[Fellowship] Manuscript Textiles in the Southeast Asian Collections

Chevening Fellowship opportunity at the British Library. Deadline for applications is 2 November 2021.

This fellowship will be hosted by the Asian and African Collections department. The British Library holds about 3000 manuscripts from Southeast Asia, forming the largest and most significant collection of Southeast Asian manuscripts in the UK. Highlights include illustrated paper folding books from Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand, rare palm leaf manuscripts from Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Laos and Thailand going back to the seventeenth century, royal letters in Malay from the courts of the archipelago, some of the earliest known Batak divination manuals from Sumatra, as well as rare royal letters and edicts from Vietnam and Thailand.

Within this body of material, recent British Library projects have brought to light a significant number of manuscript textiles– either wrapped around or attached to manuscripts as a form of protective cover – without or with only minimal documentation and cataloguing data. Often the textiles were custom-made for one particular manuscript, and in this case these objects could be made from valuable hand-woven silk brocades, printed cotton or imported materials like chintz and silk damask. Specially designed textiles were commissioned to add meritorious value to a manuscript or to an entire set of manuscripts. Sometimes discarded textiles like monks’ robes, used and new clothes of people who had passed away unexpectedly, or leftover pieces of cloths made for other purposes were used to create manuscript textiles.

The provenance of these manuscript textiles is often difficult to establish due to the lack of recorded information in the Library’s catalogues and historical handlists. It is obvious that some of the manuscript textiles are of a later date than the manuscripts themselves, and some originate from a different place than the manuscripts they belong to, since there was a practice to replace worn out manuscript textiles with new ones.

This Chevening Fellowship project provides an opportunity to survey, assess and research these under-researched and often fragile Southeast Asian manuscript textiles, in order to provide comprehensive catalogue records and to help plan and inform future conservation work and public engagement.

Source: British Library: Manuscript Textiles in the Southeast Asian Collections | Chevening