Early Life
Thanh was born in Travinh, Vietnam, to a Khmer Krom father and a Chinese-Vietnamese mother. He was educated in Saigon, Montpellier and Paris, studying law for a year before returning to Indo-China. He found work as a magistrate in Pursat and as a public prosecutor in Phnom Penh before becoming Deputy Director of the Buddhist Institute. Along with another prominent early Khmer nationalist, Pach Chhoeun, he established the first Khmer language newspaper, Nagaravatta, in 1936. The political outlook of Nagaravatta, which urged Khmers to break the commercial monopoly of foreign traders by starting their own businesses, was to make Thanh and his colleagues receptive to Japanese fascism, or as he termed it "National Socialism". Thanh's ideology was essentially republican, right-wing, and modernising in outlook, which was to make him a longstanding opponent of the King Norodom Sihanouk. Despite his nationalism, he was also a strong advocate of pan-Asian cooperation, and advocated the teaching of the Vietnamese language in Cambodian schools, as it was a potential conduit for modernising ideas.
Read more about this topic: Son Ngoc Thanh
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“[In early adolescence] she becomes acutely aware of herself as a being perceived by others, judged by others, though she herself is the harshest judge, quick to list her physical flaws, quick to undervalue and under-rate herself not only in terms of physical appearance but across a wide range of talents, capacities and even social status, whereas boys of the same age will cite their abilities, their talents and their social status pretty accurately.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)