Northeastern · Thailand
Roi Et · ร้อยเอ็ด
Standing Buddha at Phuttha Rattana Sathan, Tung Kula Ronghai plain, jasmine rice.
- Region
- Northeastern
- Population
- 1,286,000
- Area
- 8,299 km²
- Stories filed
- 0
About Roi Et
History
Roi Et — "one hundred and one" — takes its name from the legendary eleven gates of its original walled city, a number inflated by tradition to a hundred and one as a mark of greatness. The town has been a provincial seat since the seventeenth century, sitting at the confluence of several minor rivers that made it a rice-trading hub for the central Khorat Plateau. Its modern identity is shaped by two contrasting legacies: a deep-rooted Phu Thai and Lao-descended textile culture producing some of Isan's finest silk, and a post-war infrastructure boom that left the city with an outsized artificial lake at its centre and an enormous pagoda on its skyline.
Landscape & geography
The landscape is the classic Isan flatness of the central plateau: rice country rolling to the horizon in every direction, broken by the wetland of Bueng Phlan Chai — a shallow urban lake in the heart of Roi Et town landscaped into a public park with walking paths, pedal boats, and a standing Buddha that rises eleven metres from the water on a small island. The Chi and Mun river systems drain the province to the west and south respectively, their floodplains wide and gold-stubble dry after the November harvest.
Why visit
Climb the Phra Maha Chedi Chai Mongkol — a twenty-storey pink pagoda on the edge of the city — for a vertiginous view over the entire provincial plain. The aquarium and floating market at Bueng Phlan Chai make a relaxed morning. History travellers will find undervisited Khmer-period lintels and prangs scattered across the southern districts — Ku Phra Kona and Ku Ka Sing are atmospheric laterite towers surrounded by rice fields. Come in September for the Bun Sipsong Mua boat-racing festival on the Chi River. Roi Et works best as part of a slow central-Isan loop.
Stories from Roi Et
Articles, reviews, and itineraries tagged to this province.