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: Bernadeta Sardjono, head of the Southeast Asian core collections

EFEO News
New Publication
Paris, France,

Sultans-bâtisseurs et innovations architecturales à Java au début de la période coloniale (XVIe - début XIXe siècle)

Hélène Njoto

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Study days
Paris, France, 17 October 2024
Thursday 17 and Friday 18 October, together with Stéphane Gros (CESAH), Pascale-Marie Milan is organising two study days entitled Family Resemblances: Kinship Practices along the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.

They will be held at the Maison de l'Asie and the Condorcet campus. They will bring together specialists in kinship issues in different communities along the Sino-Tibetan borderlands.

EFEO Field Scholarships - 1st Semester 2025
Paris, France, 13 October 2024

Call for applications for the EFEO Field Scholarships - 1st Semester 2025:

The deadline for submitting an application to an EFEO Field Scholarships for Master and PhD students enabling a field study in Asia at one of the EFEO centers is set to the 13th of Ocotber 2025.
Call for applications
Paris, France, 30 September 2024
As part of its support for international mobility, the InSHS and the EFEO are offering researchers, teacher-researchers and research engineers from research units supervised or co-supervised by the CNRS, assistance in carrying out research activities in 2025.

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Photographic exhibition
Paris, France, 26 September 2024
The exhibition Le corps du texte, tatouages rituels du Cambodge et de Thaïlande is on show at the Maison des étudiants de l'Asie du Sud-Est (House of South-East Asian Students) at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris until the end of September 2024.

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