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