Order a coffee on Klong Dao in January and there is a decent chance the family at the next table is discussing whether to go home for Christmas. Not to Bangkok. To Gothenburg.

Koh Lanta has been called Little Sweden for years, and unlike most nicknames a tourist board invents, this one was earned.

It started with a very good winter

Swedes did not arrive gradually. They arrived like a weather front. By the 2006/07 high season, one account puts the share of visitors coming from Sweden at around 90 per cent. Nine in ten. On a Thai island four hundred miles from Bangkok.

Figures since then vary wildly depending on who is counting and what they are counting, and you will see anything from 70 to 80 per cent quoted confidently. Treat those with some salt. What is not in doubt is the direction: a small island in the Andaman Sea became, for a few months a year, a Swedish suburb with better weather.

The giveaway is the schools

Plenty of places have foreign visitors. Very few have foreign school systems.

Koh Lanta has two Swedish schools. Not Swedish-friendly. Swedish, teaching the Swedish national curriculum, to Swedish children, on a Thai island.

Lilla Svenska Skolan sits about 300 metres from Klong Dao beach and takes children from three to fifteen. It has been running since 2006 and has passed the Thai authorities' annual inspections every year since. Its subject specialisms tell you everything about where it is: alongside the usual curriculum, pupils can specialise in beach volleyball, padel, gymnastics, football and creative writing.

Svenska Skolan Thailand, known as Sanuk, runs preschool through year nine on the Swedish Lgr22 curriculum, and also has branches in Hua Hin and Huay Yang. Families sign up for a month or more. Most stay five or six. A growing number now do the entire nine-month school year here.

Read that again, because it is the whole story in one fact: there are Swedish families who do the full academic year on Koh Lanta. The children are not on holiday. They are at school. The school just happens to be near a beach.

You can eat your way to the same conclusion

Look properly at menus along the west coast and Sweden keeps surfacing. Toast Skagen, the prawn-and-dill-on-toast staple of every Stockholm lunch, turns up on a Thai island. So do homemade meatballs, which nobody serves for the benefit of passing Germans.

None of this is put on for tourists. It is what you cook when a large part of your regular custom spends five months a year within walking distance.

The online village

There is a Swedish-language Facebook group called Vi Älskar Koh Lanta, "We Love Koh Lanta", with a reported membership north of twenty thousand. For scale, that is comfortably more people than live in the entire Ko Lanta district.

More Swedes belong to the group about the island than there are residents on it. That is either lovely or slightly unsettling, depending on your mood.

Why here, and not somewhere else

The honest answer is that it snowballed. Early Swedish entrepreneurs opened businesses, other Swedes came because there were Swedes, and once there were schools it stopped being a holiday and started being a season. A family can leave a Swedish November, keep the children in the same curriculum, and pick up the school year in April as though nothing happened.

What is worth saying plainly is that this is one island with several communities living alongside each other. The Swedish season is real, and so is a Muslim-majority island where most people have no connection to it at all, and so are the Urak Lawoi, who got here about five centuries before the first Swede.

Little Sweden is true. It is just not the whole island, and it is only true for part of the year.

Know the origin story better than we do, or remember when the first Swedish businesses opened here? We would genuinely like to hear it.

Most people meet Koh Lanta for a week, along one strip of west-coast beach, and leave with the impression of an island made of resorts. The island people actually live on is a different place, and it is older, more crowded and more mixed than the beach suggests.

How many people

There is no single tidy number, and anyone who gives you one without a caveat is guessing.

Thailand's National Statistical Office counted 23,499 people in Ko Lanta district at the 2000 census and 26,805 at the 2010 census, the latter split almost evenly between 13,501 men and 13,304 women. A district figure of 30,500 is widely quoted for 2012, drawn from registration records rather than a census.

Those are different kinds of counting, which is why they disagree, and none of them capture the island's real population on any given day. Koh Lanta swells in the high season with visitors and with Thai and Burmese workers who come for the season and leave again, and it empties out in the monsoon months. A registered population is not the same as who is standing on the island in February.

The district is not only the beach island either. It covers five subdistricts: Ko Lanta Yai, Ko Lanta Noi, Ko Klang, Khlong Yang and Sala Dan. The largest by population is Ko Klang, with about 7,835 people, and Sala Dan, the pier town most visitors pass through, is the smallest at roughly 4,725. The island of resorts is the minority of the district.

Who they are

The island is genuinely mixed: Muslim Thai, Buddhist Thai, Thai-Chinese, and the Urak Lawoi. In the rural parts of the district the majority is Muslim, which is worth knowing before you arrive, because it shapes ordinary things: which restaurants serve alcohol, how people dress away from the beach, and how the island sounds at prayer times.

The Thai-Chinese presence is concentrated in Lanta Old Town on the east coast, which was the island's original port and trading centre long before the west-coast beaches meant anything to anyone.

The people who were here first

The island's founding population was not Thai. The Urak Lawoi, one of the seafaring peoples usually grouped together in English as Chao Ley or "sea gypsies", settled here more than 500 years ago, arriving from the Indo-Malay world with their own language and animist beliefs.

They are not a Koh Lanta phenomenon alone. Their communities stretch along the Andaman coast from Phuket down through Ko Phi Phi, Ko Lanta and Ko Libong to Ko Lipe, and as far as Langkawi in Malaysia. Estimates put the total Chao Ley population of Thailand at over 10,000 across three related groups, the Moken, the Moklen and the Urak Lawoi, of whom the Urak Lawoi are the largest.

On Koh Lanta they are concentrated today in the village of Sangka-u, on the southeast of the island, having moved as tourism took over the west coast. That sentence is doing a lot of work, and it is the part of the island's story that deserves more reporting than it gets: a community that arrived five centuries before the first bungalow now lives on the side of the island the bungalows did not want.

What we could not verify

We have not found a reliable count of how many Urak Lawoi live on Koh Lanta specifically, as opposed to across the Andaman coast. Nor have we found an official breakdown of the district by religion; the Muslim majority in rural areas is well attested but we have not seen it quantified in a source we would stand behind.

If you know these figures, or you are from one of these communities and we have got something wrong, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Population figures: Thailand National Statistical Office census data (2000, 2010) via CityPopulation.de; district and subdistrict figures via the Ko Lanta district record. Where sources disagree we have said so rather than picking the friendliest number.

Thai actress Nameuan Kannapahorn has shared her story of losing her pregnancy at nine weeks. The actress, who married her businessman partner in a warm ceremony late last year surrounded by close friends and fellow actors from Channel 7, recently posted about the experience she and her husband have gone through.

Nameuan explained that she discovered her pregnancy unexpectedly during an ultrasound appointment. At first, she thought she had simply gained weight, but was surprised to find out she was pregnant. At their first ultrasound around five to six weeks, they saw the baby measuring just 2 millimeters, and both parents were shocked and excited. Her husband was especially thrilled, caring for her closely during the pregnancy and preparing extensively for the baby's arrival. The couple went for regular checkups and witnessed their baby's development each time—from seeing the gestational sac to hearing the heartbeat.

Nameuan had planned to announce the pregnancy at her birthday celebration, as she would be reaching the three-month mark, which is traditionally when pregnancies are announced. However, at their final ultrasound appointment at nine weeks, the doctor found no heartbeat. Despite everything appearing normal and no signs of complications, the pregnancy had ended.

"Everything in the ultrasound room went silent. I didn't hear anything from my belly, only the doctor's voice," she recalled. "We went home in silence. After that, we followed the doctor's instructions and completed the termination process. We never got the chance to tell our friends and loved ones the good news."

Nameuan reflected on why the three-month waiting period is important, noting that early pregnancies can end unexpectedly, even when everything seems fine. She expressed her sadness at the loss and thanked her baby for the brief time they spent together. "Mom and Dad are so happy and grateful that we got to spend time with you for a while. We love you very much. 12/06 – 19/07 2025," she wrote, apologizing to friends for her absence during the difficult period and promising to share more details when she is ready.

Air Force Deputy Commander Praphapas Santheartkham, director of the Thailand-Cambodia Joint Information Center (JIC), responded on August 18, 2025, to Cambodia's claim that Thailand is acting as "ASEAN's police." He stated that Thailand does not position itself as ASEAN's police and does not interfere in any nation's internal affairs, but it will not ignore transnational crime harming Thais, ASEAN citizens, and people worldwide.

Praphapas emphasized the importance of separating facts from accusations, distinguishing between sovereignty matters, scamming operations, and Myanmar-related issues—three separate topics that should not be mixed to imply hidden Thai intentions. When asked about Cambodia's assertion that Thailand uses scammer suppression as a pretext for invading Cambodia, the JIC director said facts should prevail over political language. Thailand has never declared itself ASEAN's police and respects all member states' sovereignty.

"However, scammers and online crime are not any single nation's internal matter because victims exist worldwide, involving fraud, money laundering, human trafficking, forced labor, and various transnational crimes," he said. Combating these networks is not overreach but a shared responsibility of the international community.

When pressed on Cambodia's claim that Thailand uses scammers as a pretext for territorial disputes, Praphapas said the two issues must be separated decisively. Border disputes must follow international law, agreements, and relevant mechanisms, while scammer suppression is a transnational crime matter. Crime should not shield border issues, nor should border claims protect criminal networks. Thailand is ready to discuss borders factually and through existing mechanisms while protecting citizens from criminal networks.

On whether Thailand has evidence that scamming is a global problem, the JIC director noted that this is not Thailand's view alone. International organizations and countries worldwide recognize that scam centers in Southeast Asia are serious transnational crime and human trafficking problems. Rather than ask "Does Thailand have the right to crack down?" the world community wants to know "How do we cooperate to prevent any ASEAN region from becoming a safe haven for transnational crime?" Thailand stands ready to cooperate with all nations, including Cambodia.

Regarding Cambodia's view that Thailand overreaches, Praphapas said Thailand is not overstepping and does not seek to replace other nations' law enforcement. Thailand seeks "cooperation," not "intervention." When crime occurs in one nation but defrauds citizens across ten others, uses bank accounts elsewhere, crosses telecommunications borders, and involves human trafficking from dozens of countries, it can no longer be called "internal affairs." The solution is cooperation, not accusations.

On August 17, two construction company owners aged 25 and 22 reported to police in Ban Lamung district, Chachoengsao province, that they have been harassed by an illegal lending group attempting to collect a debt they claim they did not incur. The men revealed that their former employee, known as Chai, took out the loan using their phone number and posed as their employer. The loan amount is estimated to be in the tens of thousands of baht.

According to their account, at around 10 p.m. on August 2, they received a call from an unknown number asking if they wanted to borrow money and mentioning someone called "Pong." When they went downstairs to investigate, they claim four men confronted them in a threatening manner. The victims ran back inside, and the gang then kicked over two motorcycles parked outside, damaging both, while shouting insults and threats before leaving. Prior incidents included being followed for debt collection, threats, and spray-painted messages on the office wall reading "You scum, you borrowed money and refuse to pay." Security footage also showed someone adjusting a CCTV camera to point away from the office.

The victims filed a report at Nong Prue Police Station and expressed fear for their safety, requesting that police investigate and pursue charges against those responsible. CCTV footage from July 26 showed two men surveilling the office and adjusting a camera, and footage from August 2 captured a gray four-door pickup truck arriving before the attack occurred around 10:20 p.m., with approximately 3-4 men approaching the building and damaging the motorcycles before fleeing.