Pearls, Peranakan culture and rare rituals

It’s not yet light, but Jui Tui, a Chinese shrine in the Old Town of Phuket, is already a hive of activity. I’m standing in a massed crowd of devotees, sheltered beneath canopies of vermilion and jade and surrounded by eclectic religious statues: Taoist deities, Hindu gods and Buddhist bodhisattvas.

It’s 5.30am, and the sunrise is starting to spear shards of light through a bruised sky. Wreaths of incense smoke carry the heady scent of camphor and sandalwood on the breeze. It’s the end of monsoon season and storms are forecast, but my guide, Jo Lecourt, assures me that it never rains during the Phuket Vegetarian Festival.

You might imagine a vegetarian festival to be a largely placid affair. But you would be sorely mistaken.

Jo points out a woman a couple of metres in front of us. She’s wearing a tiara and a splendid electric-blue tunic, brocaded with floral patterns and Chinese characters. She begins to gag, her body starts to shake and her eyes glaze over; she’s helped into a chair by a team of assistants, who proceed to impale both her cheeks with foot-long skewers. No anaesthetic is used, but she doesn’t flinch. Soon she rises from her chair and joins a long queue of similarly pierced devotees — around 1,900 of them today — on a procession around Phuket Old Town.

These parades are the centrepiece of the festival, a nine-day spectacle of ritual mutilation, pyrotechnics and meat-free food which descends on Phuket in the ninth lunar month of each year. It has a history dating back some 200 years. The story goes that an opera troupe made up of Hokkien-speaking Taoists from China’s Fujian province was touring Phuket in 1825 when they got caught up in a cholera epidemic. They attributed the plague to the fact that they’d been neglecting their worship of the gods, and so swiftly resumed their practices from back home, including ritual mutilation and adherence to a meat-free diet. The epidemic soon ended and the opera troupe left Phuket not long after, but they inspired the annual festival.

Jo leads me into the thick of the procession. A tall woman in her thirties, dressed (as I am) in the all-white outfit of festival attendees, she tells me the event has grown on her with time. “When I first came 13 years ago, after I’d moved here from Bangkok, I hated it — it was too intense,” she says. “But I’ve been every year since.”

We spot the woman we saw being pierced in the shrine. Her name is Pai Siripohn, Jo explains, and she’s a mah song — one of the spirit mediums around whom the festival revolves. “Mah song means ‘entranced horse’ — the horses on which the gods ride,” says Jo. It becomes apparent that Pai is one of the less extreme practitioners. A woman walks by with a ball of spikes stuffed through her lower lip, looking like she’s lost a fight with a sea urchin. Two men parade along with swords through both cheeks, crossing inside their mouths.

Walking right in the thick of the procession is an unnerving experience — I’m constantly looking over my shoulder for the unshielded spikes of skewers, sticking out from cheeks as their wearers press on obliviously. There’s a persistent chorus of firecrackers, hurled from the sidelines by people who cover their ears and retreat, giggling, into clouds of smoke. My adrenaline’s pumping; it is, if nothing else, an effective cure for jet lag.

 The morning after the procession, I’m granted an audience with Pai in an Old Town cafe. She’s been a mah song at the festival for more than 20 years, but most of the time, like Jo, she works as a tour guide. She was in a trance during the procession, she says  — which explains the glazed look and the trembling — and can’t remember any of it.

“On the morning of the procession I’m always scared about the piercing, but I feel no pain. I’m never even aware of it,” she says. A tiny dark spot on each cheek is the only evidence that anything unusual happened yesterday. Pai’s spirit came to her quite suddenly, at the age of 13, she tells me, but it wasn’t until she was 23 that she joined the festival. “My spirit is a goddess who looks after children,” she says. I’d seen her stopping to bless groups of kids and hand them sweets during the procession. “When I was a kid, I had lots of serious accidents — one in a car, one on a motorbike. Once I nearly drowned. But when my god found me, they stopped.” Curiously, Pai continues, when possessed by her spirit she speaks Hokkien Chinese, a language she claims to ordinarily neither speak nor understand. I ask about the beautiful outfit she had been wearing yesterday. “My god requested it,” she says, and chuckles. “I said, ‘OK then — you can pay for it!’”

As it turns out, her tailor, Chaiwat Sintawee, works just around the corner. His shop, Pookunjeen, is an emporium of both sartorial elegance and martial menace. On one side are rows of courtly tunics, like Pai’s, woven from vibrant silk and inlaid with yin-yang symbols, flowers and dragons. On the other side, a rack is hung with weapons of war: axes, spiked clubs, a medieval-looking mace. These are accessories carried by some of the mah song, who are possessed by warlike deities, Chaiwat explains. “This one cracks open the sky and earth, and makes the path ahead of you free of obstacles,” he says, holding up a huge whip. “Not bad for 1,900 baht [£42]!”

Besides the ceremonial items, the shop is stacked with traditional everyday clothing: a type of blouse called a kebaya and sarongs, cut from batik fabric patterned with flowers and animals, and delicate slippers covered with tiny, colourful glass beads. This is the clothing of the Peranakans, Phuket’s dominant cultural group — the descendants of Chinese settlers who came to the island in the 19th century and married local women.

Phuket’s cultural heart

I’ve come to Phuket to see another side of a place that’s often misunderstood. Thailand’s largest island, it’s one of its most touristed; in 2023, a study found that Phuket was the most overcrowded tourist destination in the world, with 118 tourists for every local resident. The majority of international visitors stick to the west coast, where beautiful bone-white beaches are hemmed in by five-star hotels and luxury spa resorts. The seedy underbelly of touristic Phuket reveals itself each night in places like Bangla Road, a notorious strip of bars and sex clubs in the town of Patong.

Away from the beach resorts, however, Phuket is home to a lively traditional culture, and it’s this I’ve come to discover. Leaving Chaiwat’s shop, I wander through the streets of the Old Town, admiring the pastel-hued shophouses and mansions built by the Peranakans, many over a century old. I pay a visit to Chinpracha House, an elegant Peranakan residence dating from 1903 which is now open to visitors as a museum.

“My great-great-grandfather came to Phuket from China 150 years ago and built this house 30 years later. I still live here with my family,” says owner Chanachon Tandavanitj as he shows me around. He’s a short man with grey hair and glasses, neatly turned out in a slate-blue Chinese shirt. His family, he tells me, originally grew rich mining tin, a resource that drew many Peranakans to Phuket from Penang, Malacca and Singapore where they had originally landed.

The house is a marriage of the influences which shaped the Peranakans: their Chinese heritage, spiced with touches brought on the trade winds from Malaysia, India, Singapore and Europe. Chanachon shows me Portuguese wooden window shutters, black lacquerware Chinese chairs and stacks of exquisite Indonesian sarongs, their colours barely dimmed by 150 years of sunlight. There’s a mahogany upright piano, on which Chanachon tinkles a few keys. Some traditional Peranakan families still take tea and scones on a Friday afternoon, he says, and sing English songs around the piano — a legacy of the Victorian Brits who came for the tin trade. 

Beneath our feet are Italian floor tiles; above our heads, neo-classical arches held up by palladian columns. The style of architecture is known as Sino-Portuguese, because the Portuguese were the first of many Europeans to colonise maritime Southeast Asia. Phuket itself was never controlled by a European power, though nowadays it is busy with tourists from the region. “I remember fishing, diving and swimming on Patong Beach, back when it was quiet, before the boom,” says Chanachon. “But in the last few years, people have started to notice traditional Phuketian culture again. It’s nice.”

 I thank Chanachon for showing me around his beautiful house, and he replies, “If you like the architecture, wait until you try the food!”I don’t have to go far to follow his advice. Just next door is an even grander house, painted lemon yellow and set in sprawling grounds shaded with palms. This is Blue Elephant, a fine-dining restaurant helmed by Thai celebrity chef Nooror Somany Steppe, and one of the best places on the island to learn the secrets of Phuketian cuisine. Cooking classes take place daily, and Nooror herself is available to teach me. I’m lucky: she’s a busy woman, currently filming a cooking show for HBO alongside her role as an ambassador for southern Thai cuisine. 

She’s a tiny lady in late middle age, wearing tinted glasses and a black chef’s jacket and hat. “Phuket is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy,” she says, proudly. “Phuketian food has the Thai concept of having sweet, sour, salty and spicy in each dish, but brings in a lot of influences from elsewhere: Malay aromatics, Chinese soy sauce instead of fish sauce, local fruits like pineapple and garcinia.”

Nooror sets me to work pounding chillies, lemongrass and shrimp paste with a pestle and mortar. Perhaps sensing my frayed nerves after the Vegetarian Festival, she impels me to snack on ingredients she says are a balm for body and mind: black garlic (“Good for your heart”) and Thai lime leaves (“To help you relax”). As she teaches me to cook her signature Peranakan sea bass curry, she tells me how she came to learn about Phuketian cuisine, having grown up in Chachoengsao on the southern mainland. “I moved here and spoke to the Peranakan Association to learn their traditional recipes,” she says. “I also cooked with the chao leh, the sea gypsies who live on the coast. You never really stop learning as a chef.”

The curry is ready, and it’s delicious. Creamy with coconut milk, tangy from the tamarind-like garcinia and with a kick that makes me raise my eyebrows in surprise. Nooror laughs. “Phuketian food is spicier than Thai food,” she says. “That’s the influence of the chao leh.”

The quieter coast

Intrigued by Nooror’s stories, I make a beeline for the coast — not the hotel resorts of the west, but the quieter east, where mangrove forests crowd deserted beaches and the neon of nightclubs and cabarets are nowhere to be seen. This is the wilder half of Phuket; the forests inland from here are home to wildlife sanctuaries, which are rehabilitating elephants and gibbons rescued from captivity.

The locals mostly make a living here from fishing, running rubber plantations and farming pearls. Many of them are chao leh (or Moken, as they call themselves) or Muslims, with the latter forming a significant minority in Phuket, thought to make up around 25% of the population. 

I take a taxi to Koh Kaew, a harbour village around half an hour’s drive north of Phuket Town. A group of Moken fishermen wait on the pier beside their traditional wooden boats, which are easily recognisable by their long, curved prows, hung with colourful rags.

Twice a year, in the sixth and 11th months of the lunar calendar, replicas of these boats are loaded with flowers and set adrift as an offering in hopes of a bountiful year ahead — the focus of the Loy Ruea festival. Much of the Moken’s history is undocumented but it’s known to be very long, and inseparably entwined with the sea. Traditionally living a nomadic life on the waves, they hunt and gather seafood, medicines and building materials, and have developed superhuman abilities to allow them to do so: many can hold their breath for five minutes and see more clearly underwater than most people. 

Like many nomadic peoples, the Moken are often romanticised. Patong’s Four Points by Sheraton hotel has a restaurant called Chao Leh Kitchen, and visitors to Rawai, a beach village on Phuket’s southeast coast, are encouraged to visit the ‘Sea Gypsy Village’, comprising a collection of Moken houses and a fish market. In reality, though, they’re often discriminated against. Human Rights Watch describes them as “extremely vulnerable to human rights abuse”, largely as they’re stateless and hold no rights to the shorelines on which they settle for part of the year. Walking down the pier, I pass a building covered in strange effigies, made from bundled fishing nets, buoys and outboard motors, and painted with grotesque faces — a protest against the local landowner, who’s attempting to restrict public access to the pier, including for the Moken.

Wanting to learn more about Phuket’s traditional ways of life, I take a boat to Amorn, a pearl farm set on floating wooden boardwalks a five-minute ride away. Obscuring the horizon ahead is Coconut Island, where a thick forest of palms runs right down to a hem of sugary sand. I’m met at the pearl farm by tour guide Diego Sabater, a convivial young man whose pink short-sleeved shirt is sensibly swathed in a life jacket. This farm has been here since 1967, he tells me, but locals have been gathering and trading pearls since time immemorial, with the Moken harvesting oysters and clams in the hopes of finding a natural pearl.

“Pearls form around parasites or grains of sand — tiny foreign bodies which get stuck inside the shell of a mollusc,” says Diego as we stroll down a boardwalk. A natural pearl is found in around one in 10,000 oysters. Nowadays, the industry revolves around cultured pearls, whereby tiny pieces of shell are introduced into the body of oysters to encourage their growth. Diego shows me a whole ecosystem submerged beneath the boards: oysters strung on fishing lines, colourful clownfish who eat their parasites and cobalt-blue lobsters. 

He takes a mature oyster, opens it with a knife and is delighted to find a small natural pearl embedded in its flesh — a rare find indeed. “In traditional Thai culture, natural pearls are considered sacred,” he says. “They’re placed on the lips of dead people before burial. Buddha statues use them for the eyes. We see these as a gift from the gods.”

Dark clouds are stalking the horizon when we board the boat for the pier again, and I take a taxi back to Phuket Old Town. The festival is over. The cordite smell of fireworks still hangs in the air; sweepers are gathering up the crimson firecracker paper scattered over the streets. In keeping with Jo’s prediction that it never rains during the festival, the storm has held off, in defiance of the forecast. Now, though, I feel the first speckles of rain. The drops give way to a deluge, and soon all evidence of the festival will be gone, lapped up for another year by the last tongues of the southwest monsoon.