Phoa Tjoen Hoay was born in
Bogor,
Buitenzorg Residency, Dutch East Indies (today Bogor,
Indonesia) in 1890. He came from an elite
Peranakan Chinese family in Buitenzorg; his father was a
Kapitan Cina (Dutch-appointed Chinese community representative) and his older brother
Phoa Tjoen Hoat also became a journalist. He also translated from European languages; in 1907 he published a Malay translation of
Alexandre Dumas fils's
La Dame aux Camélias in serialized form in . He seems to have become a journalist around 1909, at the start of a huge boom in new Malay-language newspapers and a growth of readership due to the expansion of literacy among the non-European population. He became editor of the short-lived Malay edition of a Chinese magazine in
Batavia called . By 1911, he had relocated to
Semarang in Central Java and became editor of the daily newspaper
Warna Warta. That same year, he was summoned before the public prosecutor in Batavia for an article he had printed in the year before. In the piece, he had stated that young Chinese in the Indies should go to school to learn Chinese, and then English, a world language, rather than learn Dutch, a language only spoken in a small corner of the world. He also thought that the push to build Dutch-language schools for Chinese children (
Hollandsch Chineesche School) was part of an intentional campaign to turn the Chinese community away from
Chinese nationalism. He was charged with sedition and subversion of authority, and causing hatred between Dutch and Chinese, he was given an extremely harsh punishment of six months of forced labour. Public opinion was shocked by this heavy sentence, and petitions were sent to the
Governor-general of the Dutch East Indies; but the sentence was upheld, although he ended up serving part of his sentence in prison rather than at hard labour. In 1912, while still serving his sentence, he was caught by guards with some newspapers in his possession. He was sentenced to 8 days of solitary confinement and three months without any visitors. After his release in 1912 he became the editor of a weekly publication in Batavia called . In 1916, he became editor at
Perniagaan, which his brother had edited previously. He continued to publish translations and work as a journalist in the 1920s; in 1926 he was director of the Asia Press Bureau in Batavia. In early 1929, he finally retired from his longstanding editor position at in Padang. After the 1920s, it is unclear what he did. He died on 16 October 1966 in Bogor, Indonesia. ==Selected works==