Qualla: Kampong Thom province

Kampong Thom province: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pierre André, CC BY-SA 4.0. The province is named after two snakes that no longer exist. According to the story told along the Sen River, a pair of enormous serpents lived in a cave near a lakeside dock, and on every Buddhist holiday they would show themselves to the people gathered there. The place became Kampong Pous Thom — the port of the great snakes. Then the snakes stopped appearing, and over time the middle of the name fell away with them, leaving Kampong Thom: simply the great port. When the French carved Cambodia into provinces, they mostly took whatever locals were already calling a place. In this case they inherited a name with a hole in the centre of it.

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Image: Pierre André | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kampong Thom province: Big Country, Few People

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. At 13,814 square kilometres, Kampong Thom is Cambodia's second-largest province, and it wears that size lightly — roughly 800,000 people spread across it at about fifty to the square kilometre. It touches almost everything: Siem Reap, Preah Vihear, Stung Treng, Kratie, Kampong Ch...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Kampong Thom province: Prey Lang Means Our Forest

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yourecoveredinbees, CC BY 4.0. Spilling north and east out of Kampong Thom into Preah Vihear, Kratie and Stung Treng is Prey Lang — about 3,600 square kilometres of lowland evergreen forest, the largest surviving block of its kind anywhere on the Indochinese peninsula. Around 200,000 Kuy people live in the dis...

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Image: Yourecoveredinbees | CC BY 4.0

Kampong Thom province: Where the Lake Breathes

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Schellack at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. The Tonle Sap is not a lake so much as a lung. Through the dry months it shrinks to something like 2,500 square kilometres and a depth you could stand up in; when the monsoon swells the Mekong and forces the Tonle Sap River to reverse its direction, the lake inflates past 16,000 ...

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Image: Schellack at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Kampong Thom province: The Names Nobody Wants

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chanrasmey Miech, CC BY-SA 4.0. Under the list of notable people, the encyclopedia entry for Kampong Thom records a boxer, two politicians, a footballer — and three men from the Khmer Rouge. Saloth Sar, who took the name Pol Pot, was born in a village outside the provincial capital. Ke Pauk, one of the regime's...

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Image: Chanrasmey Miech | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kampong Thom province: Living on the Floodplain

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zz Lighting, CC BY 3.0. More than 98 percent of the province follows Theravada Buddhism, and the ordinary evidence of it is everywhere: wat roofs above the treeline, saffron on the roadside at dawn, offerings left where the great snakes were once said to appear. Cham Muslim communities have practised Is...

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Image: Zz Lighting | CC BY 3.0