Mae Kha Canal

This guide to Mae Kha Canal in Chiang Mai follows a waterway that began as the sacred outer moat of King Mengrai's new capital seven hundred years ago, then spent decades as the city's open sewer, choked with garbage as generations of families built homes over its banks. It covers the bulldozers that arrived in 2018 and 2019, the fifty-seven homes torn down and the hundred-plus families ordered out, and a community leader's plea for shelter for residents who had little to fall back on. Listen for what the canal looks and smells like today, a decade on from that clearance.