There are more attractive women in Cambodia since Prime Minister Hun Sen came to power, King Norodom Sihanouk wrote in a letter on Sunday that was posted on his Web site Tuesday.
“Since the accession of Samdech Hun Sen, our country has produced a large quantity of ravishing ‘flowers’ (the advantages and disadvantages of which we know),” he wrote.
Commenting on a photograph of King Sisowath alongside six women that was published recently in a book about Cambodian royalty, King Sihanouk quipped, “Not one of them is beautiful. If I was my august great-grandfather, I would prefer to live far from my royal palace so I could find the company of more beautiful (Khmer) women.”
The letter casts a revealing, if slightly sarcastic, light on the love lives of King Sihanouk’s predecessors. King Norodom, King Sisowath and King Monivong accepted “young ladies (even ugly ones) that the Bourgeoisie and the People offered them,” King Sihanouk said. “[The Kings] never said ‘NO.’”
King Norodom subsequently accumulated more than 300 “favorites,” King Sisowath 200 plus, and King Monivong more than 60, the King wrote.
In explaining the younger King Monivong’s smaller entourage, King Sihanouk wrote that the French colonial authorities had asked King Monivong “to ‘modernize’ his court a little.”
King Sihanouk rejected the idea that the behavior of Cambodia’s past kings was feudal. They were very democratic “in the sense that they never allowed themselves to force a ‘flower’ to sleep with Them if ‘that’ did not please them,” he wrote.
