Qualla: Koh Kong province

Koh Kong province: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Haydn Blackey from Cardiff, Wales, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1907, France gave a province back. Trat, on the eastern rim of the Gulf of Thailand, had spent three years under French Indochina before returning to Siam in a swap that traded one stretch of coast for another. Koh Kong stayed. The boundary that had run through these waters since 1795 hardened into an international border, and the province on the Cambodian side of it has been negotiating with that fact ever since - looking east to Phnom Penh for its government and west to Thailand for its market. Ten thousand square kilometres of mangrove, mountain and rain, and for most of the twentieth century the easiest way in was by boat from somebody else's country.

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Image: Haydn Blackey from Cardiff, Wales | CC BY-SA 2.0

Koh Kong province: The Coast That Changed Hands

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wikirictor, CC BY-SA 4.0. From 1795 the coast was administered from Bangkok, and during the reign of King Mongkut it acquired a Siamese name - Patchan Khiri Khet - chosen as a deliberate mirror to Prachuap Khiri Khan, the town sitting on the same latitude across the gulf. Renaming is the sort of thing emp...

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Image: Wikirictor | CC BY-SA 4.0

Koh Kong province: A Maze of Bays and Channels

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yourecoveredinbees, CC BY 4.0. Where the province meets the sea, the land stops being reliably land. Peam Krasop Wildlife Sanctuary, established in 1993, covers 246 square kilometres of islands separated by tidal channels, with roughly 23,750 hectares of mangrove threaded through them - a Ramsar-listed wetland...

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Image: Yourecoveredinbees | CC BY 4.0

Koh Kong province: Empty, Then Full

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reinhard Onasch, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the Khmer Rouge regime fell in 1979, Koh Kong was close to empty - a province of forest and coast with almost nobody in it. The national government encouraged Cambodians to settle here, and they came, from other provinces and from the border trade. The 2024 census counted 1...

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Image: Reinhard Onasch | CC BY-SA 3.0

Koh Kong province: The Runway Nobody Needed

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yourecoveredinbees, CC BY 4.0. In 2008 a Chinese firm, Union Development Group, took a ninety-nine-year lease on 360 square kilometres of the Botum Sakor coast - close to a fifth of Cambodia's entire shoreline - for a development called Dara Sakor: casinos, golf courses, resorts, a deep-water port. It also bui...

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Image: Yourecoveredinbees | CC BY 4.0

Koh Kong province: The Interior Nobody Crosses

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yourecoveredinbees, CC BY 4.0. Behind the resorts, Botum Sakor National Park covers 1,826 square kilometres of coastal forest declared in 1993, home to more than forty mammal species including clouded leopards, fishing cats and a population of pileated gibbons that may represent a tenth of the world's remainin...

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Image: Yourecoveredinbees | CC BY 4.0