Southeast Asian Core Collections
The souheast asian collections are the heart of the Library of the French school of asian studies. It covers a wide range of geographical areas, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia and to a lesser extent East Timor and the Philippines.
The core of the collections was built by the Indochinese studies lead by the founding fathers of our school, Louis Finot, Georges Coedès, and Henri Parmentier. The Southeast Asian collections then kept on increasing via donations, exchanges, and purchases focusing on Efeo's domains of excellency, archeology, architecture and art history, epigraphy and philology, languages and classical literature, history and religious studies.
The collections grow through purchases of documents in western languages in Paris headquarters, as well as in vernacular in Southeast Asia via the research centres in Chiang Mai, Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta among others.
The Southeast Asian collections have close to 33 000 monographies catalogued in SUDOC, half of which in vernacular, and about 300 periodicals.
In terms of statistics, Thailand has the most documents with 15 000 references in the catalogue, Indonesia is second with 6 000 titles, Vietnam has 3 000 titles and finally Cambodia with nearly 2 000.
Moreover our library has a precious collection of manuscripts and rubbings collected during our researchers field studies abroad, from the Indochinese period to present day.
These collections comprise several hundreds khmer and cham manuscripts, over one hundred siamese and pali manuscripts and a dozen indonesian and burmese manuscripts.
Finally, the collection of rubbings concerns Cambodia (over one thousand), Campa and Indonesia (several hundreds) as well as the State of Rhakine and Myanmar (several dozens).
Contact: Magali Morel, head of the Southeast Asian core collections
Jointly organised by IFP, the Alliance française de Pondichéry and the EFEO Centre in Pondicherry, this exhibition, conceived and realised by Jean Deloche, will be held as part of the Pondicherry Heritage Festival 2021.
This exhibition is an introduction to the history of the old French establishments in India and an inventory of their vanished monuments.
The EFEO library is open by appointment from Monday to Friday from 10am to 4pm. It offers a document lending and return service every Wednesday.
To make an appointment for THE READING SPACE: CLICK HERE
To make an appointment for the LOAN-RETURN SERVICE: CLICK HERE
Please check the EFEO's Facebook page and Twitter account regularly for any updates to the terms and conditions of the public reception modalities.
Discover "Les paysans de la forêt à travers le regard d'un ethnographe: le fonds photographique de Jean Boulbet au Sud Vietnam, 1947-1963" presented by Catherine Scheer and Isabelle Poujol, 1st video of the series "Asian Treasures of the EFEO" created to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the EFEO!
From 10.30am to 12pm. The conference will take place online upon prior registration.
Once registered you will receive the elements to log in (seminar link and password). READ MORE