Phuket Old Town: Sino-Portuguese Streets and Southern Food

Set fifteen minutes inland from the eastern coast, Phuket Old Town feels worlds apart from the island's west-coast beach resorts. During the nineteenth-century tin-mining boom, Hokkien Chinese immigrants and Straits-born Chinese (Baba-Nyonya or Peranakan) families from Penang built a compact grid of two-storey shophouses and stuccoed mansions that fuse Chinese courtyard design with Portuguese-inspired louvred shutters, pilasters and shaded pavement arcades known as five-foot ways (ngok-ka-ki).

Walking route: Thalang Road, Soi Romanee, Dibuk and Krabi Road

You can cover the heritage core on a flat two-hour walk in the morning or late afternoon:

• Thalang Road and Soi Romanee: the historic commercial spine of Old Town, lined with mint-green, ochre and terracotta shophouses housing batik fabric merchants, traditional Chinese herbal pharmacies and speciality coffee bars. Halfway along, turn into narrow Soi Romanee, once the tin-era entertainment lane and now Phuket's most photogenic street of salmon-pink and turquoise arched balconies. Every Sunday from late afternoon, Thalang Road becomes the pedestrian Lard Yai Walking Street Market.
• Phang Nga Road and Shrine of the Serene Light: one block south, admire the restored 1907 Chartered Bank building and former On On Hotel, then slip through a passageway into the tranquil red-and-gold courtyard of the 1889 Sang Tham Shrine.
• Krabi Road mansions (Angmor Lao): walk west past the 1934 Thai Hua Museum to Chinpracha House (Baan Chinpracha), a lived-in 1903 Anglo-Chinese mansion featuring an open central rainwater courtyard, Italian floor tiles and antique Straits furniture.

What to eat: Hokkien mee, moo hong, crab curry and o-aew

Phuket was UNESCO's first Creative City of Gastronomy in Southeast Asia, and Old Town holds the highest concentration of Michelin Bib Gourmand kitchens on the island:

• Phuket Hokkien Mee: thick yellow egg noodles and rice vermicelli stir-fried over charcoal flames in prawn-and-pork stock with squid, pork slices and a soft egg at veteran spots such as Ko Yoon, Mee Ton Poe or Mee Sapam.
• Moo Hong (braised pork belly): cubes of pork belly slow-simmered with crushed black peppercorns, garlic, coriander root, dark soy and palm sugar until glossy (a staple at Raya, One Chun and Tu Kab Khao).
• Gaeng Poo Bai Chaplu (yellow crab curry with betel leaves): fresh Andaman blue swimmer crab in a fiery turmeric-golden southern coconut curry served with thin rice vermicelli.
• Morning Dim Sum, Roti and O-Aew: start with steamed Hokkien dim sum or crispy flat roti dipped in massaman curry, and cool down at midday with o-aew banana-seed shaved-ice jelly with red beans.