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:
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)