Unpublished sources MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS RELATING TO THAI HISTORY IN EUROPE When asked to contribute to the Newsletter the thought sprang to my mind that this would be an excellent medium to provide information on Asian source materials in Europe. At present I happen to be giving a lecture course on Mainland Southeast Asian manuscripts and this has inspired me to write about collections of unpublished material related to Thailand, not only manuscripts that were originally written by Thais and which can be found in European museums but also handwritten material from Europeans themselves. The result is the following kind of rough guide, a sort of "map" of the rich deposits of unpublished sources that have regularly been delved into by myself and my colleagues. By B.J. Terwiel I do not claim a full coverage: Europe is large, its collections immense and varied so that I am likely to have overlooked some important sources. This is merely a modest effort to introduce some of the collections that have come to my notice when studying Thai history. This account is thus limited to the five European countries in which I have personally had the chance to become familiar with many of their manuscript holdings: the Netherlands, England, Denmark, France, and Germany. The Vatican, Spain, and Portugal are left out simply because I have as yet not attempted to gain access to archival collections there. THE NETHERLANDS The most important unpublished Dutch sources for Thai history are undoubtedly those that relate to the United East India Company (VOC) kept in the General State Archives (Algemeen Rijksarchief) The Hague. Various scholars (among whom the Thai historian Dhiravat na Pombejra is certainly the most prominent) are in the process of unlocking this material. I myself have looked mainly at the sources for 1689 and 1690 and found a real storehouse of information, notably a copy of an Ayutthayan "Daghregister" for the greater part of 1689. A perusal of the VOC indexes shows that throughout most of the seventeenth century there was quite a wealth of information gathered relating directly or indirectly to Thailand. When working at the Archives during the mid-1980s, I greatly relished handling the massive bundles of letters and reports. Little did I realize that soon the greater part of the collections would be put on microfilm and access to the originals would be curbed. In my opinion the medium of microfilm is tolerable in the case of printed sources, but it is quite inappropriate for recording bundles of seventeenth-century manuscripts of differing sizes, which are written in disparate types of handwriting. Half an hour of working through a single reel in order to locate a particular letter proved more stressful to the eye than a whole day of handling the originals. For those interested in the political aspects of the relations between Thailand and Holland, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague there is a collection of consular archives which includes a series from Bangkok from 1860 till the outbreak of the Second World War. In the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, there is a nineteenth-century handwritten report on Siam which has been studied by Henk Zoomers. Finally, Han ten Brummelhuis has been studying the family archives of Homan van der Heide who was probably the most prominent Dutch national in Thai history. ENGLAND The British Library houses a number of handsome, illustrated Thai manuscripts, the subject of a recent book by Henry Ginsburg. In the Oriental manuscript collection of the British Library is a bundle of Saci bark leaves with calendrical information written in Tai-Ahom characters, as well as a large number of photographs recording a single historical text in Ahom script. In the European manuscript collection of the British Library one also finds the notes and drawings of the German explorer Engelbert Kaempfer; these contain information on Siam at the beginning of Phetracha's reign and are being prepared for publication. From the late Sao Sai Mung I heard that there are sizeable collections of Shan Manuscripts in England. He mentioned a collection in Oxford and I seem to remember him referring to some manuscripts in the Royal Asiatic Society. DENMARK The National Library in Copenhagen has a collection of 116 manuscripts from Thailand. A descriptive catalogue was compiled by Georges CoedŠs and published in 1962. I would imagine that there is still interesting material to be found on nineteenth-century Thai history, a time when Danes were prominent there in various fields of endeavour. An enterprising student might try to locate papers, for example, those of the Richelieu family, or to discover if Gustav Schau has left written documents. However, Eric Seidenfaden. who died in 1958, spent about forty years of his life in Thailand and had wide-ranging scholarly interests to Thai history is a more likely possibility. FRANCE The Archives of the Missions EtrangŠres, Paris, house my favourite collection of missionary documents. The headquarters of the Missions EtrangŠres is situated in the Rue du Bac, in the same building in which the missionaries were already accommodated before the French Revolution; the cloister garden and architecture form an inspiring background to the masses of missionary documents relating to Thai history. These commence in 1662 with the journey of Bishop Pierre Lambert de la Motte and his companions. While I worked there in 1986 microfilming was in process, so I fear that the conditions described for the Algemeen Rijksarchief in the Netherlands may now also apply. In the section Oriental manuscripts of the BibliothŠque Nationale I came across a few documents apparently stemming from the Tais in China, including a text apparently intended as an indigenous manual teaching the local Tai script. In the Ecole Fran‡aise d'Extrˆme-Orient I found quite a prominent collection of Buddhist manuscripts, an overview of which can be readily gained by way of a card index. Documents about the relationship between France and Siam can be found in various archives among which the Archives du MinistŠre des Affaires EtrangŠres, Paris, and the Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mar, Aix-en-Provence appear be the most important. A Number of Laotian manuscripts, among which there are reported to be a series of medicinal texts, are said to be found in the library of the University of Nice, but I cannot vouch for this since I have not personally checked. GERMANY The German Foreign Office in Bonn holds documents related to the history of the political relations between Germany and Thailand. Photocopies of some of these documents can be consulted at the Library of the Thai Department,Hamburg University. Herr Stoffers in Munich is preparing a dissertation based largely on these documents The Germans have a tradition of collecting Asian manuscripts of all kinds and in the many libraries and museums which house such collections there are likely to be some from Thailand, Laos, or the Shan States of northern Myanmar. Most of the Thai and Lao holdings have been described in four volumes of the series 'Orientalisches Handschriften in Deutschland'. The manuscript of the diary of Friedrich Schaefer, a medical doctor who worked in Thailand at the beginning of this century, together with a series of photographs has been deposited with the Thai department of Hamburg University. Finally, my private collection is thematically concentrated on astrological texts of all the Tai-speaking peoples. I have not attempted to collect original manuscripts but have been satisfied with photocopies and photographs. In this short survey it has been shown that in Europe manuscripts relating to Thailand are fairly dispersed and only partially described in catalogues. It would not surprise me if there are still many beautiful manuscripts, as yet undescribed, trading archives, or private diaries still quietly waiting to be studied. Somebody may be stimulated by this short note to draw my attention to such gaps in my knowledge.