Mun Sui: The King's Pirate
By Jason for Discover Kampot
In 1859, before the journey that would make him famous for his account of Angkor Wat, the French naturalist Henri Mouhot stood at the edge of the Kampot river and watched King Ang Duong and his royal flotilla come upriver toward him. The king was returning after reviewing the ships anchored off the port and inspecting a trading junk he was having built.
Behind the king came boats carrying royal officials and local leaders. But one boat stood apart. It was manned by Chinese sailors, and at its bow stood a large, powerful man, thick-necked and heavyset, wearing his hair in the Vietnamese style and a long white beard. He was “holding in his hand a halberd surmounted by a crescent.”
“This man,” Mouhot wrote, “was the famous Mun Suy, chief of the pirates, and a friend of the king.”
Before Mun Sui became the king’s pirate, he had come to Kampot with a plan to burn it. By the end of his life, the same town would remember him as an elder who settled disputes and tended wounds without asking payment.
Mun Sui had first arrived at Kampot around 1858, with roughly a hundred men described as “adventurers and rovers of the sea.” Originally from Amoy, in Fujian, he had fled the city after what one account calls “some iniquities not very well known.” People in Kampot said he was descended from the old Chinese imperial family.
At the time, Kampot was Cambodia’s only remaining opening to the sea. Less than twenty years earlier, it had been under direct Vietnamese control, until Kampot’s governor, Oknha-Mau, gathered about three thousand Cambodians and drove the Vietnamese back toward Ha Tien.
The town Mouhot saw was spread between several riverside settlements. Around what is now Kampot’s old town stood Kompong Bay, the Cambodian village where the governor lived and where an old Vietnamese fort still marked the recent occupation. A mile and a half downriver was Prey Srok, the main port and Chinese market settlement, with no more than three hundred houses. Along the opposite bank stretched Traeuy Koh, now Fish Island, with Malay and Vietnamese settlements that formed part of the wider Kampot agglomeration. Together, these communities held roughly five hundred houses and perhaps three thousand people.
At Prey Srok, Mouhot found the market running down to the riverfront: stalls selling “glass, china, hatchets, knives, Chinese parasols, and other articles of merchandise,” while dealers and restaurateurs “dispute the street with pigs, hungry dogs, and children of all ages… dabbling in the mud.” Others, he wrote, could be seen “dragging themselves painfully along to the opium-merchant’s, the barber’s, or some gambling-house.” Six or seven ships sat in the bay at any given time.
Kampot was valuable, exposed, and thinly protected. That was the opening Mun Sui moved into. For a time, he kept the whole place “in terror,” Mouhot wrote, “extorting by menaces all he could from the market people.” He was not the first to try this. In 1856, six pirate junks threw the town into such panic that Father Arsène Hestrest, the local missionary, took refuge aboard a Hamburg trading vessel anchored offshore. Those pirates had come and gone. Mun Sui stayed.
His ambitions eventually outgrew intimidation. He planned to burn the town, kill the inhabitants, and leave with whatever could be carried. The Cambodians found out and armed the town against him. Mun Sui reconsidered. He put his men on the junk and sailed south.
He went to Ha Tien. “The market was sacked in a minute,” Mouhot wrote, but the inhabitants, “recovering from their surprise,” drove the pirates back to their junk; several of Mun Sui’s men were killed.
When Mun Sui returned to Kampot, he changed tack. He presented gifts to Kampot’s governor, Oknha Tong, a Chinese-Cambodian official who controlled a sugar estate at Phnom Sa. He also paid tribute to King Ang Duong himself.
In a weak kingdom, a pirate with a hundred armed men was a problem. Ang Duong made him a solution. The king appointed Mun Sui commander of the coast-guard. As Mouhot heard it, the king was either intimidated by the pirate, or keeping him close as protection against the Vietnamese.
Siam sent a naval expedition to seize him. Two of his men were taken and executed. Mun Sui himself was nowhere to be found, rumoured to have been hidden inside the royal palace. The Siamese ships eventually left.
While Mouhot was making his way inland, on the journey that would lead him to Angkor Wat, Ang Duong made his final return to Oudong. The king died the following year. The junk he had commissioned survived him by only a few years, breaking up in a storm on the coast between Kep and the Kabal-Roméas river mouth.
Sometime later, Mun Sui’s luck ran out in a quarrel with a rival pirate chief known as A-Chhép, “Broken Jaw.” A-Chhép attacked and defeated him. Mun Sui’s junk was badly damaged in the attack, and on the return voyage it could not cross the sandbar at the mouth of the Kampot River. It sank there. His fortune went down with it, where it probably still lies. Mun Sui survived, but everything he had built was gone. Without his junk, his men, or his fortune, he settled in Kampot for good, no longer the feared pirate he had once been.
The last portrait we have of Mun Sui comes through Auguste Pavie, who arrived in Kampot around 1879. Sixteen years earlier, Cambodia had become a French protectorate, and Pavie was a telegraph operator for the colonial administration, posted to a town already well into its decline.
With France controlling both Cambodia and southern Vietnam by then, Kampot had lost its importance. Goods could flow freely from Phnom Penh down the Mekong to Saigon. The safer, better-connected eastern sea route pulled merchants away; the junks still came to Kampot, but fewer of them. The town’s population, which had peaked at around five thousand in the early 1870s, was falling. By the early 1890s it would reach barely fifteen hundred, a few hundred Chinese merchants and planters, Vietnamese fishermen trading turtle shell and sea cucumber, and Khmers and Muslim traders scattered through the surrounding countryside.
Ruined, he had settled at Kampot for good. Despite his reputation, he was looked up to in the Chinese community: “All the Chinese loved him.” When disputes rose among them, Mun Sui helped settle them.
Years of raids and close-quarters fights had also taught him how to care for wounds. Pavie called him “the only surgeon in the country.” People came from several leagues around to find him, and he did not charge for his care. He died around the same time Pavie arrived.
Mun Sui died as that older Kampot was passing out of reach. When he first came, the town had only recently thrown off Vietnamese rule and become Ang Duong’s narrow opening to the sea, a river settlement of junks, market people, opium dens, missionaries, pirates, and armed governors between the Gulf and the jungle. By the time he died, it was already inside the French protectorate. The Kampot that followed would be drawn around the Residence, with roads, markets, water pipes, a fish market, and the street plan whose outline still survives. Mun Sui died just before that new town began to take shape. He belonged to the one just before it, when authority was personal, the coast was dangerous, and a man could arrive as a pirate, serve a king, lose a fortune on the river bar, and die as the only surgeon anyone could call.
Sources:
Henri Mouhot, Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China, vol. I (1864)
Adhémard Leclère, Histoire de Kampot et de la rébellion de cette province en 1885–1886 (1907)
Auguste Pavie, Excursion dans le Cambodge et le royaume de Siam (1884)
Auguste Pavie, Mission Pavie: Géographie et voyages, vol. I (1900)
Kitagawa Takako, “Kampot of the Belle Époque: From the Outlet of Cambodia to a Colonial Resort” (2005)
Further reading
The Massacre of Rạch Giá
On the morning of June 17th, 1868, a Chinese cattle merchant was travelling from Châu Đốc along a canal to Rạch Giá, a small port on the Gulf of Siam just south of the Cambodian border. The port was originally founded by Chinese settlers and had been occupied by the French just the year before.
Kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge: The 1994 Kampot Train Attack
In July 1994, three backpackers took a train from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville. It was a journey that would lead them into the heart of a Khmer Rouge stronghold in Kampot Province.