Solang & Beling Uk

Solang (b. Tuk Meas, Cambodia) and Beling (b. Hunan, China) Uk are the authors of the first translation of Zhou Daguan’s account on Angkor in the 13^th century sourced from Chinese and Khmer versions of this essential testimony about the Angkorian power at its peak, before the Siamese and Cham invasions.

Resettling in the USA in the 1960s, Uk Solang joined the CIBA-Geigy Agricultural Aviation Research Unit as a research scientist in 1972. A consulting researcher on cotton pest control in the Sudan Gezira for 13 years, he lectured at the FAO International Training Courses on Desert Locus Control in Nairobi, Kenya (1975) and in Karachi, Pakistan (1976). In 1985, he became a senior research biologist in Basel, Switzerland, for CIBA-Geigy International Chemicals, which became Novartis Ltd in 1996 through the merger between Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz. During this scientific career, he had authored and co-authored 50 scientific papers that had been published in 12 scientific journals and 17 books and monographs.

After his retirement in 1998, according to his Amazon profile, ​“I took up my childhood interest in the ancient history of Cambodia which resulted in a published book together with my wife [Beling]- a native Chinese biologist with a degree from the National Taiwan University and a further degree from North Carolina State University: Zhou Daguan — A Record of Cambodia’s Land & Customs [2010, Bright Pen, ISBN 9780755213061], with a 2^nd edition entitled Customs of Cambodia — Zhou Daguan.”

Uk Solang also translated the collection of Cambodian legends gathered in Cambodia by Guillaume-Henri Monod in 1898: Women’s Wiles (DatASIA, 2013).

He visited several Khmer temples in Cambodia in 2019 as a member of ZERO Project Advisory Board, noting that only the inscription K‑127, found in Sambaur area, bore ​“the numerals and the date 604 Çaka year.”