Qualla: Koh Seh

Koh Seh: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Some islands are famous by accident. Koh Seh is the opposite: it is anonymous by accident. Look the name up and you will mostly find a different island — Koh Ach Seh, some sixty kilometres east in the Kep Archipelago, where a conservation outfit drops concrete blocks onto the seabed to snag illegal trawl nets and collected one of the first National Geographic marine protection prizes for the idea in June 2018. The mix-up is common enough that reference works now carry a note warning against it. The real Koh Seh does nothing so newsworthy. It sits uninhabited at the far southeastern corner of Ream National Park, ringed almost entirely in mangrove, and its Khmer name means Horse Island.

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Koh Seh: The End of the Park

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Koh Seh covers 7.5 square kilometres — 4.4 kilometres long, between 1.8 and 4.4 wide — and carries fifteen kilometres of coastline for a landmass you could cross on foot in an afternoon. That ratio is the whole description: the shape is all inlets, points and tidal creeks rather ...

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Koh Seh: Four Point Three Kilometres

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Southeast of the island the water opens into a sound 4.3 kilometres wide, and on the far side of it is Vietnam. Phú Quốc is one of the stranger outcomes of colonial cartography — an island lying far closer to Cambodia than to the Vietnamese mainland, and Vietnamese anyway, becaus...

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Koh Seh: What the Mangrove Is Doing

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mangrove fringes nearly all of Koh Seh's shore, and that is the island's actual job. Stilt roots slow the water, drop sediment and build the murky shallows where juvenile fish, crab and shrimp can grow without being eaten in the first week; fisheries along this entire coast depen...

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Koh Seh: The Uses of Being Overlooked

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

So Koh Seh sits where it has always sat: no village, no pier worth the name, no recognition, quietly absorbing the credit and the blame owed to an island sixty kilometres east. Its neighbour Koh Thmei, a kilometre and a half north, has been sliced into development zones on paper ...

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