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Posted by: Ryan Wolfson-Ford
The Library of Congress Asian Division received a newly donated memoir by a former prime minister of Laos. The memoir, never widely distributed, will be of interest to the scholarly community.
Posted in: Asian Division, Southeast Asia
Posted by: Cameron Penwell
This post tells the story behind the notebook of Imperial Japanese Navy Lieutenant Sakuma Tsutomu (1879-1910). Following a submarine accident, Sakuma dutifully recorded his and his crew’s heroic, but doomed, efforts to save themselves.
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
The Library recently digitized three rare thangkas from the Tibetan collection. They are not only beautiful works of art but illustrate and disseminate key cultural teachings. This blog features the Srid pa ho, which wards off harm from all directions, illustrating basic Tibetan astrology concepts.
Posted in: Asian Division
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
More than 400 newly catalogued Manchu books from the Asian Division’s Chinese Rare Book Collection offer researchers new sources for study of the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in China.
Posted in: Asian Division, East Asia
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
This blog looks at Bengali publications from the Franklin Book Program, a translation program sponsored by the United States during the Cold War. It also examines the place of religion in books published for Muslim readers in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh).
Posted in: Asian Division, South Asia
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
A calligram of the Hindu god Hanuman, an 18th-century Nepalese astrological manuscript, documents from India’s princely states, and a rare edition of the “Arabian Nights” in Urdu are just some of the South Asian highlights from the Library of Congress International Collections Facebook page.
Posted in: Asian Division, South Asia
Posted by: Joshua Kueh
Part II of this post highlights aspects of language translation that attenuated Spanish aims in the Philippines: the persistence of local scripts and pronunciation, and pre-Hispanic cultural concepts.
Posted in: Asian Division, Southeast Asia
Posted by: Joshua Kueh
Part I of this post looks at how the establishment of a Spanish presence in the Philippines during the 16th-18th centuries was a collaborative enterprise that involved the interests of various actors: Chinese, prominent locals and Spanish.
Posted in: Asian Division, Southeast Asia
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
In a new acquisition by the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Chitra Ganesh, a visual artist based in Brooklyn, retells the Indian feminist utopian essay, “Sultana’s Dream” by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat, but in the style of a graphic novel through a series of 27 linocut prints.
Posted in: Asian Division, South Asia