Historical figure

Hem Chieu

Buddhist monk and teacher whose arrest by the French in July 1942 set off the first large protest against French rule.

Closed umbrellas in saffron, ochre and rust cloth leaning against a whitewashed wall, beside a wooden bench with a bundle of palm-leaf manuscripts tied with cord, under a frangipani tree in flower, with tiled monastery roofs and a spire beyond
Illustration inspired by monks' umbrellas in the courtyard of a Phnom Penh monastery

Hem Chieu (1898 to 1943), also known as Achar Hem Chieu, was a Buddhist monk whose arrest by the French in 1942 set off a large protest in Phnom Penh.[1][2]

The protest of July 20, 1942, was the first large demonstration against French rule.[1] He died in a colonial prison on Poulo Condore in 1943, and later movements and monks took up his name.[1][3]

Early life

He was born in 1898 in Kandal (កណ្ដាល) Province.[1][3] His home village was Dambauk Mean, in Ponhea Leu district, where Wat Dambauk Mean Leak stands.[1] He became a monk at 20 at Wat Langka and finished the School of Advanced Pali Studies in 1921. He was sent to Phnom Penh to study under the Buddhist patriarch Chuon Nath (ជួន ណាត), and he had worked to spread pagoda schools in the Kampot (កំពត) area.[1]

Teacher and nationalist

He taught at the Higher School of Pali in Phnom Penh, which the French protectorate had founded in 1930.[2][3] He was one of two key monks, with Achar Nuon Duong, whom Son Ngoc Thanh and Pach Chhoeun drew into their circle; the two men had started the Khmer-language newspaper Nagara Vatta in 1936.[2][3] He held that religion and the state should be kept apart and that Cambodians had the right to govern their own country, and he kept strictly to nonviolence.[1]

In 1942 the French brought in the Gregorian calendar in Cambodia and planned to write Khmer in the Latin alphabet.[2]

Arrest

The sources differ on the day of his arrest: July 17, 1942,[1] or July 18, 1942.[2][3] The French arrested him and Nuon Duong on a charge that they had urged Khmer troops in the colonial militia, in sermons against the French, toward a revolt.[2][3] He was defrocked at once and made to wear lay clothes, without the judgment by fellow monks that Buddhist law requires.[1][2][3][4]

Demonstration of July 20, 1942

On July 20, 1942, a march through the capital called for his release. The sources differ on its size: about 500 monks and as many lay people,[1] a crowd of over 1,000 that took in 500 monks,[2] or more than a thousand people, several hundred of them monks.[3] The marchers made for the office of the French Resident Superior near Wat Phnom with a list of demands.[2] The march is known as the "Umbrella War"[1] or the Umbrella Revolt, after the umbrellas the monks carried.[3]

The sources also differ on who organized it. Pach Chhoeun, then editor of Nagara Vatta, led the march;[1][2] one account has Son Ngoc Thanh help set it up but take no part,[1] and others have Son Ngoc Thanh organize it, alone or with Pach Chhoeun.[2][3] By another account, the paper's editors led it.[4] The march rules forbade carrying weapons of any kind.[1] The French seized Pach Chhoeun as he asked to see the senior colonial official.[2][3]

The historian David Chandler judged the march "a watershed in the history of Cambodian resistance to France", and the French historian Henri Locard saw it as Cambodia's step into modernity.[1]

Trial and death

He was never freed.[2] On December 19, 1942, a French military tribunal in Saigon sentenced him to death, as it did Pach Chhoeun.[1][2][3] The sentences were reduced to life in prison,[1] or, under the Vichy government, to life at hard labor.[2][3] He was sent to the prison island of Poulo Condore, off southern Vietnam.[2][3]

The sources differ on his death. One account dates it to December 1943 and gives dysentery or cholera.[1] Others date it to October 1943 and give illness.[2][3] By one account, sanctions he drew for his conduct in prison brought on the illness, and he was 46;[2] another has him barely past forty.[3] His fellow prisoners were freed in 1945.[1]

Legacy

Henri Locard called him a reformist and a modernist in his view of religious institutions and of politics.[1] In 1950 a guerrilla movement close to the Indochinese Communist Party, the United Issarak Front, opened the Achar Hem Chieu Political School in the southwest of Cambodia, where hundreds of cadres trained.[2][3]

In the period of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, party writings held him up as an example for monks, and he was usually called by the title achar.[5] Monks carried his picture on the first Dhammayietra, the 1992 peace walk led by Maha Ghosananda from Poipet (ប៉ោយប៉ែត) to Phnom Penh.[2][3] After the 1998 elections, monks who took part in the protests called on his name again.[2][3]

References 5
  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 The Cambodia Daily, Buddhist Monk Is Enduring Symbol of Cambodian Independence Movement (December 8, 2013)
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 The Phnom Penh Post, The legacy of Achar Hem Chieu (October 2, 1998)
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18 Cambodge Mag, Achar Hem Chieu, the Monk Colonial France Could Not Silence (undated)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 U.S. Library of Congress, The Emergence of Nationalism (undated)
  5. ↑ Buddhist Studies Review, Buddhist Sangha Groupings in Cambodia (2001)


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This page was last edited on 13 November 2026, at 20:26.