Place

From Lawrence Osborne's Bangkok Days:

"The name Rattanakosin appears as part of Bangkok's original ceremonial name in Thai, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's longest place-name:

Krungthep
Mahanakhon
Amonrattanakosin
Mahintharayutthya
Mahadilokphop
Noppharatratchathani
Buriromudomratchaniwet
Mahasathan
Amonphiman
Awatansathit
Sakkathattiya
Witsanu
Kamprasit.

"It is mostly a Thai pronunciation of a blend of Sanskrit and Pali, the ancient languages of India, and it means: 'The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnu.

"So Bangkok was built by Vishnu."

* * *

"It began to occur to me that Thailand as a place of exile sometimes fosters a taste for self-invention which is not unrelated to her cosmology. Where the Blue God reigns, you could say, all is magical and relative. For who is Vishnu exactly, and how can a king incarnate something so vast? Memoirs seem petty commercial affairs when put next to the wheeling galaxies that make up Vishnu's cosmic body. The Blue God, too, takes on multiple disguises, changes form like supercharged putty. In the scenes with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, he is at one moment the sweet and handsome charioteer Krishna, at the next the nearest thing in literature to a vision of nuclear holocaust. "I am become Death," he says mildly, "the destroyer of worlds." He encourages a view of reality that is undependable, plastic, ever-shifting, mysterious. He needs no fact-checkers."