Text Box: Recovering Lost Gems of Myanmar’s Past: Collecting, Preserving and Accessing Old Texts from Palm Leaves and Parabaik Manuscripts Paper Presented by Dr. Thaw Kaung, Former Chief Librarian of the Universities Central Library, Yangon With the collaboration of Dr. Thant Thaw Kaung, At the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2006. Re-printed with kind permission of the authors. Myanmar, the largest country in Mainland Southeast Asia, has a rich heritage of old texts written on lithic stone, on various types of metal, especially gold and silver, ivory, lacquerware, wall-plaster and most commonly on palm-leaves and parabaik (hand-made paper) manuscripts. This paper is focused mainly on palm-leaf and parabaik manuscripts and is based on the author’s nearly (45) years of manuscript work experience in Yangon (Rangoon) University Library and the Universities Central Library, also located on the main campus of Yangon University. The Myanmar are one of most literate people in Southeast Asia with a fondness to put down in hand-writing, records of the Royal Court, Theravada Buddhist texts and commentaries for the monks and laymen, customary law texts for the lawyers and judges, medical texts for practitioners of traditional medicine, bedin or prediction texts for fortune-tellers and many other socio-economic notes and contracts on parabaik used in common households all over the country. As the Myanmar people ceased to write on palm-leaves and parabaik paper from about the end of the 19th century, many of these precious manuscripts have become lost in neglected monastic libraries, and often completely destroyed due to the ravages of insect attacks, the high humidity and heat of a harsh tropical, monsoon climate and worse of all by human destruction from warfare between Myanmar and foreign invaders, and civil strife among the Myanmar people themselves for many decades. As one of the least developed countries of the world, Myanmar does not have sufficient economic and financial resources for preservation of her rich textual heritage and therefore, librarians, archivists and conservationists are still dependent on foreign assistance, not only financially, but also for the provision of equipment and technical training in modern preservation and conservation (from now on abbreviated as PAC) methods. As a University Librarian heading one of the largest and best collections of old Myanmar books and manuscripts (from now on abbreviated as mss.) in the country, I formed a dedicated team of librarians, conservators, and scholars to search for these precious “lost” mss., lying forgotten in dusty monastic libraries and no longer used by the monks who preferred the much easier to read printed books. Between 1960 and 2003, the teams tried to recover these lost textual