Where to live in Samut Songkhram.

Tambon Mae Klong is the provincial capital, and the town municipality that covers it registered 25,623 residents in the December 2023 count — about one in seven of everybody in the province, on a fraction of one per cent of its land. The district office has been here since 1964, and the name has moved around: the district was created in 1897 as Lom Thuan under Monthon Ratchaburi, moved to Ban Prok in 1900, was renamed after that place in 1917, became Mae Klong in 1925 when the office moved to the Mae Klong camp, and took its present name Mueang Samut Songkhram in 1938 under the policy that a capital district carries the provincial name. Thai residents still call it Mae Klong. Everything institutional in the province is inside a couple of kilometres of the river here: Samut Songkhram Hospital, the province's only general hospital at 282 beds; the provincial hall, whose fifth-floor Mae Klong conference room hosts the provincial education board; and Maeklong railway station on the east bank, a class 1 station opened on 10 June 1905 in the reign of King Chulalongkorn and the terminus of the Ban Laem line. The market that made the town internationally famous — Talat Rom Hup, the umbrella-pulldown market — is the fresh seafood market immediately east of that station, laid out directly on the track, with the awnings and the produce pulled back eight times a day as the train comes through. Wat Phet Samut Worawihan, which locals call Wat Ban Laem, holds Luang Pho Ban Laem, the Buddha image named in the provincial slogan and bathed each Songkran. This is the one genuinely walkable place in the province and the one with the deepest advertised rental supply, which in Samut Songkhram means four buildings.

Below the town the capital district fans out into eleven subdistricts and 87 villages, and the outer ones are where Samut Songkhram earns its living. Off the coast lie the sandbanks of Don Hoi Lot, famous for their population of the razor shell Solen regularis and listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance since 2001 — the site named first in the provincial slogan, City of razor shells. Behind the shoreline are the salt pans: Samut Songkhram is a leader in Thai sea-salt production, with 4,535 rai worked by 111 households in the last count we could open. Twelve fish and seafood processing establishments approved for export sit in this district — three in Mae Klong, two in Ban Khan Taek, four in Bang Kaeo and three in Bang Chakreng — and the mackerel they handle, pla thu Mae Klong, is the province's single most famous product, distinctive enough that Thais describe it by the shape it takes in the steaming basket. Population is real out here rather than notional: the Lat Yai subdistrict administrative organisation covers 18,602 people, more than any municipality in the province except the capital itself, and Bang Chakreng is a subdistrict municipality of 4,389. Khlong Khon is the mangrove-planting and boat-tour tambon. Three of the province's ten advertised rental buildings are in these outer tambons, two in Bang Kaeo and one in Khlong Khoen, all three of them cheaper than the town.

Amphawa is the province's largest district and its historical core, and the town at its centre is the reason most visitors have heard of Samut Songkhram at all. In the Ayutthaya period this was Khwaeng Bang Chang, an agricultural and commercial community whose market is documented from the reign of King Prasat Thong; in the early Rattanakosin period it was nicknamed Suan Nok, the outer garden, paired with Suan Nai — Bangkok — because the two shared the same orchard-and-canal landscape. Bang Chang means place of elephants, from the wild herds that once sheltered here, and Amphawa is taken from the canal that runs through the district, a word read as mango forest. The district seal is an elephant in a mango grove. The king was born here: Buddha Loetla Nabhalai, Rama II, whose father was then governor of Ratchaburi. The sources do not agree on the year — the province's own encyclopaedia entry says 1767 and the district entry says 1766 — and we print both rather than pick one. His birthplace is now the King Rama II Memorial Park, four traditional Thai houses arranged as an early-Rattanakosin ethnology display, next door to the floating market. His mother, Queen Amarindra, consort of Rama I, was born here too, as were the traditional musician Luang Pradit Pairoh, the bandleader Eua Sunthornsanan and the luk thung singer Toon Tongjai. Amphawa Floating Market itself is an afternoon and evening market on the canals beside Wat Amphawan Chetiyaram, Friday to Sunday only — which is the single most useful fact for anyone thinking of living here, because the town has two completely different characters depending on the day. The firefly boats leave from the same waterway after dark. Amphawa Hospital is a 33-bed community hospital, the smallest of the province's three, so anything serious is a fifteen-minute drive to the capital.

Amphawa runs twelve subdistricts and 96 villages, and only a handful of them are the famous ones. The rest is orchard country on both sides of the Mae Klong, and it is where the second line of the provincial slogan — tops of the lychee trees — comes from, alongside the pomelo and the coconut that appear on the provincial seal. Tha Kha, at 5,570 people the district's largest subdistrict on the figures we could read, runs the province's other floating market: smaller than Amphawa's, on a traditional lunar-calendar schedule rather than a weekend one, and the one Thais recommend when they want to show you what Amphawa was like before the buses came. Wat Pradu holds 5,458 people, Mueang Mai 4,043 with nine temples — more than any other subdistrict in the district — and Plai Phong Phang is the largest subdistrict administrative organisation in Amphawa at 8,270. Wat Bang Kae Yai and Wat Bang Kae Noi sit out here, founded by the senior and junior wives of Chao Phraya Surasak, the second of them built of golden teak carved with the life of the Buddha by craftsmen from Phetchaburi over roughly a decade, and holding a statue of Somdej Toh that draws its own pilgrims. The district's edges are borders: Ban Laem and Khao Yoi of Phetchaburi to the south, Pak Tho and Wat Phleng of Ratchaburi to the west. Phraek Nam Daeng, out toward the Phetchaburi line, holds the single advertised rental in this half of the district — and it happens to be the most recently refreshed listing anywhere in Samut Songkhram. Everything else out here is found by asking.

Bang Khonthi is the district that never touches the sea. It sits slightly inland at the northwestern corner of the Bay of Bangkok with the Mae Klong running through it, and it borders more of Ratchaburi than of its own province: Wat Phleng, Mueang Ratchaburi and Damnoen Saduak. It was Ratchaburi's until 1913, when it was enlarged by absorbing the old district of Mae Nam Om and reassigned to Samut Songkhram; the name changed from Si Muen to Bang Khonthi in 1914. Thirteen subdistricts and 101 villages, more of both than either of the other two districts, on the least land — this is the most finely subdivided ground in the smallest province in Thailand. Two things here matter out of all proportion to the district's size. The first is medical: Napalai Hospital in tambon Kradangnga has 90 beds, nearly three times Amphawa's, making Bang Khonthi the province's second real hospital district despite being its smallest. The second is religious. Bang Nok Khwaek is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ratchaburi, and the Nativity of Our Lady Cathedral there was built in 1890 in French Gothic style — one of the two Christian churches in a province that also holds well over a hundred Buddhist temples and one mosque, and a genuinely unusual thing to find in an orchard district of a few thousand people. There is a second Catholic church out at tambon Bang Yi Rong. The historical set piece is Khai Bang Kung, the river fort of the late Ayutthaya and Thonburi periods where King Taksin gathered the people to hold the line against the Burmese; abandoned for nearly two centuries, it became a Boy Scout camp in 1967 and now carries a shrine to the king. Wat Bang Kung stands in the same tambon, and Wat Charoen Sukharam Worawihan is the district's principal temple, its Luang Pho Toa a laterite-cored, plastered and gilded image in the Sukhothai style. Coconut plantations at Bang Yi Rong and orchards at Kradangnga are the working landscape. Nothing whatsoever is advertised for rent in the whole district.