Qualla: Tha Rae https://qualla.com/tha-rae en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:39:18 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Tha Rae https://qualla.com/tha-rae Tha Rae: Introduction https://qualla.com/tha-rae/ Photo credit nakhon100, CC BY 2.0. Every 24 December, a stretch of highway in northeastern Thailand fills up with stars. Some are the size of a car door. Others ride on flatbed trucks wired to portable generators, spinning and blinking as they roll, and there are around two hundred of them in a given year. They move out of Tha Rae and down the road toward the rest of Mueang Sakon Nakhon district, throwing red and gold light across rice paddies in a country where Catholics number well under one percent of the population. The procession has run on that night, in that village, for over a hundred years.

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Image: nakhon100 | CC BY 2.0

]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/w744-tha-rae-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Tha Rae: Two Hundred Stars https://qualla.com/tha-rae/ Photo credit nakhon100, CC BY 2.0. The Tha Rae Star Procession stretches across five days, roughly 21 to 25 December, but Christmas Eve is when the road belongs to it. The star is the point: not the manger, not the tree, but the Star of Bethlehem, the sign that something had happened in the world. Villagers build ...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/w744-tha-rae-two-hundred-stars.mp3 0:06 2 full Tha Rae: The Crossing of 1884 https://qualla.com/tha-rae/ Photo credit nakhon100, CC BY 2.0. Nong Han Lake covers 125.2 square kilometres, the largest natural lake in Isan, and it is shallow: an average depth of about 1.9 metres, ten at the deepest, with margins that go dry in the hot season. In November 1884, a French missionary named Xavier Guego led a group of Catholi...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/w744-tha-rae-the-crossing-of-1884.mp3 0:06 3 full Tha Rae: A Cathedral on the North Shore https://qualla.com/tha-rae/ Photo credit nakhon100, CC BY 2.0. The church they founded is now the Cathedral of St Michael the Archangel, and it is not a modest parish building. It is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Thare and Nonseng, which traces itself to the Vicariate Apostolic of Laos established on 4 May 1899 with its seat ...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/w744-tha-rae-a-cathedral-on-the-north-shore.mp3 0:06 4 full Tha Rae: Shuttered Fronts on the Main Street https://qualla.com/tha-rae/ Photo credit nakhon100, CC BY 2.0. Walk the main street and the architecture tells you who built it. Old colonial-era shophouses still stand along the road, their proportions and shuttered upper storeys borrowing from French, Vietnamese and Chinese models at once — the visual record of a community assembled from m...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/w744-tha-rae-shuttered-fronts-on-the-main-street.mp3 0:06 5 full Tha Rae: Rice, Fish, and the Fruit Season https://qualla.com/tha-rae/ Photo credit nakhon100, CC BY 2.0. Tha Rae is administered as a sub-district municipality and divided into eight administrative villages, most of them close enough together to blur, though a few sit a kilometre out on their own. The land is a rural-urban fringe, mostly lowland running down to the lake. Rice is the...

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]]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/w/7/4/4/tha-rae-wp/w744-tha-rae-rice-fish-and-the-fruit-season.mp3 0:06 6 full