Qualla: Khlong Yai

Khlong Yai: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For seven years this stretch of coast held far more Cambodians than Thais. From 1979 until July 1986, a Thai Red Cross camp in Khlong Yai district took in people fleeing the fighting between the retreating Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese army that had driven them from power, and at its height it sheltered more than 90,000 of them - in a district whose own population would be counted at fewer than 24,000 in 2000. The site is known today as the Ratchakarun Centre. Khlong Yai has gone back to being what it was before: a fishing town wedged onto a ribbon of Thailand two kilometres wide, catching more rain than almost anywhere else in the country.

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Khlong Yai: Two Kilometres of Thailand

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Look at the map and the shape is startling. Thailand's territory here has been squeezed to a thin coastal shelf: the Gulf of Thailand on one side, and on the other, roughly two kilometres inland, the Cambodian border running parallel along the base of the Cardamom Mountains. The ...

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Khlong Yai: Nearly Five Metres a Year

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The mountains that pin the town against the sea also soak it. Khlong Yai has a tropical monsoon climate, and the Cardamom range standing directly behind it forces the southwest airflow upward and wrings it out on the way over: the town records about 4,845.8 millimetres of rain in...

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Khlong Yai: Ceded, Then Returned

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This coast has not always been Thai, and not for very long without interruption. Khlong Yai belonged to the old province of Patchan Khiri Khet, and in 1904 most of that province - Trat included - was handed to France in exchange for French troops withdrawing from Chanthaburi. Thr...

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Khlong Yai: Ninety Thousand

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When Vietnamese forces pushed the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh at the start of 1979, the war did not end; it moved west into the Cardamoms and along this border, and civilians moved with it. Many of the people who reached Khlong Yai had already lived through the years of the Khm...

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