How many bars are in Pattaya? 423 we can count.

Why nobody has the number, and why we tried anyway

Ask three people in Pattaya how many bars the city has and you will get a thousand, three thousand, and a shrug, and the shrug is the honest one. There is no register. The provincial licence count includes restaurants and hotels and excludes the open-fronted counter on Soi Buakhao that has been serving since 2011 without troubling anyone with paperwork. Google's map has whatever people bothered to add, which is most of the bars with a sign and few of the ones without. TripAdvisor has whatever tourists reviewed. The guidebooks have a number the last guidebook had.

So we counted what could be counted, and said how. Every result Google Maps returned for a long list of bar searches within seven kilometres of our counter, kept if it had a bar category and a rating, dropped if it was a hotel, a go-go or an adult club, and dropped again if it was the same place under two names. The number at the top of this page is what was left on the day the count was done. It is a floor, not a ceiling: the real number is higher, by a factor we would guess at two and will not put in print.

The point of the count is not the total. It is the shape. Where the bars are, by street, and what Google calls them, by category, tells you what kind of city this is at night in a way the total does not. A city where a third of the counted bars are on two streets a kilometre apart, and where the biggest category is a plain bar rather than a club, is a walking city with a drink in its hand, and that is what the number says if you read it sideways.

What the shape tells you

Soi Buakhao and the sois off it hold more counted bars than Walking Street, which is not what the postcards say. Walking Street's count is held down by the exclusions: the go-gos and adult clubs that make up most of the strip are not in the data, and the bars that remain are the sports bars, the beer bars and the clubs. Soi Buakhao's count is held down by addresses, because half the bars on it list no street at all. On the ground, the two feel about the same size, and Soi Buakhao is the one with the tables outside.

The categories are more honest than the streets. Plain bars first, by a distance. Then sports bars, pubs and Irish pubs together, which is the British and Irish presence in a number. Then live music bars, cocktail bars and night clubs in a cluster, and then a tail of beer halls, lounges, karaoke and wine bars that Google has a category for and Pattaya has three of. The city, by its own listings, is a beer bar city with a sports channel on, and everything else is a minority.

Live music is the category we care about and it is small: a few dozen places where Google thinks the band is the point. Most of the bands in the city are in plain bars that do not say so. Our hall is listed as a beer garden, its stage has a band six nights a week, and neither fact is in the category. The live-music guide on this site is built from the reviews rather than the categories for exactly that reason, and it finds three times as many.

The number of bars within one kilometre of our counter, which the fact at the top of the page gives, is the number that matters if you are standing at it. Every one of them is a walk. That is the whole argument for the triangle of Soi Buakhao, LK Metro and Soi Diana, and this page is the arithmetic behind it.

How the count was done, step by step, so it can be repeated

The count starts with a list of searches: the kinds of bar people type into Google Maps, with Pattaya attached. Bar, pub, Irish pub, sports bar, live music bar, cocktail bar, beer bar, rock bar, rooftop bar, beer garden, night club, and the streets, one by one, with the word bar after them. Each search was run against Google's map data centred on our counter and every result within seven kilometres was kept, with its name, category, rating, review count, hours, address and position.

Then the exclusions. Hotels, because a hotel with a bar is a hotel. Go-go bars and adult clubs, because they are not what this site ranks and the law is specific about what a bar may say about them. Restaurants, unless Google also called them a bar. Anything with no rating, because a place with no rating is either new or not there, and we could not tell which. And duplicates, which are the biggest correction: the same bar under two spellings, or with and without the street in its name, counted once.

What is left is the number at the top of the page, and it is a floor. The bars that are on the map with no rating, the bars that are not on the map at all, and the whole of the trade the exclusions removed are all above it. Anyone who wants to check the method can run the same searches and get, on the same day, the same number, and on a different day a different one, because the city opens and closes a bar a week.

What the number is for

It is for the argument at the counter, which is where it started. Somebody says a thousand, somebody says three thousand, and now there is a number with a method behind it that both of them can disagree with on the facts. It is for the streets, because the count by street is the real map of the city at night and it does not match the postcards. And it is for the categories, because the count by category says what kind of city this is when it goes out, and the answer is a beer bar with the football on, by a distance.

It is also for this site, honestly. Every ranked guide here takes a slice of the same data and ranks it by the same rule, Google's rating weighted by review count, with the rule stated so it can be argued with. The number on this page is the size of the pool those slices come from. The one-kilometre number in the facts at the top is the size of the pool a person can walk, and it is the number that matters at eleven at night.

The bar this was counted from is one of the counted. It is at the back of a hall on Soi Diana, beside a stage, and the walk from the gate to its counter is at the bottom of the page, as it is on every page, because the count is the argument and the walk is the point.