The French founded the Buddhist Institute in 1930 in an attempt to isolate Cambodian Buddhists from potentially disruptive influences from Thailand. In exchange, the institute exposed intellectuals in Phnom Penh to some of the political currents affecting monks in the Khmer minority in southern Vietnam. The institute acted as a clearinghouse and repository for Cambodian religious and literary texts and as a meeting place for Buddhist intellectuals (most of them monks or former monks). It also coordinated the higher phases of monastic education. The institute’s journal, Kambuja Surya (“Cambodian Sun”), published poems, novels, proverbs, chronicles, folktales, and religious texts.14

When Nagara Vatta was founded, its editors sought royal patronage for it, but they were rebuffed by Monivong’s eldest son, Prince Sisowath Monireth, who told them brusquely that in his opinion education was a waste of time, because better-educated Khmer would be “difficult to govern.” The editors then turned to Monireth’s brother-in-law Prince Norodom Suramarit, who agreed to act as a patron for the paper. He remained a close friend of Thanh, Var, and Chhoeun for many years, especially after his son, Norodom Sihanouk, became king in 1941.

The Buddhist Institute was only a few hundred yards from the palace, and Meak, Samy, and Suong probably knew the editors of Nagara Vatta by sight, subscribed to the paper, and approved its mildly nationalistic stance. Other readers were concentrated in the Buddhist sangha (“monastic order”) and among graduates of Cambodia’s only high school, the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Students at the lycée in the late 1930s included several future prime ministers of Cambodia and an earnest young woman eight years older than Saloth Sar, Khieu Ponnary, the first Cambodian woman to earn a baccalaureate. She and Saloth Sar were married in 1956.15

Between 1936 and 1942—coincidentally the lifespan of Nagara Vatta—Saloth Sar attended a Catholic primary school near the palace, the Ecole Miche. The fees were paid by Meak. Most of his classmates were the children of French bureaucrats or Catholic Vietnamese. One of them, brought up near the palace, remembered Sar as “very charming, like his [adopted] mother.” No anecdotes about him have survived from this period when he became literate in French, grew familiar with Christian doctrine, and received the rudiments of a classical education. During his final years at the school, however, several events occurred that altered the course of Cambodian history and affected Saloth Sar’s career.

The first of these was the Franco-Thai war of 1940-1941, which followed the fall of France to the German army and led to the annexation by the Thai of the northwestern Cambodian provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap. The loss of so much Cambodian territory infuriated King Monivong, who retired to his model farm in Kompong Chhnang. He soon became seriously ill and refused to speak French for the remaining months of his life. Saloth Sar’s younger sister, Saroeun, was at the king’s bedside when he died at the hill resort of Bokor in April 1941, just as the Japanese, eager to expand southward into Southeast Asia were increasing their military pressure on the French in Indochina.