A handwritten diary kept at the island's Swedish school records it season by season, from a single child taught by her mother to 220 pupils. It also records the January the tsunami emptied it.
Somebody at the Swedish school on Koh Lanta kept a diary. It is a spiral notebook, written by hand, and it belongs to the school's very first pupil, who was seven when it starts.
She organised it by season rather than by year, the way an island does. It begins the year the school begins and stops in 2007. Her opening line is the whole story in one sentence: Lanta Sanuk School has not always been the way it is now. In the beginning there was only a single pupil, and then it grew and grew.
Season 00/01: a maths book made of A4 paper
The first entry describes a school with one pupil, one teacher and nothing else.
"The school was in my bungalow. Mum was the teacher and there was absolutely no material. We made a maths book out of A4 paper!"
That is the beginning of what people now call Little Sweden. A child, her mother, a bungalow, and a maths book they stapled together themselves.
Season 01/02: the Palm School
Another Swedish family arrived, and the mother happened to be a secondary school teacher. She taught her own two daughters, aged eight and six, plus the diarist, then seven. Lessons moved to their bungalow, and the children gave it a name: Palmskolan, the Palm School.
Then, in a detail that could only come from a real diary, the whole thing decamped to Greece for a few months and carried on there.
The following season has the shortest entry in the book. "No school. We were in Sweden."
Season 03/04: cockroaches and road dust
By now enough families wanted in that the diarist's parents hired an actual teacher, and it was she who named it Lanta Sanuk School. Usually six pupils turned up. At most nine.
The description of the premises is the least romantic thing you will read about this island:
"Two rooms with a fan and a filthy hole in the floor as a toilet. The tables were rickety, there were several cockroaches and the floor was always dirty with road dust."
And then, immediately after: "There were lots of different ages and everyone hung out with each other." Which is the part the children evidently remembered.
Season 04/05: the tsunami
The autumn term opened with 25 pupils and three teachers. By January sixty children were enrolled. It was the school's best year yet.
Then one line, written plainly, the way a teenager writes down something enormous:
"The school was closed after the tsunami because everyone went home."
It stayed shut through January 2005 and opened again at the beginning of February with two new teachers. That same season the first pupil enrolled through the Swedish distance-learning programme, and the school got its first computers.
Season 05/06: upstairs at the conference centre
The school took over the entire upper floor of a conference centre, twelve air-conditioned rooms. There were 119 pupils and ten teachers.
Her list of what existed for the first time that year tells you what had been missing before it: a head teacher, a library, a preschool, school lunch.
Season 06/07: two schools
The last entry counts 220 pupils and 20 teachers across two sites, plus 19 children in preschool.
The old building became the Holiday School, for families staying one to four months. A new school went up at Long Beach for families staying longer than four months. They called it the Long-term School.
That distinction is quietly the most revealing thing in the diary. By 2007 there were enough Swedish families living on Koh Lanta for a whole year that they needed their own school, separate from the ones passing through.
Why this matters beyond one school
The usual account has Swedes discovering Koh Lanta in the mid-2000s, and the 2006/07 season is the one always quoted. The diary ends exactly there, and that is the point the school wanted to make when they shared it: the season everyone remembers was not the start of anything. It was the moment something that had been growing quietly for seven years became too big to miss.
It started in a bungalow, with one child and a maths book made of A4 paper.
The diary is kept at Sanuk, the Swedish school on Koh Lanta, and was shared with us by the school. Its author, the school's first pupil, also designed the yellow sun that is still the school's logo. Translations from the Swedish are ours. The school asked us to be clear that they speak for Sanuk alone and not for anything else on the island.
