Pretty in pink - some of the Mah Song are women. © Alasdair Forbes

It’s nearly that time of year again, when hundreds of  Chinese gods and goddesses are invited down from heaven to occupy the bodies of ordinary mortals  – the Mah Song, or mounts of the gods – for the annual Phuket Vegetarian Festival.

This year’s festival runs from October 17 to 27, with processions from the main shrines winding their way around various parts of the island, a bizarre yet strangely compelling affair with the Mah Song jittering along the streets, their cheeks and sometimes other parts of their bodies pierced with a bewildering assortment of objects, ranging from decorated skewers to motorbike wheels, flagpoles (complete with flags), shovels, and much more. Some show their devotion by slicing their tongues with swords or daggers. This is not a celebration for the squeamish.

It is said that the self-inflicted injuries heal at remarkable speed and leave no scars.

It’s also very noisy, particularly around the shrines, with drums and hundreds – thousands – of firecrackers being set off to drive away evil spirits and celebrate the presence of the gods.  Brilliantly coloured flags and embroidered costumes disappear and reappear from the dense clouds of smoke from the firecrackers and from aromatic incense sticks. It’s a stunning sensory feast.

In the evenings more believers test their faith at the shrines – or San Jao – by firewalking, climbing ladders made of sharp blades – barefoot – or pouring boiling oil on themselves. It’s said no one is ever injured.

The festival begins on the 17th with the raising of lantern poles at the island’s nine main shrines. It is down these poles that the gods will descend to earth.

A shovel put to unusual use. © Alasdair Forbes

Ornate ceremonies to propitiate the gods and make offerings of food to them occupy the following three days, often starting before dawn.

The first shrine to stage its procession this year will be Sam Kong, on the east side of Phuket Town, starting at 07:19 on the 21st. Processions from the other shrines start at varying times (all calculated to be the most propitious) during the following days.

On the 26th, ceremonies are held to say farewell to the gods until the following year and then, on the 27th, the lantern poles are lowered and dismantled, signalling the end of the festival.

Throughout the festival believers – not just the Mah Song – adhere to a strict vegetarian diet. This is not as difficult as it may sound to the carnivores among us; food stalls set up around the shrines offer a stunning array of delicious foods, all of it veggy.

For those who want to join in whole-heartedly, there are other rules, too, which may be seen at the official website, here. Bring your camera. The gods often seem to be strangely attached to having their photo taken.  And bring an umbrella – October in Phuket can bring with it weather that Noah would recognise.

Phraya Rassada, the wily governor who got tin companies to build roads and government offices. This statue is at the top of Rang Hill.

Search the web for information on historical buildings in Phuket and you’ll get stacks of hits for the old downtown area of Phuket Town, with its charming Sino-Portuguese shop-houses etc etc etc. Fair enough – Thalang Rd is definitely worth a visit. But try to find anything about the old government quarter of the town and you’ll probably draw a blank. Let’s try to redress the balance a little.

Roughly 100 years ago, long before tourism, the tin boom was reaching its height in Phuket. The island was pockmarked with huge holes as mechanisation raised mine production to new heights. The boom was a huge bonus for the island’s government, headed by Governor Kosimbee na Ranong or, to give him his royal title, Phraya Rassadanupradit Mahitsaraphakdi.

Lord Rassada, as Governor of every community down the west peninsular coast from Ranong to Satun, had grander visions than most when it came to tin. He invited major international mining companies in, and then made sure they paid in full, though not necessarily in cash.

One way they paid for their mining concessions was through building infrastructure in the government quarter on the northeast side of the town. Many klongs (canals) and roads were built or improved this way, along with many of the province’s government buildings, which are still in use today.

The largest building in this area is the Sala Klang, or Provincial Hall. Designed by an Italian architect, it took six years to build – from 1907 to 1913.

Delicate, airy galleries surround the Provincial Hall.

It was Thailand’s first reinforced concrete building, though you would never guess this from looking at it. The open galleries all around it and the fretwork decorations everywhere give the building a delicate, airy feeling that absolutely does not say “concrete”. When built, the Provincial Hall had 99 doors but no windows, allowing breezes free play and keeping staff cool. (It’s since been fitted with air-conditioning and windows. A pity.)

Round the exterior walls are hung dozens of photographs of Phuket in the past – stark contrasts with the Phuket of today.

The Governor's Mansion is surprisingly modest in scale.

The Governor’s Mansion, one street over, dates from the same era. Set in spacious grounds, it echoes the Sino-Portuguese architecture seen in many streets in old Phuket City. The building is surprisingly modest in scale, though one imagines it is still daunting for any modern governor to lay down his head in the same bedroom where Lord Rassada slept. Or perhaps it’s inspiring. Next door is the yet more modest but equally charming residence of the Provincial Deputy Governor, or Palad.

Across Damrong Rd from the Provincial Hall is the Office of Disaster Prevention & Mitigation. However, the ODPM is a relatively recent arrival in this building, which was originally the all-important Tin Mines Department, keeping an eye on the industry and ensuring that King Rama V and the local government received their fair share of the wealth flowing from the mines.

The old law court now functions as offices for the judiciary.

Diagonally across from the Provincial Hall, at the foot of To Sae Hill is the original Provincial Court, gleaming white and set in well ordered gardens. It is still used for offices of the legal establishment, though legal cases are now heard in the much larger modern court house up the hill behind it.

Those found guilty in the court were generally shipped no more than 500 meters down the road to the Provincial Prison. The gaol is still in use today, a century after it was built.

A wander around the nearby streets is always pleasant in good weather. This is all government land, untouched by development, so most of the streets are shaded by huge trees planted at the time the Provincial Hall was built. There are other rewards: The old Red Cross Building, for example, also harks back to the same graceful architectural era, when tourism was unknown and Patong was a tiny fishing community.

The museum's architecture is on Sino-Portuguese lines.

Long before Phuket became the epicentre of tourism in Southeast Asia, and for a much longer period, the island was renowned around the region for something just as valuable, though much more destructive: tin.

Way back in prehistory, when weapons were still made of flint, some bright spark discovered that if you mixed tin and copper – both of them soft metals – you got something much harder. Bronze. With this you could make hard, durable weapons and tools. Phuket had tin ore and, unlike many other tin sources, Phuket’s tin was not associated with arsenic, making it a lot less dangerous to mine.

At first, tin was obtained mostly by panning or from small mines, but as demand expanded, so did the sophistication of mining methods, and the damage caused by them. There was a huge boom in demand with as the Industrial Revolution spread across the world, with tin being used to coat machinery to prevent rust.

One of the museum's dioramas, in this case showing open cast mining - all done by hand.

If you had come to Phuket in the 1930s, you would not have recognised it. More than 200 muddy lakes pitted the countryside, as tin dredgers chomped their way across the countryside, leaving a moonscape in their wake.

Demand for Phuket’s tin died fairly abruptly in the late 1980s, partly with the advent of plastics, but also because sources easier to exploit were found elsewhere. As tourism began to take hold in the 1980s, opposition to heavy industry that destroyed natural beauty killed off tin mining.

But the tin era was central to the development of Phuket and of its culture and its ethnic mix.

It is this that is celebrated at the Phuket Mining Museum, which is now open – sort of – in the countryside in the middle of the island. Although the museum has not yet received its official opening, and parts, such as the auditorium and the surrounding gardens, have yet to be completed, the staff welcome visitors, and there is plenty to see, with most of the signage being in both Thai and English.

The general store in the reconstructed 1900s street.

The building is in the Sino-Portuguese style, built in a square around a large open courtyard. From the entrance, going left, one first enters a room with a “Sorng Taeo” or “baht bus” – a kind of transport one can still see around Phuket, made from a pickup chassis with a wooden body. Next to this is a gallery with a variety of exhibits in glass cages – rock, jewelry, currency, Buddha images, plastic dinosaurs (!) and more.

One then steps into the start of an explanation of tin – where it came from and how it was extracted. On the day the Observer visited, there was an electrical brown-out, so not all the exhibits were working and the lighting was a bit dim, though still sufficient.

The journey starts with an explanation of the chemistry, beginning with the creation of the solar system, and has a variety of dioramas and scenes showing different methods of tin mining.

The next room is more for those with an interest in industrial processes, explaining how tin ore is turned into pure metal. The third, stretching along the right side of the building is a recreation of a street in Phuket Town around 1900, with shops, cafés, a San Jao, or Chinese temple, and a typical kitchen of the era. Happily, it is not equipped with the squalor, stench and hurly-burly rowdiness of the town at that time which, by all accounts, were pretty extreme.

The museum also has many old photographs from the tin era. This one shows Chinese coolies at work.

The museum cost 50 million baht and was originally supposed to open two years ago, but it hasn’t, officially. Ads a result it doesn’t appear in the literature and websites about tourist attractions in Phuket including – would you believe – the official Tourism Authority of Thailand website.

But it’s still definitely worth going to, especially when, as now, the weather can be wet, making a day on the beach unattractive. And because it’s not officially open, there’s no fee for going in. Now that’s a deal.

To get there, turn off Thepkrasattree Rd (going north) between the bypass road junction and the Boat Lagoon entrance and go past the British International School. About a mile further on is the entrance. You can’t miss it – a very imposing gateway on the left, in the middle of the countryside.

There’s a web page in Thai here or you can contact the museum by calling +66 8647 07767 or by email.

The old building is currently covered in scaffolding and the entire roof has been removed, replaced by a temporary tin one.

The Phra Pitak Chinpracha Mansion, the largest of the old tin boom mansions in Phuket Town, which has been quietly crumbling for a couple of decades, is being resurrected and will, by the end of this year, be a chic 300-seat restaurant run by international gourmet Thai chain Blue Elephant.

Some parts are still in good condition, including the tile floor downstairs...

The mansion was built by Tan Ma Sieng, who made his fortune mostly from mining tin in Phuket and was ennobled as Phra Pitak Chinpracha by the King of Thailand. It is built in a style known as Sino-Colonial or, to the Hokkien Chinese on the island, as “Ang mor lau”  – houses of the red monkeys, the red monkeys being Europeans.

Tan’s descendants, the Tantawanitj family, have leased the crumbling building for 30 years to Blue Elephant, which is spending some 40 million baht – more than a million bucks – on the renovation of the 20-room mansion.

...and the tile friezes around some of the walls...

It’s a huge task. For a start, the entire roof is being replaced, both the 100-year-old hardwood  frame and the roof tiles. In the meantime, a tin roof has been erected over the whole house to keep the rain out. Rotted timber flooring and termite-riddled window frames have to be repaired replaced. Modern wiring and plumbing has to be installed.

Parts of the building are still in surprisingly good condition, however. The small tiles on the ground floor are being left largely alone, the stairs are in reasonable condition and decorative tile friezes on some of the walls are still as good as new. On the other hand, the old kitchen looks like a bomb hit it.

Asked what her biggest challenge is, Blue Elephant’s in-house architect, Sasiwan Makhaprasit, promptly replied, “Getting it completed on time”. She added, “It’s very difficult to fix – every detail, the entire roof, the floors and windows. We’re trying to repair rather than replace.”

...but the kitchen still needs a bit of work.

Helping with this procedure is the construction company Pradittananuruk which, Sasiwan says, “has good connections” with the government’s  Fine Arts Department and its experts on old Thai buildings. The Fine Arts Department also advised on the renovation of Phuket’s old post office and the old mansion on Ranong Rd that now houses the offices of Thai Airways International in Phuket Town. Pradittananuruk currently has 50 workers on site, and expects this to rise to 80.

In Phuket, as in many other cities, the restaurant will have attached to it a Thai cooking school, for which a new building will be constructed. The current rather featureless garden will be extensively landscaped.

Blue Elephant was founded in 1980 by Nooror Somany Steppe and her Belgian husband Karl Steppe, who opened their first restaurant in Brussels. Four years later they opened what has become the city’s top Indian restaurant, La Porte des Indes.

A Blue Elephant followed in London in 1986, and the company now has restaurants in Paris, Copenhagen, Lyon, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, Malta, Beirut, Moscow, Jakarta and, of course, Bangkok, which opened in 2002, also in a renovated 100-year-old mansion. There is also a second Porte des Indes in London. In addition to Phuket, more Blue Elephants are due to open soon in Jakarta, Jeddah and Abu Dhabi.

On top of all the restaurants, Blue Elephant recently set up a factory in Thailand to make gourmet Thai frozen meals – 50,000 a day – for those who cannot make it to the nearest Blue Elephant restuarant.

Why “Blue Elephant”? The owners say it’s because blue is the royal colour on the Thai flag and the elephant is Thailand’s national animal. They also point out, “If you see a blue elephant you will never forget it.”  True enough.

The Phra Pitak Chinpracha Mansion is at the intersection of Krabi Rd and Satun Rd, close to the old centre of Phuket Town. The restaurant is due to open in November or December this year.

The modest frontage of the China Inn Café. But first impressions can be misleading.

In the old heart of Phuket Town in and around Thalang Rd, you’ll notice that the streets are lined with small shops. The buildings are usually two-storey with an arcade in front. The shop owners do business at street level and live upstairs, hence the name for this type of building – shophouses.

Some are monstrosities of 1960s concrete, but most date back 100 years or more and are built in an architectural style that combines Chinese and Portuguese elements, hence the term Sino-Portuguese.

What is not apparent from the street is just how spacious these buildings are. Almost all follow the same layout, the result of a combination of necessity and Chinese feng-shui principles. In fact, you’ll find the same design, more or less, in all the Straits Settlements – Singapore, Penang, Melaka, Medan and Phuket – all of which have large Chinese communities.

The necessity was created in the early days of Singapore, when the city’s founder, Sir Stamford Raffles decreed that no Chinese shop frontage could be more than two broomsticks wide. He did not put any limit, however, on how far back the building might stretch. As a result, some of the bigger shophouses in Phuket are 70 or 80 metres deep. In the centre there is traditionally a yard open to the sky, with a well. This accords with Chinese feng-shui theory.

If you’d come to Phuket 10 years ago, you’d have found many of these buildings in a dreadful state. These days, however, although there are still some supremely scruffy examples, many have been restored.

One very good example is the China Inn Café on Thalang Rd. At the front is an antique shop. Walk through it, past the cash desk and toilet and into the courtyard restaurant behind.

Epicentre of gentrification: Soi Romanee is a very attractive street these days.

Although the quarters at the back are now one-storey and are used as the kitchen, you can get a very good idea of what life in a shophouse would have been like 100 years ago – the rooflines are still visible on the surrounding walls.

The food’s very good, too, and sitting in the shade around the courtyard with a frosty drink is a great way to escape from the hustle and bustle and heat of the street.

Other good conversions that are accessible include Salvatore’s Italian restaurant on Rassada Road, Anna’s next door to Salvatore’s, and Siam Indigo restaurant on Phang Nga Rd.

The current epicentre of gentrification is off Thalang Rd, on Soi Romanee, which is now a delightful place for a stroll, browsing hand-made crafts or sitting for a while with an iced coffee or a cold beer. These shophouses, however, are not as deep as the classic design – when they were built, there just wasn’t enough space left.

Let 'em have it! The Heroines fire a cannon at the dastardly Burmese.

Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on Phuket will have seen the Heroines monument in the middle of the circle halfway between Phuket Town and Thalang. The statue of two women holding swords commemorates the defeat 224 years ago of a Burmese army by the people of Thalang (then the capital of the island).

Burma had a bit of a habit of sending armies to bash Siam, burning cities and carrying off thousands of slaves.  In 1767 they took the Siamese capital, Ayudhya, and burned it to the ground.

In 1785, as part of a much larger invasion, Burma’s King Bodawhpaya sent troops in ships hopping down the Andaman coast, raiding towns with impunity – until they reached Phuket.

There they met stiff resistance organised by two sisters, Jan and Mook, who rallied townspeople and villagers to beat off the Burmese. It took five weeks, but they succeeded. The sisters were later honoured by King Rama I, who gave them the monikers Thao Thepkrasatri and Thai Srisoonthorn.

The victory is celebrated every year on Phuket with a week of activities, culminating in a free open-air theatrical performance on the supposed site of the final battle in the five-week defence of Phuket.

This year, the performance, featuring hundreds of people, takes place on the nights of March 13, 14 and 15, starting at around 7pm. The costumes are gorgeous, as are the backdrops, and the acting, if a little wooden, is definitely sincere. Lots of sword fighting, kick boxing and even a cannon or two.  Note that on the first night there tend to be a lot of speeches before the performance begins. You like long speeches in Thai? Go that night.

Lots of stalls in the area sell snacks, beers and other drinks, and souvenirs, so it’s worth getting a crowd together to make a night of it.

To get there, go north from Phuket Town along the main road, past the Heroines monument to Thalang. At the lights, turn left, and then, on the first left-hand bend, turn right towards Baan Riang. Follow the signs.

Other activities during the week include tours of related historical sites, starting at 9am on March 7-10; a mountain bike race along “historical routes” on March 8; and, on the same day in the evening, local sports including Thai boxing at the Baan Riang victory site. Try the following numbers to join any of these: 08 6942 3234, 08 1838 4860 or 076 282 950.