Qualla: Stung Treng

Stung Treng: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1904 France traded this town away. Stung Treng had been administered since 1893 as part of French Lower Laos, and when the colonial authorities decided to tidy their own internal borders, French Laos handed the province to the French Protectorate of Cambodia and took Champassak in exchange. Nobody who lived here was consulted about the swap, and it is the reason a town standing at one of the great river junctions of mainland Asia - 50 kilometres south of the Laos border, 376 from Phnom Penh - is Cambodian at all rather than Lao.

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Stung Treng: Four Rivers Come Together

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Look at the water and the town makes sense. The Srepok rises among the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Dak Lak province, and runs 405 kilometres - 281 of them inside Cambodia - to meet the Sesan about 37 kilometres above the Mekong. The Sekong travels 480 kilometres from the mou...

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Stung Treng: The Word Is Outpost

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Wikivoyage is blunt about it: the word for Stung Treng is outpost. Around 29,665 people lived in the town at the 2009 census, in a province of some 176,488 across 11,092 square kilometres - the eighth largest province in Cambodia and one of the emptiest. The town is small enough ...

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Stung Treng: Getting Out

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Highway 7 south to Kratie is fully paved and takes four to five hours, a good deal longer in the rainy season. The road north to the Lao border has been a different proposition - as of 2019 it alternated between stretches of pavement, stretches of gravel, and stretches of bumpy f...

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Stung Treng: What the River Lost

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Something has gone out of this stretch of the Mekong. Until February 2022, Stung Treng was one of the few provinces in the world where you could see Irrawaddy dolphins in the wild, in pools near the Laos border. That population has almost certainly vanished, killed off by illegal...

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