Ly Chheng Biography Apr 2026

"I learned to watch," he once told a researcher. "If you watched the guards, you could see the violence coming. If you watched the rice, you knew if you would eat. If you watched the sky, you knew when the bombing would stop. Watching became my profession."

That changed in 1995 when Yale University opened the . For the first time, there was a systematic effort to locate, preserve, and digitize the paper trail the Khmer Rouge had left behind. The regime was famously bureaucratic: they kept records of arrests, confessions (often tortured), and executions. ly chheng biography

He paused. Outside, Phnom Penh’s traffic roared—a city of skyscrapers, coffee shops, and teenagers on smartphones who never knew the Year Zero. "I learned to watch," he once told a researcher

"I have seen the signature of the man who killed my cousin," he told a Phnom Penh Post reporter in 2012. "I have read the confession of the woman who lived next door to me in Battambang. She confessed to being a Vietnamese spy. She was a rice farmer. She was 22. She had a baby." If you watched the sky, you knew when the bombing would stop

For nearly four decades, has sat at the intersection of memory and mathematics. As the chief document examiner and senior investigator for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) , his life’s work has been to count the uncountable: the 1.7 million to 2.2 million Cambodians who perished during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979).

He turned back to his desk. On the screen was a scanned confession dated 1977. The prisoner had signed it with a shaky hand. Chheng adjusted the contrast, zoomed in on the signature, and added the name to a database.

When he identified the handwriting of his own primary school teacher on a Tuol Sleng execution order, he closed the file and went for a walk. He did not return to the document for three weeks.