Qualla: Sihanoukville Autonomous Port

Sihanoukville Autonomous Port: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. In April 1960, Louis Jacquinot, a minister of state in the French government, stood on a raw concrete quay at the edge of the Bay of Kampong Som and declared Cambodia's first deep-water port open. France had paid for it — twelve million US dollars — and the entire point of the enterprise was to loosen France's grip. Until that year, nearly everything Cambodia sold to the world went out through Saigon. The berths behind Jacquinot changed the arithmetic of an independent country's trade in a way that no treaty had managed to.

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sihanoukville Autonomous Port: A Coastline With Nowhere to Dock

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cambodia had a coast. What it did not have was anywhere an ocean-going ship could tie up. Kampot, the country's only marine port, sat roughly five kilometres up the Tuk Chhou River, too shallow for deep-draught vessels. The river port at Phnom Penh, on the Tonle Sap, could take s...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sihanoukville Autonomous Port: One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Beams

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Work began in 1955 on four berths at what became known as the Old Jetty. The hardest part was the decking. When the original pier was laid in 1958, it rested on 137 pre-stressed concrete beams, each 35 metres long and weighing around 90 tons. They were cast on site — nothing that...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sihanoukville Autonomous Port: Nine Berths and a Metre of Tide

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. The port that exists today reads, on paper, as a set of unglamorous numbers: nine berths, 1,330 metres of total quay length, a maximum draught of 8.5 metres. The tidal variation is just 1.4 metres, which is the sort of detail that never makes a brochure and quietly governs everyt...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sihanoukville Autonomous Port: The Only Deep Water in the Country

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0. It remains Cambodia's sole deep-water port, which is a strange kind of responsibility for a single organisation to carry. The state corporation that runs it, known simply as PAS, employs more than a thousand people and answers to a board appointed across several government minist...

Image: Dmitry Makeev | CC BY-SA 4.0