Asian and African studies blog

Last year was the centenary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), whose contribution to the theory of evolution was as significant as that of Charles Darwin.  For Southeast Asianists, Wallace is of course best known as author of The Malay Archipelago (1869), a record of his detailed scientific observations in the Malay world.  

Title page of the first edition of The Malay Archipelago, 1869.  British Library, 10057.aaa.28.

As part of the Wallace Centenary activites, the Natural History Museum launched the Wallace Letters Online project, aiming to document all letters to and from Wallace.  It was thus that early in 2013 I received a query about a small sheet of blue paper with writing in Malay in Jawi (Arabic) script (Add. MS. 46442, f.93), held among Wallace’s correspondence in the British Library. According to the Australian naturalist J. T. Cockerell, the document was given to him in 1872 in the Aru Islands in eastern Indonesia, where Wallace had spent six months from January to June 1857, as described in chapters 30-33 of The Malay Archipelago. Cockerell explains that the letter was to be forwarded to Wallace from its author, who had piloted Wallace up the Wanumbai Creek in Aru in 1857.  

J.T. Cockerell was a professional naturalist from Australia, who was in Aru on an expedition to collect specimens from the field from 4 March to 15 December 1872.  In his journal for 3 May 1872, he recounts how he came into possession of the document: ‘The pilot now gave us to understand that he knew Mr. Wallace well, and had gone with him to Wannumbai: also that he had great respect for ‘the Englishman,’ in consequence of which he and his eldest son had taken the name of Wallace. He showed us a heavy silver-headed cane he had received from that gentleman, and which he seemed greatly to prize. When my son told him that he also knew Mr. Wallace, and had seen him lately, the pilot and his son kissed us all round three times on the forehead, and the old man said that he would write a letter in the Aru language stating the time of visit of Mr. Wallace, and where he went and what he did. The pilot performed his promise, and gave me one copy and asked me to forward the other to Mr. Wallace out of respect for ‘the Englishman’.”


Wallace’s map of the Aru Islands, showing Wanumbai (Manumbai) in the centre of the island.  There are a number of inaccuracies in this map, as Cockerell noted. The Malay Archipelago, p. 338.

The document is of interest as the only known written Malay source from Aru.  It was written with care, but is extremely hard to decipher and to interpret, as reflected in the comments of those charged with reading it. In 1909 C.O. Blagden, lecturer in Malay at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, wrote to W.W. Skeat that the letter was ‘an extreme specimen of bad writing in the Arabic character and bad spelling of Malay … I have read Malay MSS a many, & bad ones not a few, but as bad a one as this I never saw before, & I think it ought to be set at the next exam for the Malay bonus in the F.M.S.’, referring to the financial premium for Malay-language skills for civil servants in the Federated Malay States.  Skeat (author of Malay Magic, 1900), however, took a more nuanced view, and noted that it looked ‘as if the writer were trying unsuccessfully to reproduce some peculiarities in the local pronounciation, (‘p’ for ‘b’, for instance) because they are evidently not all accidental’. The problem is that although most of the individual words in this short document can be read, the overall meaning of the text can only be conjectured.  


Malay account of Wallace’s visit to Aru, 1872.  British Library, Add. MS. 46442, f.93r.

Given below is a modernised line-by-line transliteration of the letter, with proposed translation:
Bahwa alamat ini surat dari ingatan / dahulu kala daripada orang xxx Melayu / nenek moyang dapat tana Aru sampai tana Wasir / kompani Inggeris dapat / sama kita orang Melayu xxx Wallace / jadi tuan kompani Inggeris / kasi ka ruma sama nenek [se]mua xxx dia / punya anak cucu [se]mua xxx anak / cucu [se]mua xxx [symbol] wa kabungwalai / imama ajar marid adanya.
‘This is a record based on memories of the past, from the Malays whose forefathers have possessed the land of Aru up to the land of Wasir.  The English came here to meet us Malays. Wallace, who was the English chief, established a bond of friendship with all the elders of the house, and their children and grandchildren, their children and grandchildren.  Kampong Walai; the imam who teaches students, the end.’
The  document therefore is not a letter to Wallace, but rather a statement recording Wallace’s visit to the writer’s communal home, and the friendship he established with the elders, extending to their children and grandchildren, and thence to their children and grandchildren.

Cockerell’s impression of the author was of a man ‘of good education’ who frequently ‘took notes’ of all matters of interest, and who carried a ‘well-written and well-cared for manuscript book’, yet it is difficult to reconcile this image with the undeniably poor hand of the Jawi document.  Could it be that the pilot was perhaps more literate in Bugis/Makassar script, but chose to write in imperfect Jawi script as Malay was the language in which he had communicated with Wallace?  In any case, the Malay imam would doubtless have been gratified to know how much attention would be focussed on his words, so many years after they were inscribed.

[With thanks for comments and suggestions to George Beccaloni, Caroline Catchpole and Henri Chambert-Loir.]

Further reading

Cockerell, J.T.    
A visit to the Aru Islands. No. III. The Queenslander, 21 February 1874, p.6
A visit to the Aru Islands. No. IV. The Queenslander, 28 February 1874, p.6
    
Wallace, Alfred Russel.  The Malay Archipelago. London: Macmillan, 1869.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

When I first joined the British Library in 1986 as Curator for Maritime Southeast Asia, my official remit was manuscripts and printed books and periodicals in the vernacular languages of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and the Philippines. I also regarded myself as having a ‘watching brief’ on other materials in the British Library relating to the Malay world, ranging from East India Company archives to prints and drawings of the region. But in the present digital age, the wealth of collections in the British Library relating to Indonesia in particular has expanded exponentially through the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP).

The EAP, which was founded in 2004, is funded by Arcadia (previously known as the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Foundation) and administered by the British Library.  It aims to preserve in the form of (digital) reproductions archive material deemed to be in danger of survival.  The original material is retained by its owners, but digital copies are deposited both in the country of origin and at the British Library.  The EAP offers grants for both pilot projects, which usually yield a survey and images of a small sample of manuscripts, and major digitisation projects.  To date the EAP has funded 13 projects in Indonesia. (Strangely enough, there have been few applications for projects in Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei or Singapore).  There are also two projects in Timor Leste, and one on manuscripts from Vietnam in Cham, an Austronesian language.  


One of three Cham manuscripts digitised through the 2012 pilot project EAP531, Preserving the endangered manuscripts of the Cham people in Vietnam: an Islamic manuscript containing selections from the Qur'an and prayers, in Cham and Arabic, from Vietnam,19th c (with thanks to Ervan Nurtawab for this identification).  EAP531/1/2. 

Under the terms of the EAP, the digital copies sent to the British Library will be made freely available online for research purposes.  In practice it has taken some time to process the images and to solve technical issues, but six of the Indonesian projects are now fully catalogued and accessible online, while the other seven projects are in varying stages of completion.  And what surprises they bring!  It would not be an exaggeration to say that the manuscript collections now made accessible digitally through the EAP have begun to change our understanding of the landscape of the writing traditions of the Malay world.  

The first and most striking impression is the overwhelming predominance of Islamic texts, in the form of copies of the Qur’an, prayer books and sermons, and works on ritual obligations, theology, and Sufism.  This should be contrasted with the strong literary, historical and legal slant of collections of Malay and Indonesian manuscripts held in Europe, and those in Southeast Asia formed under colonial auspices.  

The second, and related, point is the very high proportion of manuscripts written in Arabic, rather than in vernacular Southeast Asian languages.  Such manuscripts have tended to fall under the radar of most academic programmes of Indonesian and Malay studies.  For example, the authoritative catalogue of Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain by M.C. Ricklefs and P. Voorhoeve (London, 1977) lists manuscripts in Austronesian languages ranging from Balinese, Batak and Bugis to Javanese, Makasarese, Malay, Old Javanese and Sundanese, but not in Arabic.  And yet a full appreciation of the totality of writings produced within a culture is an important context from which to appreciate better the composition of texts in indigenous languages such as Malay and Javanese.

A third consideration is the great codicological value of these newly-documented manuscripts, often still cared for within the community within which they were created. As such, they are rich sources of information on traditional binding materials and storage methods – aspects of book history nearly always lost when an Oriental manuscript entered a western library, and was rebound or rehoused in accordance with European conventions.

The large volume of fragile materials being digitised in difficult conditions in the field means that inevitably there are problems with metadata supplied by project teams: titles are not always accurate, languages are sometimes misidentified, and a few items described as 'manuscripts' are in fact printed.  However these caveats are more than compensated for by the richness of the material now being made accessible for the first time.  Listed below are the six EAP projects from Indonesia which are now fully accessible online.

EAP276, Documentation and preservation of Ambon manuscripts
Although the central Moluccas has a large Christian population, this project of 2009 documented 182 mainly Islamic manuscripts from 12 collections on Ambon and the smaller neighbouring island of Haruku.
Calligraphic batik cloth binding of a finely illuminated Kitab mawlid manuscript containing songs in Arabic in praise of the Prophet, 19th c., from the collection of Husain Hatuwe, Ambon. EAP276/7/32.

EAP229, Acehnese manuscripts in danger of extinction: identifying and preserving the private collections located in Pidie and Aceh Besar regencies
EAP329, Digitising private collections of Acehnese manuscripts located in Pidie and Aceh Besar Regencies
The pilot project (EAP229) of 2008 surveyed the region and digitised 10 manuscripts; this was followed by a major project (EAP329) in 2009 which digitised 483 manuscripts in Arabic, Malay and Acehnese.

Ma'rifat al-fatihah, one of 118 manuscripts owned by Teungku Mukhlis of Calue, Pidie Regency.  Shown here is Syair Kalimat, a Sufi explication in Malay verse of the confession of faith, the title set within a dramatically graphic rendering of the shahada (Ini syair kalimat baca oleh kamu, hai ya ikhwan, supaya kamu faham akan dia) .  EAP329/1/90.

EAP205, Endangered manuscripts of Western Sumatra: collections of Sufi brotherhoods
A pilot project in 2008 digitised 7 manuscripts held in surau (prayer houses) in West Sumatra.  

Undang-undang Minangkabau, a Minangkabau legal digest in Malay, from the collection of the Surau Gadang Ampalu in Kabupaten Padang Pariaman, West Sumatra.  EAP205/2/2.

EAP280, Retrieving heritage: rare Old Javanese and Old Sundanese manuscripts from West Java (stage one)
This project of 2009 digitised 28 palm leaf manuscripts, comprising 27 from the sanctuary (kabuyutan) at Ciburuy in Garut Regency, West Java, and possibly dating from the 14th-16th centuries, and one manuscript from the private collection of Mr Kartani in Cirebon.

Nipah Kropak Ciburuy I (Buana Pitu?).  EAP280/1/2.

EAP365 Preservation of Makassarese lontara’ pilot project
This pilot project of 2010 was able to make representative images from seven 20th-century manuscripts written in Makassarese and Arabic held in Makassar, capital city of South Sulawesi, and in a number of villages in Kecamatan Galesong south of the city.  
Kotika Boddia, divination manual, from the collection of Daeng Tiro, Desa Boddia, Galesong, South Sulawesi, Indonesia [1920s]. EAP365/3/2.

Projects mostly completed but not yet accessible online:
•    EAP061, The MIPES Indonesia: digitising Islamic manuscripts of Indonesian Pondok Pesantren
•    EAP117, Digitising ‘sacred heirloom’ in private collections in Kerinci, Sumatra, Indonesia
•    EAP144, The digitisation of Minangkabau’s manuscript collections in Suraus
•    EAP153, Riau manuscripts: the gateway to the Malay intellectual world
•    EAP211, Digitising Cirebon manuscripts
•    EAP212, Locating, documenting and digitising: preserving the endangered manuscripts of the legacy of the Sultanate of Buton, South-Eastern Sulawesi Province, Indonesia

•    EAP352, Endangered manuscripts of Western Sumatra and the province of Jambi: collections of Sufi brotherhoods

For further information about the Endangered Archives Programme, contact the Grants Administrator, Cathy Collins: [email protected], and subscribe to their blog.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

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Most Malay manuscripts are written on European paper, which is usually easily identifiable as such from the watermarks which are visible when the paper is held up to the light. But how can we tell if a manuscript is written on Chinese paper?  This question has long exercised Russell Jones, pioneer of and (indeed, the only) authority on the study of the paper of Malay manuscripts, who has addressed the question in several publications (Jones 1986, 1993).  


A man making paper, from a volume of Chinese drawings representing men and women from various classes and trades. China, ca.1800.  British Library, Or. 2262, no. 69.

I had often noticed that many of the Malay and Javanese manuscripts in the British Library, and also official documents in English and Dutch from Melaka in the 18th and 19th centuries, were written on thin cream or light brown paper with a very distinctive ‘striated’ surface.  Russell informed me that such these were in fact brush strokes typical of Chinese paper, and he directed me to a very useful article by Ian Wilson: ‘China paper was usually made from bamboo fibre or less commonly rice straw. After pressing to remove water, the damp sheets were brushed onto a smooth drying surface with a coarse fibre brush. The brush invariably left brush marks in the surface of the soft paper. The brush marks are the most easily recognized feature of Chinese paper’ (Wilson 2009: 2).  


Detail from an inventory of household goods, cited in a claim made by Fakir Husain bin Syaikh Ismail Lebai against his brother Muhammad Husain in a dispute over an inheritance, Melaka, 12 February 1822.  The list is written on Chinese paper with brush marks evident on the writing surface.  British Library, IOR: R/9/20/8, f.17.  

In addition to brush strokes, another indication (albeit not proof, as Russell is quick to caution) of Chinese-made paper is the presence of the seals of Chinese paper merchants. One of the oldest known Malay manuscripts, a copy of the Hikayat Seri Rama given to the Bodleian Library by Archbishop Laud in 1635 (MS Laud Or. 291), has on the bottom of two pages (ff. 84v and 91v) the red ink impression of a Chinese seal.  Russell invited David Helliwell, curator of Chinese collections at the Bodleian, to examine the seals.  Helliwell read the inscription as ‘the rather trite four-character motto fu kuei shuang pao (‘riches and honour, the two treasures’)’ and surmised that the seal most likely ‘related to either the maker or distributor of the paper on which the manuscript is written’, greatly strengthening the probability that the Hikayat Seri Rama was indeed written on Chinese paper.

Early in 2013 Midori Kawashima of Sophia University, Tokyo, drew my attention to two elaborate Chinese seals in an Islamic manuscript from Mindanao.  We showed the seals to Russell Jones and Frances Wood, then head of the Chinese section at the British Library, who identified them as belonging to a paper merchant.  By coincidence, soon after I came across two similar Chinese seals in a Javanese manuscript of Panji Angreni in the British Library (MSS Jav 17), which, as part of the Mackenzie collection, can probably be dated to the early 19th century.  According to Frances, the legible portions of the seal read ‘Guangdong … superior paper … city, Gate of Supreme Peace …’, evidently giving the address of a supplier of superior paper.  

Seals of a Chinese supplier of paper, in a Javanese manuscript of Panji Angreni.  British Library, MSS Jav 17, f.10v.

As I began recataloguing all the Malay manuscripts in the British Library in preparation for digitisation, it was only awareness of the examples discussed above that helped me to recognize the slight traces of red ink on the edge of the page in two Malay manuscripts as similar stamps of Chinese paper merchants.  Both manuscripts are from the John Crawfurd collection and have endpapers of Javanese treebark paper (dluwang), which may indicate an origin in Java, although the manuscripts may also have been acquired earlier in Penang, where Crawfurd had served previously.  Of the seal on the Hikayat Ular Nangkawang (Add. 12382, f. 29v), Frances Wood commented, ‘Three half characters: could be a name, either personal or of a business. The middle character could be 三 but equally could be 五，王 etc- it is difficult to know whether they have been evenly halved or we just have a third’ (F.Wood, 19.4.2013).  On the Syair Dang Sarat, only the smallest portion of the seal remains at the top of a page (Add. 12381, f.20r).


Hikayat Ular Nangkawang, with a partial impression of what may be a Chinese paper merchant’s red ink seal stamped on the edge of the right-hand page.  The MS has been digitised and can be read here.  British Library, Add. 12382, ff. 29v-30r.


Syair Dang Sarat, with slight red ink traces of a very similar Chinese seal stamped at the top of the left-hand page.  The MS has been digitised and can be read here. British Library, Add. 12381, ff. 19v-20r.

Helliwell stressed the rarity of such seals in the context of Chinese bibliographical studies. ‘Such seals were commonly used as paper marks of some sort, but as they were usually trimmed off, if indeed the paper which bore them was used at all, too few examples survive to have permitted even a perliminary study of them.  Only four of these marks have been discovered in the course of scanning several thousand volumes in the Bodleian’s Chinese collections’ (in Jones 1986: 52).  It is intriguing to think that more traces of Chinese paper merchants’ seals may survive in the less rarified Malay manuscript tradition than on Chinese books themselves.

Further reading

Russell Jones. European and Asian papers in Malay manuscripts.  A provisional assessment.  Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 1993, 149 (3): 474-502.
Russell Jones.  One of the oldest Malay manuscripts extant: the Laud Or. 291 manuscript of the Hikayat Seri Rama.  Indonesia Circle, November 1986, (41): 49-53.
Ian Wilson.  China paper usage in early Van Diemen’s Land printing.  The Quarterly (The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians), October 2009, (72): 1-7.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

Some famous Malay texts have survived in numerous copies – over thirty manuscripts of the Sejarah Melayu are known, including two in the British Library – yet others are only represented by a single manuscript.  One such work is the Kedah poem Syair Sultan Maulana, ‘The Ballad of our Venerable Sultan’, known solely from Add. 12394 in the British Library, which has just been digitised and can be read here.  This epic in verse, set during the reign of Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Syah of Kedah (r.1804-1843), records the heroic part played by a Kedah fleet in helping the Siamese expel the Burmese from the island of Phuket (known in Malay as Pulau Salang) in early 1810.  

The seal of Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Syah of Kedah.  The Arabic inscription reads: al-‘azīz dhū al-mulk al-qadīr al-ghālib ghayr al-maghlūb al-sultān khalīfat Allāh ‘alā dā’īrah Kedah wa-huwa al-Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Syah ibn al-Sultan Abdullah Mukarram Syah sanat 1219, ‘The mighty one, possessor of the kingdom, the powerful one, the conquering [yet] unconquered one, the sultan [who is the] vicegerent of God over the territory of Kedah, and he is Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Syah, son of Sultan Abdullah Mukarram Syah, the year 1219 (1804/5)’.  The seal is stamped on a letter from the Sultan to the Governor-General of Bengal, [Lord Minto], 26 Rabiulakhir 1226 (20 May 1811), pleading for protection against the Siamese.  British Library, MSS Eur.D.742/1, f.3.

Like many Malay literary and historical works, the Syair Sultan Maulana is anonymous, but the author’s vantage point at the centre of action led the scholar Cyril Skinner to conclude that the poem was probably written by the secretary to the Kedah Admiral, the Laksamana.  According to a note on the front cover, the manuscript was given by its author to John McInnes, who served as the government Malay translator in Penang from 1812.  In 1825 it was in the possession of John Crawfurd, Resident of Singapore, and as part of the Crawfurd collection was acquired by the British Museum in 1842.  The historical value of this work has long been recognized: the text was the subject of a Ph.D. thesis by Muhammad Yusoff Hashim (1980), and it was also published in transliteration and elegant English translation by Skinner (1985), from which the quotations below are taken.

The sultanate of Kedah is renowned as the oldest Malay kingdom in present-day Malaysia, its ruling line dating back to the 12th century.  For much of its existence, Kedah has been subservient to Siam, its powerful neighbour to the north.  When Burmese forces occupied Phuket in October 1809 Kedah was forced to support the Siamese war effort, and it is this five-month naval battle that is the subject of the syair.  


The opening lines of the Syair Sultan Maulana, written in the Malay syair verse form of four-line stanzas, with each line ending with the same rhyme.
‘Listen, Sirs, to this composition / the story of His Majesty the Sultan of Kedah
many were his subjects, fair his realm / and prosperous were those who dwelt in it.
His Majesty was venerated as Sultan Maulana / his official title being Ahmad Tajuddin
the son of the noble Sultan Abdullah / of a dynasty born to occupy the golden throne’
Dengarkan tuan suatu madah / kisah baginda Sultan di Kedah
negerinya ramai terlalu indah / isi negeri semuanya mudah.
Ismu baginda Sultan Maulana / Ahmad Tajuddin gelar rencana
ibnu Sultan Abdullah yang ghana / bangsa di atas tahta kencana
British Library, Add. 12394, f.1v. 

The syair is a valuable source of information on Malay naval warfare in the early 19th century, with details of vessels and crews, armaments, and battle formations and tactics.  The departure of the fleet from Kedah must have been a glittering sight, each ship flying the pennant of its commander:
‘The Temenggung had been made operational commander / his cannon was called Raging Tiger / his pennant was bright red in colour / a truly daunting sight’
Jabatan Temenggung panglima perang / lotang bernama Harimau Garang
tetunggulnya merah cahaya berdarang / memberi gentar dipandang orang
But perhaps one of the main delights of this syair lies in the author’s pithy, no-punches-pulled, portrayal of individual Kedah warriors, his aim in writing made clear in the closing stanzas:
‘I merely wished His Majesty to know / how his subjects acted –
who did their duty and who was remiss - / all their deeds are clearly related here’
Sekadar maklum duli makota / perintah hamba sahaya semata
masing kerja baik dan leta / barang perintah di sinilah nyata
Among the proven heroes were Wan Akil son of Wan Alang (patutlah jadi menteri hulubalang), the loyal and true Raja Mahkota (lagi sangat teguh setiawan) and the brave Wan Hanafi (muda terpilih), while those publicly shamed in the syair included the weak-willed Tengku Alang Naga (bersifat udang), who used the excuse of being thirsty (katanya dahaga) to slope off; Lebai Lang Didik, who put on a great show – once he was sure the coast was clear (mereka berperang sangatlah cerdik / tampil pun hingga habis disidik); and Captain (Nakhoda) Dul, whose actions did not match his fine words (jika bercakap terlalu behena / sampai berperang tiada berguna).  

The whole range of human sensibilities is depicted, with shades of grey as well as black and white.  Raja Setia Jaya, the chief (penghulu) of Kerian, may not have led from the front but neither did he lag behind (tiada dahulu tiada kemudian). The pious Tengku Idris (sikap pahlawan ulama pun dia) viewed the battle between co-religionists Burma and Siam as one in which Kedah should not play a part (katanya agama mereka sebangsa / menyertai dia kita berdosa), even for the sake of Kedah’s security (sebab negeri hendak dipelihara), and after long debates with the Laksamana he eventually sailed back alone. At the end of the successful campaign the Laksamana is rewarded by the Sultan with the position of Bendahara, and the syair ends asking for God’s blessings.


Final pages of the Syair Sultan Maulana.  British Library, Add. 12394, ff. 47v-48r.  

On a recent visit to Kedah to receive the award of Darjah Setia Diraja Kedah from the Regent of Kedah, I felt very honoured to meet the Regency Council comprising the four great ministers of state of Kedah – the present-day Bendahara, Temenggung, Laksamana and Panglima Besar – all descended from the 'Sultan Maulana' of the syair.


From left: Tunku Panglima Besar, Tunku Laksamana, Tunku Temenggung, the writer, the Menteri Besar of Kedah, the Regent of Kedah Tunku Bendahara, the royal consorts Toh Puan Bendahara, Toh Puan Temenggung and Toh Puan Laksamana, and the writer’s parents.  Istana Anak Bukit, Alor Setar, Kedah, 6 Feburary 2014.

Further reading:

Muhammad Yusoff Hashim, Syair Sultan Maulana: suatu penelitian kritis tentang hasil pensejarahan Melayu tradisional.  Kuala Lumpur: Penerbit Universiti Malaya, 1980.
Skinner, C., The battle for Junk Ceylon.  The Syair Sultan Maulana.  Text, translation and notes.  Dordrecht: Foris, 1985. (Bibliotheca Indonesica; 25).

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

Regular users of the Asian and African Studies reading room in the British Library will certainly be aware of the display cases on the landing in front of the reading room. The two large cases by the lifts contain gilded manuscript chests from Thailand and Burma, while the exhibits in the smaller case are changed at least once a year. In the past we have covered themes like Thai illustrated manuscripts, rare printed material from Thailand, and Thai palm leaf manuscripts.

The latest display – by coincidence, installed just before Valentine’s Day – depicts love stories and relationships in Southeast Asian manuscript traditions. For the first time, we are presenting three manuscripts from different Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Thailand, and Burma.  

The Javanese story of Sela Rasa
This beautiful Javanese manuscript tells the story of Prince Sela Rasa, who with his two older brothers has been forced to leave their kingdom of Champa.  In the illustration shown in the display, the brothers pay their respects to a holy man.  The sage’s daughter, Ni Rumsari, had dreamt that three handsome men would come to visit.  The characters are drawn according to the stylised conventions of the Javanese shadow puppet theatre, wayang kulit.  The Serat Selarasa is perhaps the earliest finely-illustrated Javanese manuscript known. The manuscript is dated 1804, and according to a note in the text was once owned by the wife of a Dutch East India Company official in Surabaya, before it was presented to Col. Colin Mackenzie in 1812.


Serat Selarasa.  British Library, MSS Jav. 28, ff. 13v-14r.

A Thai divination manual
This divination manual (phrommachat) from central Thailand is on public display for the first time. It contains horoscopes based on the Chinese zodiac, relating each lunar month to the animals of the 12-year-cycle and their reputed attributes (earth, wood, fire, iron, water) as well as a male or female avatar (representing the Chinese concepts of yin and yang). This manuscript from the 19th century also includes beautifully illustrated descriptions of lucky and unlucky matches of couples. The paintings on the left side depict the female avatar of the year of the pig riding on a blue hog, and illustrations of possible fates for people born in the year of the pig. On the right side we see a couple of ogres (phi suea) who will stay happily married until old age, whereas the relationship between a male ogre and a female angel (deva) is an unlucky one.


Thai divination manual.  British Library, Or. 4830, ff. 25-26.

Scenes from the Burmese Ramayana
The highlight of the display is a manuscript book from Burma with large paintings stretching over several folios, illustrating the great epic of love and war Ramayana. It was created at the royal court, where a team of painters served.  The paper of this 19th century Burmese folding book of the Ramayana was handmade from mulberry bark. Shown here is the famous scene where Rama is lured away to shoot the golden deer.  Meanwhile, his wife Sita is captured by Ravana in the guise of an old hermit, after which he returns to his original form of a fearful ten-headed giant.
Dramatic performances of the Ramayana emerged in the Konbaung Period (1752-1885). The king’s minister Myawaddy Mingyi U Sa converted the Ramayana Jataka into a Burmese classical drama and he also composed accompanying music and songs. Ever since, Ramayana performances have been very popular in Burmese culture.  


Ramayana.  British Library, Or.14178, ff. 8-9.

All three manuscripts in this new display have been fully digitised and can be viewed freely online through the British Library’s Digitised Manuscripts website.  Clicking on the highlighted links beneath each image will take you directly to the digitised manuscript.  Digitisation of these manuscripts was supported by the Henry Ginsburg Legacy, while the display cabinets were sponsored by the Royal Thai Government.

Further reading

Annabel Teh Gallop, Javanese art in the early 19th century: Serat Selarasa.  Southeast Asia Library Group blog, 4 March 2013

Jana Igunma, When an angel meets a demon: advice on love and relationships in a Thai divination manual. Asian & African studies blog, 7 January 2014.

San San May, Scenes from the Ramayana. Southeast Asia Library Group blog, 3 April 2013.

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This blog is normally used to present items from the British Library’s collections, but today I would like to introduce a Malay gem from a neighbouring institution in London. The Wellcome Library, housed at 186 Euston Road, was founded on the collections of Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936).  Best known for its medical materials, the Wellcome also holds important Asian collections especially pertaining to medicine, divination and magic, including Malay, Batak and Javanese manuscripts (described in Ricklefs & Voorhoeve 1982).   

Last week Wellcome Images was launched, making over 100,000 images freely available for download and reuse, in both low and high resolution.  A search on the keyword ‘Malay’ yielded a wealth of items including Malay manuscripts on magic, photographs of Sarawak and Penang, and watercolour drawings of Singapore and Johor.  But the most exciting item to me was a copy of an early Malay newspaper published in Singapore in 1877, no other copies of which are known to survive anywhere else in the world: Peridaran al-Shams wa-al-Qamar, ‘The revolution of the sun and the moon’.  


Peridaran al-Shams wa-al-Qamar, issue no.20, 30 August 1877.  Wellcome Library, Malay collection / Hervey collection / Pamphlets / 1.

The publication of the title was first noted in January 1880 by E.W. Birch, who mentioned Peridaran Shamsu Walkamer as one of two early Malay newspapers that had ‘after a short run, died out’.  When William Roff published his seminal guide to pre-war Malay periodicals in 1972, although no copies had been traced he guessed that the paper was hand-lithographed.  The existence of a copy of this rare newspaper in the D.F.A. Hervey collection in the Wellcome Library was first brought to light by Ellen, Hooker & Milner (1981: 92), but as their article was mainly about Hervey's Malay manuscripts, not many scholars of early Malay printing were alerted to this discovery.  In 1992, Ahmat Adam noted a contemporary reference in the Padang newspaper Bentara Melajoe, no.8, of 8 May 1887, which mentioned that Peridaran was a weekly, first published on 19 April 1877, and that the editor ‘had studied with Keasberry and Abdullah Munsyi’.  Benjamin Peach Keasberry (1811-1875) was an American missionary who had pioneered lithographic printing in Singapore, while Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir Munsyi (1796-1854) - a renowned Malay writer, scribe and teacher, and author of the Hikayat Abdullah (1849) - had first learned typeset printing from missionaries in Melaka, and later worked with Keasberry at his lithographic press at Bukit Zion in Singapore.

The issue of Peridaran al-Shams wa-al-Qamar shown here is no.20, dated 30 August 1877, with its 8 pages numbered 160-167, and it is indeed lithographed.  From information on the front page, the newspaper appeared every Thursday, and cost 15 cents per issue.  The list of agents covers not only the states of the Malay peninsula but also further afield: Johor and Teluk Belanga, Melaka, Kelang – Selangor, Pulau Pinang, Betawi [present-day Jakarta], Padang, Pontianak and Sarawak.  As well as articles on Aceh and Cirebon and the Russo-Turkish war, of great interest is the main story on the front page: a portion of the serialised Pelayaran Ibrahim Munsyi, ‘The voyages of Ibrahim Munsyi’.  This account by Ibrahim, Dato’ Bentara Dalam of Johor (d. 1904) and son of Abdullah Munsyi, was previously believed to have been printed for the first time posthumously in 1919 (Sweeney & Phillips 1975: xxxii).   Hervey had studied Malay with Ibrahim, and this might be a reason why he kept this issue of the newspaper.

The first Malay newspaper to be published in Singapore was the typeset Jawi Peranakkan, launched in 1876.  However, the earliest surviving copies of this title, which are held in the British Library, only date from March 1881.  This leaves the Wellcome Library’s copy of Peridaran al-Shams wa-al-Qamar of August 1877 not just the only known issue of this title, but also as the oldest known surviving issue of a Malay newspaper from Singapore.

The oldest surviving issue of Jawi Peranakkan, vol.5, no.214, 28 March 1881.  British Library, OP 434.

Further reading

Ahmat Adam, Sejarah dan bibliografi akhbar dan majalah Melayu abad kesembilan belas.  Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1992.
E.W. Birch, The vernacular press in the Straits. Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1879, (4):51-5.
R.F. Ellen, M.B. Hooker and A.C. Milner, The Hervey Malay Collections in the Wellcome Institute.  Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1981, 54 (1): 82-92.
M.C. Ricklefs & P. Voorhoeve, Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain: addenda et corrigenda.  Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 1982, Vol.XLV, Part 2, pp.300-322.
William R. Roff, Bibliography of Malay and Arabic periodicals published in the Straits Settlements and Peninsular Malay States, 1876-1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Amin Sweeney and Nigel Phillips. The voyages of Mohamed Ibrahim Munsyi.  Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Annabel Teh Gallop
Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

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Happy New Year, and Selamat Tahun Baru 2014 to all our readers in Southeast Asia.

For my first post of the year, I would like to ponder the question of why illuminated Malay manuscripts are so rare. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that, apart from a superb copy of the Taj al-Salatin (Or. 13295), almost none of the Malay manuscripts I have been writing about are decorated in any way. Among the recently-digitised Malay manuscripts from the historic British Museum collections, the only other finely illuminated work is a copy of the Hikayat Isma Yatim, Add. 12379, from the John Crawfurd collection, which has a pair of ornamental frames around the first two pages. The manuscript has just been digitised in full and can be read here, with high zoom capabilities allowing a close inspection of the artwork.


Hikayat Isma Yatim, by Ismail, recounting the story of a young writer who becomes a trusted advisor to the king.  British Libary, Add. 12379, ff. 1v-2r. 

When I first began to survey illuminated Malay manuscripts in British and other collections,  it was surprisingly hard to make sense of the data: no patterns or trends could be read into the decorated frames, headpieces and tailpieces which adorned the books, however beautiful they were. It was only when I realised that the finest examples of manuscript art from the Malay world are found not in literary, historical or legal manuscripts written in Malay, but in manuscripts of the Qur’an and other religious works mainly written in Arabic, that the mists began to clear, and distinctive regional schools of Southeast Asian Islamic manuscript art could be identified. On the basis of the shape and structure of the decorated frames, and the palette and ornamental motifs used, it is usually possible to identify the origin of a Qur’an manuscript from Southeast Asia, whether from Aceh, or Terengganu, or Java.  But although many decorated Malay literary manuscripts exist, they stubbornly refused to group themselves into clusters on the basis of the artistic criteria which had proved so effective in identifying regional schools of Qur’anic illumination. 

The reason for this discrepancy may lie in differing perceptions of the status of religious and literary manuscripts in the Malay world. Manuscripts of the Qur’an, containing the enduring and unchanging Word of God, are usually the most beautifully ornamented books in any Muslim culture, and much the same reverence enveloped certain other texts in the Islamic canon. It is where the written text was deemed to have intrinsic value that we find illumination in a prescriptive and conformist way, also fulfilling a functional purpose: decorated frames announced the opening and closing words of the Holy Book, while marginal ornaments guided the reader to standard divisions of the text.  On the other hand, Malay literary works were composed for oral delivery: they came alive while being recited aloud and while being listened to, with the beautiful sounds of sung syair (narrative poems) enjoyed as halwa telinga, literally 'sweetmeats for the ear'. There was thus little sense of permanence attached to any particular written manifestation of a work of literature; indeed, Malay scribes conventionally exhort their successors to correct and improve the text in front of them.  Perhaps this is why literary manuscripts were not traditionally deemed to merit illumination, with decoration only occasionally being supplied at the whim of individual scribes.

Another important consideration is differing contexts of production. Illuminated religious manuscripts in the Malay world almost always appear to have been created in the communities within which they were initially destined to be ‘consumed’. On the other hand, many illuminated Malay literary manuscripts known today were copied at the behest of European patrons, implying that western tastes and commercial incentives may have played a pivotal role in their production, with illumination added as halwa mata, 'eye candy', to attract the client and add value to the book.  It is hardly surprising that the only other illuminated Malay manuscript known to have been owned by John Crawfurd – a copy of Hikayat Dewa Mandu, written on English paper watermarked 'Budgen & Wilmott 1809' and perhaps commissioned by Crawfurd himself – was snapped up by another European collector, and is now held in the Staatsbibliothek (Preussischer Kulturbesitz) in Berlin. 

What, then can we say about the British Library’s Hikayat Isma Yatim?  The gold panels at top and bottom of each page reflect the influence of Qur’anic illumination, for such panels would normally enclose surah titles in a Qur'an manuscript. The use of pale blue pigment may indicate a Javanese origin, which is in fact consistent with the majority of Malay manuscripts in the Crawfurd collection. And the suggestion of European patronage in the production of this illuminated Malay manuscript is strengthened by the presence of some writing exercises in Latin script on the first page.

Detail of the first illuminated page of Hikayat Isma Yatim. The palette is centred on gold, red and pale blue, with black ink used for outlines and an important role played by ‘reserved white’, whereby the white background of the paper is manipulated as essential component of the colour scheme. British Library, Add. 12379, f.1v (detail).

Writing exercises in English on the first page of the Hikayat Isma Yatim manuscript.  The sentence in Malay in Jawi script reads: Raja Ahmad yang menulis surat Inggris ini adanya, 'Raja Ahmad wrote these English letters'. British Library, Add. 12379, f.1r (detail).

Further reading

A.T.Gallop, Malay manuscript art: the British Library collection. British Library Journal, 1991, 17 (2): 167-189.

A.T. Gallop, Islamic manuscript art of Southeast Asia.  Crescent moon: Islamic art & civilisation in Southeast Asia, ed. James Bennett.  Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2005, pp.156-183.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

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In my final post for this year on the Malay manuscripts digitisation project, I thought I would give a glimpse of the 'food chain' for digitising a Malay manuscript.

To start with, none of this would have been possible without our generous patrons, William and Judith Bollinger, who, when they moved from London to Singapore, expressed their desire to support collaboration between the British Library and the National Library Board (NLB) of Singapore, by digitising material held in the British Library of interest to Singapore.  The evolution of the project was overseen by Sarah Frankland and colleagues in the Development Office, while three main collection areas in the BL – Malay manuscripts, early maps of Singapore, and papers relating to Sir Stamford Raffles – were identified by Noryati Abdul Samad and Ong Eng Chuan of the NLB during a research visit to London in January 2012.  

Once we had agreed to start by digitising all the Malay manuscripts in the British Library, Rossitza Atanassova, Digital Curator, kindly shepherded me through the complex technical and procedural framework of the process.  The selection of Malay manuscripts was made from the authoritative published catalogue by M.C. Ricklefs & P. Voorhoeve, Indonesian manuscripts in Great Britain (London, 1977), but one of my main tasks was to recatalogue all the manuscripts on the BL’s online catalogue using the Integrated Archives and Manuscripts System (IAMS).  All the manuscripts selected for digitisation had to be condition-checked by conservator Jane Pimlott, and at this important hurdle, a few items had to be dropped as being too fragile. Then, with the helpful advice of Anna Vernon, Andrew Tullis and Rachel Marshall, all the choices had to be considered carefully to ensure that digitisation would not cause breaches of copyright, necessitating the further omission of a couple of more recent items.  

The collection of treaties in Malay and Tausug signed between Alexander Dalrymple for the East India Company and the sultans of Sulu, 1761-1764, which can not currently be digitised due to the poor condition of the volume.  British Library, IOR: H/629.

It was an exciting moment when photography started: Chris Lee allocated us space in the Imaging Studios in June 2013, and assigned photographer Neil Cowland to the task.  As Neil worked through the manuscripts, producing high-resolution TIFF images of nearly 100 MB per page, Sarah Biggs quality-checked all resulting images.  One of the most complicated elements of the process was filenaming: according to long-standing British Library conventions, blank pages and fly leaves of a manuscript are not numbered, but the resulting digital images needed to be numbered appropriately to ensure they appeared in correct sequence in the digitised version of the manuscript.  


Neil Cowland preparing to photograph a manuscript in the Imaging Studios of the British Library.  


Sarah Biggs checking the qualityof a digital image from a manuscript of Hikayat Dewa Mandu, Add. 12376.  Sarah is famed as the author of the ‘Knight v. Snail’ posting in Sept 2013 on the BL’s Medieval Manuscripts blog, which garnered 36,000 views worldwide in a single day!

Finally, all images were published online in the DIPS system, through the BL’s Digitised Manuscripts site, which was originally developed for a Greek manuscripts digitisation project funded by the Stavros Niarchos foundation.  The Malay project was the first time that manuscripts written in a right-to-left script had been uploaded, and the ‘open book’ viewer, showing two facing pages side-by-side, therefore needed adjustment.  The revised viewer, which has been developed by Paul Jones and Ken Tsang, will benefit not just Malay manuscripts but all other languages written in right-to-left scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Hebrew.

'Open book' view of a book in Arabic script, read from right to left, in the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts viewer.  Malay Qur'an, from Kelantan or Patani, 19th c., Or. 15227, ff. 3v-4r.

'Open book' view for books in right-to-left scripts in the new prototype of the Digitised Manuscripts viewer, which will also offer a 'top to bottom' viewing option for palm leaf and other manuscripts.

So when the Memorandum of Understanding – drafted by Shanthi Thambapillai – was signed on 19 August 2013 in Singapore by Chief Executives Roly Keating for the BL and Elaine Ng for the NLB, and the first few digitised Malay manuscripts went live on both the BL and NLB websites, it represented the culmination of many months’ work.  Efforts to publicise the digitised manuscripts continue, through the Asian & African Studies Blog and Twitter account @BLAsia_Africa pioneered by Ursula Sims-Williams and Malini Roy, and the appreciative comments we receive from all over the world, particularly from Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, are our greatest reward.  

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

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