Phuket’s old town, with its open-air noodle shops and brightly painted Sino-Portuguese shop fronts, is a favourite social media and selfie backdrop for tourists from China. The island, which has a year-round population of 500,000, typically attracts about 7m foreign visitors a year, of whom 2m are Chinese — Thailand’s biggest source of tourists.

Chinese tourists can normally even be relied on to come to Phuket in the May to October rainy season, when Europeans mostly stay away. But this month Thalang Road, in the heart of the old town, has been largely deserted.

Chinese groups cancelled trips to Phuket en masse last year after a boat carrying tourists from the mainland capsized in July, killing 47 people. This season, say tradespeople, things are even worse. According to the local hotel association, occupancy on the island is running at only 40-50 per cent.