(2 Jan 2023) It was a night during the reign of King Ang Duong, who ruled Cambodia from 1840 to 1860. In a Kodi or monk’s house in Wat Svay Chrum, a Buddhist monastery in Prey Veng, a young man, who wished to become a district judge, was studying a Sastra or text on the kingdom’s laws, etched on a Sleuk Rith manuscript, made from the leaves of a local thorny palm tree known as Traing… Back to the present day, the manuscript the young man was reading, kept at Le Fonds pour l’Edition des Manuscrits du Cambodge (FEMC), a library in the compound of Phnom Penh’s Ounalom Pagoda, where these forms of palm-leaf manuscripts from all over the country are preserved.
Founded by The École Française d’Extrême-Orient, which in 1990 “undertook the locating, physical restoration, microfilming, identification and inventory of the extant manuscripts”. However, it has been under the administration of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts since EFEO ran out of funding in 2012.
FEMC has distributed their collection of Sleuk Rith manuscripts to five museums and libraries, including the National Library of Cambodia and the National Museum. They have even published their texts into books. However, Kok An claims, all of these are just “a small portion.”
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