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Text Box: Primary Source Materials on Southern Thailand Located in Malaysia
Francis R. Bradley
Ph.D. Candidate in Southeast Asian History
University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article provides a brief survey of primary source materials that are located in Malaysian libraries and museums concerning Thailand’s Malay-speaking southern provinces. Political violence and sectarian tension in southern Thailand at various times over the past sixty years have caused the bulk of locally produced Malay-language manuscripts in the region to flow into Malaysia, eventually finding their way into a number of professionally-run repositories. All of these manuscripts are composed in Jawi script, literary Malay written using the Arabic alphabet, or in Arabic language in a Qur’anic style of mainly black ink with red lettering when certain sentences, phrases, names, or words are highlighted. The scholars or copyists who scribed the texts generally used paper as their primary medium, but some manuscripts also appear upon parchment and, in rare cases, upon leaves of wood. Most of the extant manuscripts are not authentic originals, but are, in fact, copies of earlier manuscripts now lost to climate or time. The newer copies, nevertheless, often retain the original and copy dates, thus providing scholars with a detailed genealogy of the manuscript in question.
The Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia (National Library of Malaysia) has made

Volume 30 no 1

Edited by Judith Henchy, University of Washington

In this issue

Primary Source Materials on Southern Thailand Located in Malaysia

By Francis Bradley

Notes on Research in Thailand

By Constance Wilson

Recovering Lost Gems of Myanmar’s Past: Collecting, Preserving and Accessing Old Texts

By Dr Thaw Kaung, with the collaboration of Dr Thant Thaw Kaung

News From U.S. Collections

Collections News from Around the World

Dissertations on Southeast Asia Defended

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