Qualla: Ratanakiri province

Ratanakiri province: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franz Xaver, CC BY-SA 3.0. The province is named for two things it has. Rôtânô means gem and kĭri means mountain — Khmer words carrying Sanskrit roots, ratna and giri, that reached the region by way of a thousand years of trade. It is an unusually literal name. There are mountains in the north, the tail spurs of the Annamite Range, and there is blue zircon in the ground, still dug out by hand one shaft at a time. What it does not tell you is that a place can be named for its wealth and still be among the poorest corners of the country that governs it.

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Image: Franz Xaver | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ratanakiri province: The People Who Were Here First

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lukas Bergstrom, CC BY 2.0. For more than a thousand years these hills have belonged to the Khmer Loeu, the highland peoples who are a small minority everywhere else in Cambodia and the majority here. They are not one group. Tampuan, Jarai, Kreung, Brou, Kachok and Kavet each hold their own language, and as...

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Image: Lukas Bergstrom | CC BY 2.0

Ratanakiri province: Rubber, Roads and the Uprising of 1968

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Albeiro Rodas, CC BY-SA 3.0. France absorbed the region into Indochina in 1893 and ended the slave trade, replacing it with something the colonial administration found more useful: enormous rubber plantations around Labansiek, the settlement that is now the provincial capital of Banlung. Indigenous men built...

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Image: Albeiro Rodas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ratanakiri province: Practically North Vietnamese Territory

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lukas Bergstrom, CC BY 2.0. The Khmer Rouge understood that grievance and used it. The Communist Party of Kampuchea moved its headquarters into Ratanakiri in 1966 and recruited hundreds of Khmer Loeu into its units. Vietnamese communists had operated here since the 1940s, and at a press conference in June 1...

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Image: Lukas Bergstrom | CC BY 2.0

Ratanakiri province: Emerald Water and Spirit Forest

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franz Xaver, CC BY-SA 3.0. Five kilometres south of Banlung, a volcanic crater some seven hundred thousand years old holds Yeak Laom: eight hundred metres across, fifty deep, ringed by forest and filled with water so clear it reads as green stone. Tampuan communities manage it under a twenty-five-year agre...

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Image: Franz Xaver | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ratanakiri province: The Ledger

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yourecoveredinbees, CC BY 4.0. In 1997 an estimated 300,000 cubic metres of logs crossed illegally into Vietnam, against a legal export limit of 36,000 — a ratio that led Asian Development Bank researcher John Dennis to call the logging a human rights emergency. Visitors hoping for untouched forest increasingl...

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Image: Yourecoveredinbees | CC BY 4.0