Southeast Asia

76 records, the largest region in the register. Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines between them hold more private ground in this collection than the Mediterranean and the Caribbean together, and they hold it under the widest range of arrangements anywhere.

The regional fact that shapes every entry is that the land is rarely owned outright by the operator. Thai law bars foreign freehold, so what Trisara's thirty residences hold is a long lease through a company. The Datai's landlord is the Malaysian state's investment arm. Bawah's six islands sit inside a marine conservation area of a thousand hectares that no one owns in the ordinary sense. A reader who takes ownership here to mean a deed will misread most of the region.

Scale runs from NIHI's five hundred and sixty-seven acres on Sumba, under a published cap allowing only sixty-five to be built on, down to Rayavadee's twenty-six acres of coconut grove wedged between karst cliffs with no road to it. Between them sit estates that hold a corner of an inhabited island — Soneva Kiri, Yao Noi, Con Dao — and the register is careful to say corner rather than island.

What the region does not offer is a private shore. Every Thai beach is public by law and Indonesian and Vietnamese coasts are used by the villages along them. Several properties here describe their beaches as private; the register carries the description and the law together, and where the ground has been inspected it says which is true.