Thiounn

After the insurrection of 1884-1886 and later his failed diplomatic trip to France in 1886, Prince Norodom Yukanthor went after those he presumed where responsible for making Cambodia a "slave inside the whims of (French) administrators". Yukanthor demanded the removal of the Prime Minister Um "who ran away before the enemy" in 1885, and of Thiounn, secretary of the Council of Ministers, the latter two which Yukanthor accused of being the "two main embezzlers of the country".[10][11]

In the scandal around Prince Yukanthor, Thiounn did not try to defend himself and sided with the French colonial authorities. Thiounn was accused by Yukanthor to be a half-breed treated as a puppet by the French since his recruitment as secretary-interpreter, placed by them in the council of ministers and accused of enriching himself there thanks to the spices he demands in return for his services. Thiounn is thus accused to have illegally amassed a real estate fortune.[12] The decision of a man like Thiounn to position himself alongside the French is easily explained. He was not a man rooted in the royal administration. After serving the French for a long time, he probably had a good idea of the extent of their power.[13]

The young Thiounn, in full military uniform, as Minister of the Palace in 1910.

From 1892, he became, as Deputy Secretary of the Council of Ministers, one of the main mediators between the Cambodia monarchy and the Résident supérieur. From first secretary in 1897, he became general secretary and ex officio member of the council of ministers in 1899.[6]

In 1902, Thiounn was placed with King Norodom I by Resident Superior Boulloche and appointed Minister of the Palace, Finances and Fine Arts. He kept that position until the end of the reign of King Sisowath in 1927 and even under King Monivong until 1941. In 1906, he accompanied King Sisowath to France in what was the first international tour of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. The French public was impressed by their performance and French journal L'Illustration praised Thiounn for his bright intellect and love of France. His son Thiounn Hol also joined the royal journey, and received as sponsorship to study at the Ecole coloniale.[14] Thiounn wrote the account of his trip, in which he punctiliously reports every stage of the long sea-voyage of the King.[15]

Around 1915, Thiounn Yang, daughter of Thiounn, was married Poc Duch's son, Poc Hell, sealing strong matrimonial alliances with others dignitaries.

In 1917, Thiounn was involved in major heritage projects such as the School of Arts, which eventually become the Royal University of Fine Arts, and the Albert Sarraut Museum, which become the National Museum of Cambodia. At that time, Thiounn also began working on what would we his major literary legacy, a revised and expanded edition of the Royal Chronicles of Cambodia. Thiounn worked a major bilingual illustrated history of the Reamker based on his previous work in the Silver Pagoda, but his work was never properly published.

Through his participation in such heritage publications, particularly in the review Kambuja Suriya in collaboration with Suzanne Karpelès, Thiounn appears as one of the first indigenous Khmer intellectuals or neak-cheh-doeung,representatives of local religious and cultural knowledge in tune with his time through the transmission of Khmer heritage in modern forms such as printed edition in French.[6]

In 1928, following the coronation of Monivong, Thiounn was made president of the Permanent Committee of the Council of Ministers. By then, he had accumulated more wealth and power than anybody else in the Kingdom of Cambodia:

[Thiounn] is now the richest and most powerful man in the kingdom [...]. He is the real master; the other ministers, the crown prince, even [Sisowath] himself tremble before him, mut and resigned.

— [Harry A. Franck, East of Siam, 1926[16]

After the demise of Son Diep in 1935, Thiounn promoted his son Thiounn Hol as secretary of the Council of Ministers. Also in the 1930s, Thiounn arranged the wedding of granddaughter Poc Vane with the candidate for the throne Sisowath Monireth (1909-1975), reproducing the marriage practices associating the families of dignitaries with the royal family, aggravating both King Monivong and the French authorities, who would later prefer another candidate to the throne, Norodom Sihanouk.[6]

Thus, Thiounn was Prime Minister until the very beginning of his reign King Norodom Sihanouk, after having him under his tutelage for some years. Sihanouk said of Thiounn that by the end of his career, Thiounn was a "veritable  little king" and "as powerful as the French Residents-Superieurs of the period".[17] When the Second World War worsened the situation in Cambodia with the presence of the Japanese, Thiounn was deposed, at the request of the French admiral Jean Decoux under the orders of the Vichy government, and replaced by Ung Hy, who was younger and more obedient to the French authorities.[18] In fact, this decision may have been encouraged by the young Sihanouk as well, as in 1967, the latter accused Thiounn of "dipping his finger in the palace treasury" so that he might commit the greater sin of raising his children "as princes".[19]

Veang Thiounn died in September 1946.

Thiounn extensively studied the murals depicting the Reamker in the Silver Pagoda, hoping to give a more concise and accessible narrative to both Khmer and French audiences.

In 1903, Oknha Veang Thiounn published a description of the wall paintings in the Royal Palace depicting the Reamker. Not only did he explain the scenes depicted in the paintings in the cloister of the Silver Pagoda. He also included in his introduction the prolegomena of the Râmayana in various Indian myths.[21] Though he did substantial study of the original myths,[22] he significantly altered in order to make the visit of the Royal Palace easier for visitors.[23]

These commentaries were instrumental in transmitting this traditional epic, before the later translation made by Saveros Pou;[24] his identification of scenes was picked up in various Buddhist monasteries as was the case in the Wat Bo monastery in Siem Reap.[25]

While Veang Thiounn had originally resisted sending the few remaining Royal dancers to France, he finally accepted under the insistence of Col de Monteiro, Minister of the Navy, who offered to arrange to travels by sea for all.[26]

The detail report of his travel to France in 1903 is a rare document which relates in detail the first ever international tour of the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. It compares to the report of King Chulalongkorn, Loin de chez moi (Far from home) which tells the story of latter's first trip to the West in 1907. While the Khmer tour was immensely popular in France as could be seen from the impact it had on sculptor Auguste Rodin or on dramaturgist Jean Cocteau who wrote Sisowath en balade in 1906, Thiounn's account is the only one remaining from the Cambodian perspective.[27] After this trip, struck by its international appeal, Veang Thiounn became an "ardent devotee of the Cambodian dance" and contributed to his renewal back home.[28] However, according to Olivier de Bernon, this type of performance, such as the "empty choreography" prepared by Thiounn on Albert Sarrault's request for the colonial exhibitions,[29] a type of performance aimed at strangers cleared the way, as time went on, for a gradual ‘modernization’ and cheapening of a sacred artistic genre.[30]

Thiounn also established a historical discourse which associated court dance with the reign of King Jayavarman II, identified by French scholars as the founder of the Angkor era, but associated by Thiounn with the legendary figure of King Ketumala known from The Poem of Angkor Wat and Cambodian Royal Chronicles prior to the fifteenth century.[31]

Okna Veang Thiounn rewrote the Royal Chronicles of Cambodia.[32] He was able to creatively combine established traditional Khmer narratives with the developing critical history emerging from Khmer archeology, promoted by the French School of the Far East.[33] The Royal Chronicle, known as the Veang Thiounn Chronicle, named after the minister who presided over its writing, was probably completed in 1934, and preserved in eight notebooks, notably at the Buddhist Institute of Phnom Penh.[34]

When Thiounn made the effort to formulate his own narrative on the origins and other elements of Cambodian dance, he selectively ignored the details of what French scholarship had established about the rulers of Angkor, and adopted the narrative of the Khmer Chronicles.

— Theara Thun[35]

Compared to previous Chronicles, Veang Thiounn adds much information, of which the source, hearsay or unknown documents, remains unclear. For instance, while Thai and Cambodian sources state the Vietnamese drowned in the Mekong river after her sisters had been taken to Saigon. Khin Sok, citing the Veang Thiounn version of the chronicles, states that Khmer Princess Baen was taken to Long ho and tortured to death by the Vietnamese general, after which her body was placed in a sack and thrown in the river, adding details of cruelty incriminating for the Vietnamese neighbours.[36]

Eng Soth continued in that same tradition and add on even more unknown stories to the Cambodian Royal Chronicles in the second half of the 20th century, while Khin Sok appealed for a more historical criticism.