Son Ngoc Thanh - Early Life

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 life, early and/or life:

    ... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.
    Hortense Odlum (1892–?)

    The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
    Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)

    I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)