll workshop initiated by Queen Sirikit in 1976 still runs on a work-from-home cooperative model, villagers moulding and painting figurines of Thai children at play, traditional orchestras and Thai fruit in their own houses. Nothing is advertised for rent here, but of all the outer districts this is the one where a car makes the most sense of a commute.

Best for: Anyone whose real centre of gravity is Ayutthaya rather than Ang Thong, and who wants to pay Ang Thong prices for it