Place

Mondulkiri

មណ្ឌលគិរី

Mondulkiri (មណ្ឌលគិរី) is a province in eastern Cambodia, a highland plateau on the border with Vietnam.[1][2] Its capital is Sen Monorom, and the Bunong are the largest of its Indigenous peoples.[1][3] Into Cambodia glosses the name as "area" (mondul) and "mountain" (kiri), after the province's mountains, plateaus, waterfalls and valleys.[3]

Geography

Mondulkiri borders Kratie to the west, Stung Treng and Ratanakiri to the north, and Vietnam's Dak Lak, Dak Nong and Binh Phuoc provinces to the south and east.[1][3] Its area is 14,288 square kilometers (5,517 sq mi), the figure approved by the Ministry of Interior,[1][4] while the provincial spatial plan's own map database measures 13,715 square kilometers (5,295 sq mi).[1] Into Cambodia and Tourism of Cambodia both call it the largest province in the country.[3][5] By road, Phnom Penh is about 365,[1] 375[5] or 382 kilometers away.[3]

The province sits on the Chhlong Plateau, the western end of the southern Annamite range of Vietnam's Central Highlands. Its basalt dome has worn into steep hills and valleys, and the land falls away west toward the Mekong and north toward Ratanakiri.[1] The highest ground lies in Pech Chreada district, close to Vietnam.[1] The spatial plan gives elevations from 40 to 1,030 meters (130 to 3,380 ft),[1] while Into Cambodia and Tourism of Cambodia give heights from about 200 to over 1,000 meters (660 to 3,280 ft).[3][5] The Srepok River rises in Vietnam's Central Highlands and crosses the province through Koh Nhek district; in Cambodia its catchment takes in the south of Ratanakiri. The Ou Chba, flowing north through the same district, is one of its tributaries. The Prek Te marks the line between Sen Monorom and O Reang (អូររាំង).[1][2] Into Cambodia gives the rainy season as May to October and the dry season as November to April.[3] Tourism of Cambodia gives rain from June to October, a cool season from November to February and a hot season from March to May,[5] and the spatial plan puts the dry season from December to April.[1] The height of the land keeps the province cooler than most of Cambodia.[3][5]

Districts

The province has one municipality, Sen Monorom, and four districts: Keo Seima, Koh Nhek, O Reang and Pech Chreada.[1][3] Together they hold four sangkats (urban communes), 17 communes and 92 villages.[1][3] Koh Nhek, in the north, is the largest district, with 39 percent of the province's land.[1]

People

The 2019 census counted 88,649 people in its provisional results[6] and 92,213 in its final results, against 61,107 in 2008. That was a growth rate of 3.7 percent a year, the highest of any province after Phnom Penh. With about six people per square kilometer, Mondulkiri is the most thinly settled province in Cambodia.[4][1] The provincial planning department counted 90,949 people in 2020.[1] The population had already more than doubled between 1998 and 2013, from 32,407 to 72,680, mostly through Khmer migrants arriving from other provinces.[7]

The Bunong, also called Phnong, are an Austroasiatic people of the Mon-Khmer language branch, and have lived in the region for at least 2,000 years.[1][3] Hak, McAndrew and Neef found that the Indigenous share of the population dropped to 39 percent in 2013, down from 71 percent in 1998.[7] The spatial plan counts the Bunong at 51 percent of the population in 2009 and 44 percent in 2019, and all ethnic minorities at 47 percent in 2020.[1] Into Cambodia and Tourism of Cambodia give 80 percent for highland minorities, mostly Bunong, and 20 percent for Khmer, Chinese and Cham.[3][5] In Srae Ampil, a village of Keo Seima district, Bunong families live alongside Stieng and Khmer neighbors.[7] Khmer, highland languages, Vietnamese and Lao are all spoken.[5]

Bunong farming is built around the forest, with swidden fields cleared, planted and left to regrow, and Bunong belief is animist.[1] Bunong is a largely unwritten language.[8] Tourism of Cambodia counts gongs and large jars among an Indigenous community's most valuable possessions, and writes that many were buried in hidden places in the forest during the Khmer Rouge years.[5] In Pu Tam village in December 2010, Sounds of Angkor recorded a Bunong set of four bossed gongs, named from largest to smallest me (mother), klöu, trö and kon (child), with the largest, the "mother", keeping the pulse. Musicians there also played six flat gongs, beaten with the fist.[9]

History

The highlands of northeast Cambodia and Vietnam were long home only to Indigenous peoples. The Bunong lived for centuries apart from the lowland states, though the region was often raided for forced labor.[1] Under the French protectorate (1863 to 1953), the territory was split between Cambodia and Vietnam and little explored, and only around 1930 did the French administration move to bring its people under control. After the French left, Khmer settlers came to hold the area, and their arrival did not bring conflict with the Indigenous farmers.[1][3]

A royal decree, number 46, created Mondulkiri out of Kratie province on December 30, 1961, with three districts: Koh Nhek, Chhbar and O Reang. Sen Monorom became the provincial seat in 1962.[1][3] In the late 1960s, during the Vietnam War, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam kept three bases in the province,[1][3] and US forces made repeated incursions and bombing raids.[3] The Khmer Rouge took control of the area around 1970 and moved people by force to Koh Nhek district to grow rice: the whole population,[1] or much of it.[3] Into Cambodia writes that schools, hospitals and whole villages were destroyed, and that as many as half of the province's people died during the forced moves of the 1970s.[3]

From the 1990s, as Cambodia's economy opened, logging, land concessions, mining, hunting and the arrival of new settlers cut deeply into the province's forests and wildlife.[7] In 2020 the Ministry of Interior gave the province an emblem. Two wild oxen stand for its wildlife and a mountain and a tree for its highland forests, inside a ring of kbach phni tes ornament, which stands for good administration, development, social security, equality and the keeping of national cultural traditions in peace.[3]

Forests and wildlife

A 1993 royal decree on protected areas created three wildlife sanctuaries in Mondulkiri: Phnom Prich, Phnom Namlear and Lumphat. Srepok and Keo Seima were declared protected forests in 2002 under the Forestry Administration and passed to the Ministry of Environment as wildlife sanctuaries in 2016.[1][7] Phnom Prich lies wholly within the province and covers 222,500[1] or 262,642 hectares.[3] Keo Seima, shared with Kratie, covers 292,690 hectares, of which 233,654 lie in Mondulkiri,[1] or 317,456 hectares.[3] As of 2021, with a biodiversity corridor added in 2017, about 77 percent of the province was under protected-area management.[1]

Phnom Prich, Srepok and parts of Keo Seima hold the most suitable habitat in the province for Asian elephants, tigers and white-rumped vultures.[1] Into Cambodia counts about 60 rare and endangered species in Keo Seima, among them the silvered langur and seven species of wild cat, and names it an important area for Asian elephants.[3] A forest carbon project began in Keo Seima in January 2010 with the Wildlife Conservation Society and funding from the United States Agency for International Development, and its carbon savings were first verified in 2016.[1] Between 1999 and 2019, Phnom Namlear and Keo Seima lost the most forest of the five sanctuaries, much of it cleared for rubber, while Lumphat stayed the most intact.[1]

Land and economy

By September 2015, 33 economic land concessions had been approved in the province, covering 211,317 hectares, nearly 15 percent of its arable land, for rubber, cassava and tree plantations.[7] Cassava harvests rose from 546 tons in 2001 to 157,505 tons in 2013 as farmers moved from swidden fields to cash crops.[7] Rubber, cassava, pepper, maize and cashew nuts are the main crops, and coffee is grown in the cool hills.[1][3] The province also holds deposits of gold and bauxite.[1]

In 2011 the International Federation for Human Rights reported on the rubber plantations of Socfin-KCD in Bou Sra (ប៊ូស្រា) commune. It found that two concessions totaling more than 7,000 hectares had forced more than 850 Bunong families off their farmland, and that sacred and ancestral sites had been destroyed.[10][2] By January 2016, seven villages in Mondulkiri held collective land titles, of eleven in all of Cambodia.[11] In September 2023, more than 300 Bunong families in Dak Dam (ដាក់ដាំ) commune, O Reang district, protested for five days; they said that land titles had been issued over their farms and community forest.[2]

Tourism draws on the province's waterfalls, forests and Bunong villages. In 2017 Mondulkiri received 114,349 visitors, 102,590 of them Cambodian and 11,759 from abroad.[1]

Places

Sen Monorom is the main base for visitors, and most of the province's sites lie around the town and in Pech Chreada and O Reang districts.[1] Phnom Doh Kramom (ភ្នំដោះក្រមុំ), a grassy hill above the town, is a place of worship for local and Indigenous people.[3] Bou Sra waterfall (ទឹកជ្រោះប៊ូស្រា), a waterfall of several tiers in Pech Chreada district about 43 kilometers northeast of Sen Monorom, ranks among the country's most famous falls.[1][3] A private company manages the site, and the road to it is hard to travel in the rainy season.[1] In O Reang district, the Chrey Thom waterfall falls about 10 meters (33 ft), in Into Cambodia's account,[3] and Dak Dam commune has a community-based ecotourism site.[3]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 1.30 1.31 1.32 1.33 1.34 1.35 1.36 Provincial Administration of Mondul Kiri, Mondul Kiri Provincial Spatial Plan: Technical report (March 2021)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Radio Free Asia Khmer, យ៉ង ចាន់តារា, ជនជាតិដើមព្នងជាង ៣រយគ្រួសារតវ៉ារឿងមន្ត្រីខេត្តមណ្ឌលគិរីធ្វើប្លង់រឹងប៉ះដីស្រែចម្ការពួកគាត់ (September 28, 2023)
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 3.19 3.20 3.21 3.22 3.23 3.24 3.25 3.26 Into Cambodia, Mondulkiri Province (undated)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 National Institute of Statistics, General Population Census of the Kingdom of Cambodia 2019: Final Report (undated)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 Tourism of Cambodia, Mondulkiri Province Travel Guides (undated)
  6. ↑ National Institute of Statistics, General Population Census of the Kingdom of Cambodia 2019: Provisional Population Totals (2019)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 Land, Sochanny Hak, John McAndrew and Andreas Neef, Impact of Government Policies and Corporate Land Grabs on Indigenous People's Access to Common Lands and Livelihood Resilience in Northeast Cambodia (October 19, 2018)
  8. ↑ VOA Khmer, Hong Chenda, Saving Bunong, a Vulnerable Language in Cambodia (June 19, 2017)
  9. ↑ Sounds of Angkor, Gong sets (undated)
  10. ↑ Fédération internationale pour les droits humains (FIDH), Land cleared for Rubber, Rights Bulldozed (October 6, 2011)
  11. ↑ Open Development Cambodia, Newly titled communities hope to protect more than just traditions (January 4, 2016)


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This page was last edited on 17 October 2026, at 00:30.