The Town Where Monkeys Run the Show

When was the last time an entire town threw an official banquet for wild animals — and turned it into a business?

Lopburi sits about a hundred and fifty kilometers north of Bangkok — roughly the distance from London to Birmingham. Every last Sunday of November, the town does exactly that. Red tablecloths go up against the walls of the ancient Phra Prang Sam Yot temple, piled into pyramids of pineapple, watermelon, banana, and rice. On top: cakes and bottles of soda. About two tons of food in total. Officially, the spread is set for around six hundred guests. In reality, several thousand long-tailed macaques show up.

The idea came in the late nineteen-eighties from a local hotel owner, Yongyuth Kitwatananusont. The province was fading economically, and it needed a reason for tourists to come. The macaques — long since squatting in the temple ruins — became that reason. Since nineteen eighty-nine, the banquet has run every year. Since two thousand seven, it's been an official town event, complete with the governor, a speech, and media coverage.

Ahead of the festival, "invitations" go up around town — paper envelopes tied with cashew nuts. The macaques learned fast: paper means food. Now they work the whole route methodically.

Here's the scale of it: by twenty twenty, the provincial capital was home to nearly four thousand six hundred macaques. They open doors, raid refrigerators, chew through power lines. Officials are weighing sterilization and splitting the population across districts. But nobody touches the banquet itself — too much of the local tourist economy rides on that one brand.

The town feeds the monkeys. The monkeys feed the town. That's not a figure of speech — it's a working model, and so far, nobody's found a way out of it.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.