Qualla: Pha Taem National Park

Pha Taem National Park: Introduction

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alabama Martin Künzel, Berlin, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0. Every year on New Year's Day, crowds gather on a cliff edge in northeastern Thailand to watch the sunrise. They come to Pha Taem because this is where the first light of the new year touches Thailand — the easternmost point where the sun, rising over Laos across the Mekong, finds land. But even before that annual pilgrimage became a tradition, people were coming to these cliffs with something on their minds. The evidence is still here: handprints pressed into sandstone, outlines of fish larger than any human, geometric shapes whose meaning has been debated for decades. The paintings at Pha Taem are estimated to be 3,000 to 4,000 years old. Pha Taem National Park — 340 square kilometres of Dipterocarp forest, mushroom rocks, and Mekong riverside established on 31 December 1991 — exists partly to protect them.

Read more: Pha Taem National Park on Qualla

Image: Alabama Martin Künzel, Berlin, 2012 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pha Taem National Park: What the Artists Left Behind

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ddalbiez, CC BY 3.0. The rock art at Pha Taem covers the cliff face in four distinct groups, the longest stretching 180 metres and containing more than 300 individual images. Among them are anthropomorphic figures — humans in postures that suggest ceremony or ritual — and depictions of the giant Meko...

Read more: Pha Taem National Park on Qualla

Image: Ddalbiez | CC BY 3.0

Pha Taem National Park: Geology Shaped by Deep Time

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ddalbiez, CC BY 3.0. The sandstone cliffs of Pha Taem owe their distinctive shape to millions of years of differential erosion. Where softer rock wore away faster than the harder cap above it, the remaining pillars formed broad mushroom shapes — their stems narrowed by wind and water, their tops pres...

Read more: Pha Taem National Park on Qualla

Image: Ddalbiez | CC BY 3.0

Pha Taem National Park: Elephants, Catfish, and the Crossing of Seasons

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Khunkay, CC BY-SA 3.0. The park is not only a site of archaeology. During February and March, wild elephants migrate across the Mekong from Laos into the park area, moving in search of food — banana leaves, fruit, whatever the season offers — before returning across the river as conditions change. Loca...

Read more: Pha Taem National Park on Qualla

Image: Khunkay | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pha Taem National Park: The First Light of the Year

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ddalbiez, CC BY 3.0. Cha Na Dai Cliff, within the park, has become a pilgrimage site of a very modern kind. Because of Thailand's easternmost geography at this latitude, the sun on New Year's Day rises here before it reaches any other point in the kingdom. Thousands of people make the journey each De...

Read more: Pha Taem National Park on Qualla

Image: Ddalbiez | CC BY 3.0