Bang Na
'A place of rice farms' — now the eastern gateway of mega-malls, exhibition halls and the road to the airport.
Bang Na was paddy land inside living memory and only became a district in its own right in 1998. Almost everything a visitor sees here was built after that date, which makes it the clearest place in Bangkok to watch how the city expands.
The Royal Dragon Restaurant here held the Guinness record as the world's largest restaurant from 1992 to 2008: 1.6 hectares of outdoor seafood tables, with waiters delivering food on roller skates.
Above the Bang Na–Trat highway runs the Burapha Withi Expressway, a 55 km elevated road once counted among the longest bridges on Earth and the alternative route to Suvarnabhumi Airport.
The BTS Sukhumvit line reached here in 2011 (Udom Suk, Bang Na, Bearing), and the MRT Yellow Line now crosses it. Bang Na station connects to BITEC by a covered skywalk of about 500 m — far faster than the traffic below.