Qualla: Bokor Hill Station

Bokor Hill Station: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Nine hundred people died in nine months. That is the figure the historians Michael Vickery and David Chandler recorded for the building of the hill station on top of Phnom Bokor, and it is the first thing worth knowing about the place. The structures those workers raised — a palace hotel, a church, a residence for the colonial governor — still stand on the plateau roughly a thousand metres above the Gulf of Thailand, wrapped in cloud for much of the year. Photographers love them. The people who carried the stone and cement up the mountain were Cambodian, the guests they built for were not, and the record that preserves the number does not preserve a single name.

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Bokor Hill Station: A Cure for the Heat

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Damrei Mountains — the Elephant Mountains — had been venerated by Cambodians long before any Frenchman climbed them. What the protectorate saw in the range was altitude, and what altitude offered was relief. Kampot sits thirty-seven kilometres away at the bottom of the slope,...

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Bokor Hill Station: Abandoned the First Time

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The retreat had barely two decades of use before politics took it away. In the late 1940s, with the First Indochina War underway and Khmer Issarak insurgents active in the countryside below, the French pulled off the mountain and left the buildings to the weather. Independence e...

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Bokor Hill Station: The Last Stronghold

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The second abandonment came in 1972, when Khmer Rouge forces took the area, and the mountain became something else entirely: ground worth holding. When Vietnamese forces invaded in 1979 and drove the regime from Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge dug into the plateau and held on for mon...

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Bokor Hill Station: Building Bokor Again

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What happened next is the part most visitors actually see. The state owns the site but leased it for ninety-nine years to the Sokimex Group, which announced the project on 19 January 2008: a new road and resort, roughly thirty months of work, about twenty-one million US dollars. ...

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Bokor Hill Station: What the Cloud Keeps

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most of the original buildings are still standing; the post office is the notable loss. Rangers keep a station on the plateau, a reminder that this ground has never entirely stopped being strategic, and a small temple remains in use. The Popokvil Waterfalls run hard in the wet se...

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