Qualla: Songkhram River

Songkhram River: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 4.0. Songkhram means war. The river carrying the name is not remotely warlike: 420 kilometres of slow brown water winding across the flat top of Isan, swelling enormously in the wet season and shrinking back to sandbars in the dry. But the name has turned out to be uncomfortably apt, because for the better part of four decades the Songkhram has been the site of a running battle - between agencies and investors who want to put something across it, and the people living along it who have so far stopped every attempt.

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Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Songkhram River: Where It Comes From, Where It Goes

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Songkhram rises quietly in the hills between Nong Han district in Udon Thani province and Sawang Daen Din district in Sakon Nakhon, in country that gives no hint of what the river becomes downstream. From there it wanders northeast and east through Seka district in Nong Khai ...

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Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Songkhram River: The Last One Left

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 4.0. What makes the Songkhram unusual is what it does not have. No dam, no barrage, nothing across the channel to interrupt the flow - the only Mekong tributary in Thailand left in that condition. The consequence arrives every year with the floods. Fish swim up out of the Mekong into ...

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Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Songkhram River: Fifteenth on the List

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2019 the lower Songkhram basin was designated a Ramsar site - a wetland of international importance - the fifteenth in Thailand. The listing covers a 92-kilometre reach of the river along with 34,000 rai of surrounding basin, some 5,400 hectares, and it arrived through an unli...

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Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 4.0

Songkhram River: Forty Years of Saying No

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hdamm, CC BY-SA 4.0. The proposals keep coming. Government bodies and private investors have been pushing for a dam on the Songkhram since the 1980s, and every scheme so far has been beaten back by the villagers, fishers and civil-society groups who would live with the result. In 2019 the Royal Irrig...

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Image: Hdamm | CC BY-SA 4.0