Khmer manuscripts online

SEACOM southeast asia communication centre

A very useful online resource for the study and research on manuscripts in Khmer and Pali languages is http://www.khmermanuscripts.org/.

This platform is the outcome of a long-term research, digitisation and preservation project carried out by the EFEO in collaboration with Buddhist temples in Cambodia and many Cambodian researchers and monks. The emphasis was on conservation of the manuscripts, preparation of a catalogue and digitisation. The digitisation and online publication of numerous manuscripts makes it possible to study the various facets of the Khmer manuscripts tradition as well as Buddhist and traditional literature in Cambodia.

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Mandalay Marionettes Theater Online

The ever growing Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL), hosted by the Northern Illinois University, has made available access to ten videos recording various aspects of the Mandalay Marionettes Theater.

In Burma, marionette puppetry has played an important role in the history and development of dramatic art and culture over the last 500 years. Burmese puppetry served as a means of making people aware of current events; as a medium for educating people in literature, history, and religion; as a display of lifestyles and customs; and as mouthpieces for the people in the days of the monarchy.

Burmese puppet theatre show, photograph by Philip A. Klier, 1895 (British Library Photo 88/1(42))

The practice of traditional marionette puppetry in Burma has waned over the decades, and is on the verge of becoming a lost art form. In 1986, Mrs. Ma Ma Naing and Mrs. Naing Yee Mar formed the Mandalay Marionettes Theater as a step in saving this rich legacy. This troupe has been working to preserve Burmese puppetry and original Burmese traditions such as Burmese dancing and music, sculpture, sequin embroidery and painting.

The Mandalay Marionettes Theater troupe has contributed an assortment of performance videos to the SEADL. Included in these is an introduction and overview to the Burmese marionette tradition; a ritual dance that is done to respect the Nats, or the guardian spirits of the area; the Himalayas dance, featuring the horse, monkey and demons; and a dance of an alchemist or the Zaw-Gyi dance. Daw Ma Ma Naing, one of the founders of the Mandalay Marionettes Theater, also gives a brief history about marionettes. Other videos highlight the skills of the puppeteers themselves, while demonstrating the dance of the two royal pages; a humorous dance performed by two villagers named U Shwe Yoe and Daw Moe; a dance between a human being and a puppet; a romantic and sentimental dance called “Myaing Da;”and a performance from the Ramayana epic where Rama chases a golden deer for his princess, Sita.

To go directly to the video collection at SEADL, click HERE.

For further information about the Mandalay Marionettes Theater, please visit http://www.mandalaymarionettes.com/.

Digital “resurrection” of lost Lao Ramayana murals

A groundbreaking project with the aim to digitally replicate the lost Phralak-Phralam (Lao version of the Ramayana) murals at Vat Oub Mong in Vientiane has been under way for several years. The project is being carried out by the Digital Conservation Facility, Laos (DCFL); affiliated since 2003 with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) at Northern Illinois University. DCFL founder Alan Potkin has recently been developing interactive visualization and virtual reality technologies in ecological and cultural conservation for applications in impact assessment, heritage management, museological and site interpretive materials, public participation; and accessible institutional memory for corporations, government agencies, and NGOs.

The historical temple hall at Vat Oub Mong that contained the original murals had been demolished in the year 2000. However, prior to the demolition, photographs were taken of the murals which had been created in 1938. Thanks to this initiative and newly emerging technologies, digital replication of the lost cultural heritage is now possible.
But digital replication is not the only goal of the project – equally important is the replication at Vat Oub Mong (Vientiane) of the demolished Phralak-Phralam murals which was completed in 2011. In addition to this, the original 2,100-page palm leaf manuscript containing the Pralak-Pralam text in Lao tham script has been digitised and is currently being transliterated into modern Lao by the monks at Vat Oub Mong.
Alan Potkin gave talks about this project and its progress at several conferences in the recent years.

An abridged translation of the Phalak-Phralam text together with some photographs of the original murals from the demolished temple can be found on the homepage of the Center for SEA Studies at Northern Illinois University.

Latest news from the project can be found on the Theravada Buddhist Civilizations website.

An English translation of a Phralak-Phralam text found in a manuscript at the Royal Palace in Luang Prabang, together with photographs of the murals at Vat Oub Mong are in Sachchidanand Sahai’s book “Ramayana in Laos. A study in the Gvay Dvorahbi” (published in 1976 by B.R. Publishing corporation, Delhi).

Asian bookbinding traditions

Asian bookbinding traditions which can be found in the Southeast Asian manuscript cultures as well are the subject of a research paper by Colin Chinnery and Li Yi (International Dunhuang Project).

This research paper combines textual descriptions together with diagrams illustrating binding techniques and photographs of a selection of objects. The aim of the paper is to give a comprehensive introduction to the different kinds of Chinese bookbinding contained in the Dunhuang collections. Included are details about butterfly binding, stitched binding, palm-leaf binding (pothi), whirlwind binding, concertina binding, and wrapped-back binding.

Bookbinding methods found in the Dunhuang collections. Diagram by Li Yi and Colin Chinnery (British Library)

The International Dunhuang Project is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

The IDP has partner institutions in Beijing, St Petersburg, Kyoto, Berlin, Dunhuang, Paris and Seoul which provide data for and act as hosts to the multilingual website and database.

Much of IDP’s early work focused on conservation and cataloguing, both of which remain core activities. These have been supplemented in the past few years with digitisation, education and research. IDP started digitising the manuscripts in 1997 with the aim of bringing together the collections in virtual space. Its web site went online in October 1998 and allows free access to the IDP DATABASE with high-quality images of the manuscripts and other material, with cataloguing and contextual information. In this way, Silk Road material is becoming increasingly available to academic and general users alike.

Conservation of panoramic photographs of Hong Kong

Six spectacular photographic panoramas of Hong Kong, taken c. 1900, were  painstakingly conserved by Nicholas Burnett and colleagues at Museum Conservation Services at Duxford, Cambridge, along with one panorama of Macau, one of Canton, and one of Medicine Hat, Alberta, taken in 1913.

The panoramas form part of the impressive photographic collection of the Royal Commonwealth Society Library in Cambridge.

The conservation process was quite complicated and took 21 months. A short report of the project together with photographs taken during the conservation works can be found on the Cambridge University Library Special Collections blog.

Lao Oral History Archive

This project of the Center for Lao Studies in San Francisco is the first of its kind with the aim to document the untold stories of Lao refugees in the US through audio and video media and create an on-line archive of interviews, videos, and historical documents. Currently, there are almost no existing oral history projects and little academic research that focus on the ethnic Lao refugees in the US. By creating a Lao Oral History archive, CLS aims to raise awareness within the Lao-American community and the greater population of the history, culture, and contemporary realities of Lao refugees in the US as well as the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Secret War in Laos in the 1960s and 70s. This project will disseminate the voices of underrepresented population, whose stories of immigration reflect unique moments in both Lao and American history, thereby building bridges between the past and present and between disparate cultures. The project started in 2009 and some first results are now available online through their Youtube page.

Revealing Hidden Collections: Buddhist Literature in UK and SE Asian collections

Pre-modern or traditional Theravada is a little understood or researched subject and there are large gaps in our knowledge of Theravada between C5th-3rd BCE canon/C5th CE commentaries and the 18th/19th centuries. In the modern period there were many changes in Buddhism in response to colonialism, modernisation, state formation and the cold war and history is written from the perspective of modernised Theravada. The history of traditional Theravada remains obscure. Elements of traditional Theravada are preserved in some marginalised communities in Southeast Asia and in the manuscript collections of both monastic and university libraries around the world. Information about these texts, however, if it exists at all, is confined to handwritten lists and remains inaccessible to the wider community of Buddhist scholars. Within this project, the focus will be on one particular Tai group, the Shan, since their materials are the least studied and there remains a living tradition of Shan scholars who have the specialist poetic and subject skills necessary to access these materials.

This project, funded by the Dhammakaya Foundation, will catalogue unexamined collections of Shan texts from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and from temple libraries in Thailand and Burma, as well as identifying traditional meditation manuals from these places and the British Library in London.

Special attention will be given to widening and deepening our understanding of the diversity of two fields of specialist Theravada literature, meditation techniques and manuals, and secondarily grammatical texts. Searches for manuscripts from these genres in collections of Burmese texts, supplementary fieldwork in Cambodia and Laos and the translation of two important texts from Thai and Sinhala will increase our understanding of how to categorise such material and will in turn inform the cataloguing project.

The project will work with the TEI/XML schema developed for the Fihrist catalogue, which will be enhanced to incorporate descriptive terminology relevant for Shan Buddhist materials. A data entry form will be developed suitable for use by subject specialist cataloguers with no knowledge of the XML schema. Existing descriptions from handwritten catalogues created for Cambridge University Library’s Scott collection and for South East Asian temple collections will be re-keyed into TEI/XML using the data entry form. Original catalogue entries for the Bodleian and other libraries in the UK and South East Asia will be created by entering descriptions directly into the data entry form.

Anticipated Outcomes

• International access to hitherto uncatalogued and inaccessible materials through an online catalogue of Shan manuscripts
• An agreed TEI P5 schema and transliteration scheme for Shan Buddhist manuscripts
• Key tools for future researchers through looking at the literatures of Theravada regions, in particular protecting and recording the endangered literatures of traditional, non-modernised Theravada
• Reference materials to assist researchers working in the historical grammatical and, especially, meditation traditions of Theravada regions.