While he has been described as the shogun of the French protectorate[1] and a "comprador feudalist",[2] others have praised his long service to the Kingdom of Cambodia, as "the epitome of the colonial subject who quickly saw how to turn the new regime to an advantage":[3] Thiounn was born in the Kampong Tralach district of Kampong Chhnang province on April 8, 1864, in a Vietnamese family of fishermen who had emigrated from Ha Tien and settled a few miles north of Longvek.

[4] His father was known as oknha piphéac norit Hui, a Cambodian merchant and "honorary mandarin"[5] of the personal guard of Her Majesty the Queen Mother.

In 1884, Thiounn married a certain Malis, daughter of mī Soc and Paul Le Faucheur, “runner of arroyos” with a sulphurous reputation with the Indochinese authorities.

[9] While he was harshly criticized by the more conservative dignitaries of the Royal Palace who supported rebel prince Si Votha, Veang Thiounn encouraged collaboration with the French protectorate for the modernization of Cambodia.

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".

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.

[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".

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

His descendants, though highly educated and qualified, were excluded from the Palace after having been its masters; later, they were among the Cambodian intellectuals of French culture whose aspirations placed them in a situation of competition with the Crown.