San Kim Sean

Cambodian martial arts grandmaster who led the postwar revival of bokator and founded its national federation.

Creator details
Khmer name	សាន គឹម​ស៊ាន​
Also known as	San Kimsean; Grandmaster San Kim Sean
Roles	Master practitioner; Tradition bearer; Educator
Based in	Cambodia
Recognition	Holds the Golden Krama grade as a bokator grandmaster and is widely described as the father of modern bokator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Kim_Sean)
Subjects	Work & Livelihoods; History & Remembrance; Community & Civic Life

Grandmaster San Kim Sean (សាន គឹម​ស៊ាន​, San Kimsean) was a Cambodian martial arts master credited with reviving bokator, the Khmer battlefield martial art. He founded the Cambodia Bokator Federation and the Cambodia Bokator Academy, where he trained students and instructors. He held the Golden Krama rank of grandmaster, and is often called the father of modern bokator. He died of a heart attack on June 3, 2025.

Training

San Kim Sean began learning bokator at 13 under Master Khim Leak at Wat Mohamandrey. He learned hand fighting, the long staff and the dao swords from different teachers. He took up stick fighting and free boxing in 1959 and judo and karate in 1960, and he studied hapkido under the Korean master Chhay Yong Ho. He introduced hapkido to Cambodia in 1969, was one of three Khmers to earn a hapkido black belt, reaching third dan, and became a hapkido instructor in 1975.

Khmer Rouge years and exile

Bokator itself was suppressed under the Khmer Rouge. San Kim Sean survived the regime. After the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 he was sent to Pursat province, where he survived by eating grass alongside the cows. He said the Khmer Rouge targeted people who knew martial arts because they could defend themselves, and that he was the only hapkido instructor in his group to survive.

After the regime fell he taught hapkido in secret, because martial arts were banned under the Vietnamese-backed government, and Vietnamese accusations that he taught martial arts led him to flee. He walked toward Thailand, crossing minefields and evading Khmer Rouge remnants. In 1980, sponsored by the YMCA, he traveled from a Thai refugee camp to Houston, Texas, where he taught hapkido to Khmer children at a local YMCA. He later moved to Long Beach, California, and kept teaching hapkido. He could not teach bokator in the United States because he lacked the required license and certificate. He lived in the United States for almost 20 years.

Reviving bokator

He returned to Cambodia in 1992 with the aim of rebuilding bokator; one account gives the year as 1993. Another account has him coming back in the early 1990s to help rebuild the Khmer Hapkido Association, moved back to Phnom Penh in 1995 to lead it, and in 2001 left the hapkido school to teach bokator, while remaining an officer of the association. He settled in Phnom Penh in 2001 and, with permission from King Norodom Sihanouk, began teaching bokator to local young people.

He traveled through the countryside to find bokator masters who had survived the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese regimes. He found about 20 elders who knew something of the art and asked each of them to teach at least five people in their village. After persuading the surviving masters and gaining government approval, he reintroduced bokator to the Cambodian people. In April 2004 he helped hold the first bokator conference in Phnom Penh, and he reported bokator schools in eight provinces. He taught first in Phnom Penh and later in Siem Reap, where his training camp introduced many visitors to the art. By April 2019 he counted about 200 bokator teachers.

In place of belts, he created a ranking system of krama, the traditional Cambodian scarf, in colors that mark each level of training. The golden krama, above the black, is the highest honor. The Bokator Association gave him the honorary title of grandmaster, and he was known as Krama Meas (golden krama). He wrote the bokator rulebook and wrote and illustrated a book on some of the art's thousands of movements, drawing on his study of the combat scenes carved at Angkor Wat.

A provincial association to preserve and develop bokator spread to seven provinces and cities with support from the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. It brought together some 6,000 to 7,000 schoolchildren, and a primary school in Kampong Chhnang taught bokator. He trained thousands of students across Cambodia and worked to bring bokator into the national school curriculum.

Bokator and its history

San Kim Sean held that bokator is older than the Angkor period, and he pointed to combat scenes at Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. He saw divine combat in the battles of Rama, Hanuman and other beings in the Angkor Wat galleries, and human combat on the walls of Angkor Thom, built under Jayavarman VII. In his teaching, the art's fighting movements came from animals such as lions, snakes and wild boars, and some from plants and trees. He explained that bokator uses the whole body as a weapon, and that his students would not fight in a boxing ring because their training included lethal techniques. He regarded bokator as the ancestor of Khmer free boxing, a name he said the French gave the sport during colonial rule.

International recognition of bokator

San Kim Sean presented bokator to the World Martial Arts Union in Chungju, South Korea, in 2009, and seminars followed in Japan, the United States and France. He spent more than ten years preparing documentation for UNESCO. UNESCO inscribed bokator as intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2022, and bokator was part of the Southeast Asian Games in 2023.

Film

The documentary Surviving Bokator, about his life, premiered at the Austin Film Festival in 2019.

Works

• Bokator (Tradition)

See also

• Bokator
• All creators

References