Across the River, from the Temple of Dawn to a Portuguese Catholic Village

Named for the God of Dawn, Decorated with Broken Chinese Porcelain Used as Ship Ballast -- Wat Arun takes its name from Aruna, the Hindu god of dawn, yet despite the name it is not necessarily best viewed at sunrise -- many visitors find the temple's silhouette most striking from across the river at sunset, when its central prang catches the fading light. The spires are covered entirely in fragments of Chinese porcelain and seashells, a decorative technique born of practicality: Chinese ships arriving in Bangkok once used porcelain as ballast, and once unloaded, the broken or surplus pieces were donated to the temple rather than discarded. What looks like an elaborate ceramic mosaic designed from the start was actually assembled piecemeal from material that would otherwise have gone to waste.

A 300-Year-Old Portuguese Cake Still Baked in a Catholic Quarter of a Buddhist Capital -- Santa Cruz Church anchors the Kudi Chin neighborhood, Thailand's oldest Catholic parish, established in the late 18th century on land granted by Thai King Taksin to Portuguese-descended soldiers who had fought alongside him against Burmese invaders after the fall of Ayutthaya, their reward a riverside plot where they could build their own church and keep their own faith inside an overwhelmingly Buddhist kingdom. Their descendants still live in the neighborhood today, and the community's signature food tradition, a dense, chewy cake called khanom farang kudi chin baked in a wood-fired brick oven using a recipe passed down largely unchanged since the Portuguese traders who first settled along the Chao Phraya in the 16th and 17th centuries, survives as one of the few living culinary links in Thailand to the earliest European contact with the kingdom, baked in the shadow of a church built by soldiers rewarded with religious freedom for fighting someone else's war.