Qualla: Preah Vihear province

Preah Vihear province: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Markus G. Klötzer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Preah Vihear means sacred sanctuary. The province borrowed the name from a temple on a clifftop, and for the better part of a century that temple has been the least sanctuary-like address on the Cambodian border — litigated at The Hague, shelled, evacuated, and litigated again. It is an odd inheritance for a province that is otherwise almost entirely forest and sky, where the roads run empty for an hour at a stretch and the loudest thing in most villages is the wind moving through dry leaves.

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Image: Markus G. Klötzer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Preah Vihear province: Eighteen People to the Square Kilometre

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tetsuya Kitahata, CC BY-SA 4.0. At 13,788 square kilometres, Preah Vihear is Cambodia's third-largest province and one of its emptiest, holding roughly 250,000 people at a density of eighteen per square kilometre. Seven districts and one municipality — Chey Saen, Chhaeb, Choam Khsant, Kuleaen, Rovieng, Sangkom ...

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Image: Tetsuya Kitahata | CC BY-SA 4.0

Preah Vihear province: Sixteen Years as the Capital

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-en) Peaceofangkor at English Wikivoyage, Public domain. From 928 to 944 the Khmer Empire was governed not from Angkor but from Koh Ker, in what is now Kuleaen district, first by Jayavarman IV and then briefly by his son Harshavarman II, who reigned three years and probably did not die of natural causes. The move lasted sixteen years a...

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Image: (WT-en) Peaceofangkor at English Wikivoyage | Public domain

Preah Vihear province: What the Looters Took

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PsamatheM, CC BY-SA 4.0. Koh Ker's sculptures began leaving in the 1880s, carried off by French expeditions to the Musée Guimet in Paris, and they never really stopped — a disputed Koh Ker statue was still the subject of a Sotheby's case in 2011. A hundred kilometres east of Angkor, the vast complex of P...

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Image: PsamatheM | CC BY-SA 4.0

Preah Vihear province: The Cliff and the Court

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0. The temple that named the province stands 525 metres above the Cambodian plain, an 800-metre processional of courtyards and gateways climbing 120 metres up the Dângrêk escarpment, begun in the Koh Ker period and built out under Suryavarman I and Suryavarman II across the eleventh...

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Image: sailko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Preah Vihear province: The People Who Live Underneath It

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) Jpatokal at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 3.0. The arguments are conducted between governments; the consequences land on farmers. In 1979, Thai forces drove Cambodian refugees who had reached Preah Vihear back down the escarpment, and an estimated three thousand people died on that mountainside — men and women who had already...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) Jpatokal at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 3.0

Preah Vihear province: Our Forest

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit USAID U.S. Agency for International Development, Public domain. South of the temples, Preah Vihear shares in Prey Lang, established as a wildlife sanctuary in 2016 and covering more than 430,000 hectares across four provinces — the largest lowland evergreen forest left on the Indochinese peninsula. Its name comes from Kuy, and means, roughly,...

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Image: USAID U.S. Agency for International Development | Public domain