ABSTRACT
Geography and history have determined the development and characteristics of Bangkok, the leading city and port of Thailand. From a national perspective the outstanding feature of Bangkok must surely be its dominance. From the city's foundation in 1782 until the present, Bangkok has held a remarkable concentration of the nation's wealth, trade and industry, and in terms of size has dwarfed all other Thai cities. In 1950, for example, the population of Bangkok was around one million while the second largest city, Chieng Mai in the north of the country, was scarcely 40,000. Today Bangkok is a teeming and explosively-growing city of some eight million; the second city, Korat, has yet to reach 250,000. This primacy is echoed in economic statistics, and as far as trade is concerned Bangkok in the 1970s accounted for around 95 per cent of all imports entering the country and 85 per cent of exports.
