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
Kyoto,

Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie, vol. 31 (2022)
New Perspectives for Chinese History?
Local Society and Archives


Read more
EFEO Java-Bali Palmleaf Manuscripts Digitisation Project
London, United_Kingdom, 10 July 2023
Read the article "EFEO Java-Bali Palmleaf Manuscripts Digitisation Project" about the collaboration between the EFEO and the British Library on the digitisation of the complete collection of 70 palm-leaf manuscripts from Java and Bali, written in Old Javanese, Javanese and Balinese.
Study day
Paris, France, 30 June 2023

The CRCAO and the EFEO organize a study day on Échanges artistiques entre l'Asie de l'Est et l'Occident, d'hier et d'aujourd'hui (fin du XIXe s.- début du XXIe s.) [Artistic exchanges between East Asia and the West, past and present (late 19th c. - early 21st c.)] with the support of the IRHiS-Université de Lille and Sciencescope Japon.

From 9:45 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., in the Grand Salon of the Maison de l'Asie.

Programme

Annual EFEO-Faculty of Archaeology Seminar
Bangkok, Thailand, 29 June 2023

On June 29, as part of the Annual EFEO-Faculty of Archaeology Seminar on "Inscriptions, manuscrits et archéologie en Asie du Sud-Est [Inscriptions, manuscripts, and archaeology in Southeast Asia]," at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, the following spoke for the EFEO:

Gregory Kourilsky gives a talk entitled "Relative Dating of a Code of Law from Luang Prabang (Laos)"

Christophe Pottier gives a talk entitled "Archaeology beyond monumentality: some recent works in Cambodia"

Dominique Soutif gives a talk entitled "Continuing the K. Number inventory"

Lecture-debate
Tokyo, Japan, 27 June 2023

From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., the EFEO Centres in Tokyo and in Kyoto are co-organising with the French Institute for Research on Japan (UMIFRE 19 MEAE-CNRS), at the Maison franco-japonaise in Tokyo, a lecture-debate on the topic "Vingt-deux ans à la tête du musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac" [Twenty-two years at the head of the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac], with Stéphane Martin (former president of the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac) and Ozawa Kei (University of Tokyo), moderated by François Lachaud (EFEO).

Participation on registration