the Cambodian royalty: his cousin Meak was a consort of King Sisowath Monivong and later worked as a ballet teacher. When Sâr was six years old, he and an older brother were sent to live with Meak in Phnom Penh; informal adoptions by wealthier relatives were then common in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh, he spent 18 months as a novice monk in the city's Vat Botum Vaddei monastery, learning Buddhist teachings and to read and write the Khmer language. In summer 1935, Sâr went to live with his brother Suong and the latter's wife and child. That year, he began an education at a Roman Catholic primary school, the École Miche, with Meak paying the tuition fees. Most of his classmates were the children of French bureaucrats and Catholic Vietnamese. He became literate in French and familiar with Christianity. Sâr was not academically gifted and was held back two years, receiving his Certificat d'Etudes Primaires Complémentaires in 1941 at the age of 16. He continued to visit Meak at the king's palace, and it was there that he had some of his earliest sexual experiences with some of the king's concubines. Later education: 1942–1948 While Sâr was at the school, the King of Cambodia died. In 1941, the French authorities appointed Norodom Sihanouk as his replacement. A new junior middle school, the Collége Pream Sihanouk, was established in Kampong Cham, and Sâr was selected as a boarder at the institution in 1942. This level of education afforded him a privileged position in Cambodian society. He learned to play the violin and took part in school plays. Much of his spare time was spent playing football (soccer) and basketball. Several fellow pupils, among them Hu Nim and Khieu Samphan, later served in his government. During the new year vacation in 1945, Sâr and several friends from his college theatre troupe went on a provincial tour in a bus to raise money for a trip to Angkor Wat. In 1947, he left the school. That year, he passed exams that admitted him into the Lycée Sisowath, meanwhile living with Suong and his new wife. In summer 1948, he sat the brevet entry examinations for the upper classes of the Lycée, but failed. Unlike several of his friends, he could not continue on at the school for a baccalauréat. Instead, he enrolled in 1948 to study carpentry at the Ecole Technique in Russey