Southern · Thailand
Trang · ตรัง
Underwater wedding every Valentine's, Morakot cave, roast pork breakfast culture.
- Region
- Southern
- Population
- 641,000
- Area
- 4,918 km²
- Stories filed
- 1
About Trang
History
Trang was Thailand's first province to cultivate rubber commercially, its seedlings brought from Malaysia in 1899 by a governor who recognised the potential of Hevea brasiliensis on the Andaman hillsides. The rubber wealth built the old town's ornate Sino-Portuguese shophouses, and the province's morning dim-sum breakfast culture — maintained in the Chinese coffee shops of Trang town — is a direct inheritance of Fujian merchants who came to manage the early plantations. Trang was also the birthplace of Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai, who served twice as Thailand's premier in the 1990s.
Landscape & geography
A karst-studded Andaman coast with a long, forested limestone archipelago offshore — Koh Mook, Koh Kradan, Koh Ngai, Koh Libong — and rubber and oil-palm plantations rising from the coastal plain into the Banthat range. The Trang river drains the central valley south to Kantang, the province's fishing port. Libong island is the last stronghold of the dugong (sea cow) in the Gulf of Thailand; the Libong Research Centre monitors a remaining population of approximately two hundred animals.
Why visit
Koh Mook's Tham Morakot — the Emerald Cave — is one of Thailand's most memorable natural experiences: swim through a 100-metre sea tunnel at low tide and emerge into a hidden beach ringed by vertical limestone with sky visible through a sinkhole overhead. Koh Kradan and Koh Ngai offer excellent coral snorkelling quieter than Krabi's Phi Phi. The dugong-watching boat tours from Koh Libong are the best in Thailand. Back in Trang town, the morning dim-sum at the Chinese coffee shops along Ratsada Road is as good a breakfast as any in southern Thailand.
Stories from Trang
Articles, reviews, and itineraries tagged to this province.
