Sukhothai

The camera stands on the brick paving of the temple platform, in the middle of a forest of columns. They are laterite, round, weathered to a rough dark red, and they stop at different heights because they are all broken - what is left of the pillars that once carried a roof over the whole hall. In the middle of them a great seated Buddha faces out, hands in the earth-touching gesture, rendered in stucco over brick and considerably taller than everything else standing. Offering bowls and burnt incense sit at its feet. Behind it a bell-shaped chedi rises, and beyond the platform the park opens out: mown grass, more ruined bases, reflecting ponds with lotus in them, and further temples showing through the trees. Someone is standing near the tripod - their feet are in the bottom of the frame.

Sukhothai was the first Thai kingdom, founded in 1238 in what is now north-central Thailand when two local rulers broke from Khmer control. Its 140 years of independence are usually treated as the beginning of Thai history, and the art, script and architecture of the period are still held up as the classical Thai style.

Wat Mahathat, where this panorama stands, was the spiritual and physical centre of the city - the royal temple, surrounded by nearly two hundred subsidiary chedis inside its own moat. The lotus-bud chedi at its core is a Sukhothai invention and appears nowhere else.

The city was absorbed by Ayutthaya, the kingdom to the south, in 1438. What survives is about seventy square kilometres of ruins, ponds and city walls, protected as a historical park and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1991.