Collections Evening and Bayly Prize
Collections Evening 2025
The Society held its annual Collections Evening last Friday (10 April). This year, we were pleased to host three presentations dedicated to different parts of the Society’s important manuscript collection. Before the presentations, Dr Edward Weech, RAS Librarian, gave a brief introduction on how scholarly focus in the field had increasingly concentrated on production, circulation and use of manuscripts, opening up new avenues in researching and understanding manuscripts as complex objects.
Dr Alexandra Green and Thaw Zin Latt, from the British Museum, focused on the Burmese manuscripts in the RAS collection. In her presentation Dr Alexandra Green looked at the details surrounding the production of Burmese manuscripts, including the specificity of its dating convention as well as the intriguing origin of the endboards used in the manuscripts. Thaw Zin then drew our attention to the significance of Aṅguttaranikāya – Catukkanipāta (Burmese 64), a gilt, lacquered and beautifully decorated manuscript produced as a donation by King Pindale of Burma, who reigned from 1648 to 1661. This manuscript is the oldest dated palm leaf manuscript written in Pali in a European collection, making it an even more historically important object. This manuscript, along with our other Burmese manuscripts, is available for online viewing in our Digital Library. We hope this presentation will spark more research interest in the Society’s Burmese manuscript collection.
Coming up next was Dr Annabel Teh Gallop, from the British Library, on the Malay and Javanese manuscripts in the Society’s Raffles collection. Dr Gallop began her presentation by introducing the provenance of the manuscripts – how they came into the possession of Sir Stamford Raffles and ended up in the RAS collection. But the core of her presentation explored the interesting fact that although there are more Malay manuscripts than Javanese ones in the Raffles collection, there is a significantly higher percentage of old Javanese manuscripts. Many of the Malay ones collected by Sir Raffles are new copies and, in comparison, not as well-thumbed. The presentation provided food for thought about Raffles’ academic interest, and the historical significance of old and new manuscripts.
The third presentation was by Dr Barbara Brend, Chair of RAS Library Committee, who presented some colour images in our Persian manuscripts. A series of exquisite illustrations were featured, including images from the Gulistan of the poet Sa’di (RAS MS 258), one of our finest Persian-language manuscripts which is currently on long-term loan at Cambridge University Library. It was delightful to see the minute depiction of birds and animals in the manuscript, and to consider the subtle interplay between the text and the illustration across the pages. To see details and images of this manuscript, please visit this webpage here.
To round up the presentations, Nancy Charley, former Archivist of the Society, bid a proper farewell to the Society’s supporters after she had left the position last month. Nancy supported this year’s Collections Evening by researching into the provenance of some of the featured manuscripts. She took the opportunity to reflect on her long stint at the Society, and extended her thanks to the RAS management, members, colleagues and volunteers, as well as those who have supported the Library and Archives and the Society’s other activities in general.
After the presentations, the participants had a chance to see up-close some of the manuscripts discussed in the presentations in our Reading Room. Also on display were paintings depicting people and scenes of Burma, belonging to the Society’s James Low collection. Collections Evenings provide an opportunity for people to come in and discover more in-depth about our collections outside our normal opening hours, and we hope to continue to showcase our collections in occasions like this.
We are grateful to everyone who has made the evening a successful occasion, especially the speakers, and those who joined us in-person and online for the event. A big thanks to you all!
Winners of the Bayly Prize 2024
In other news, the Society is delighted to announce the winner of the Bayly Prize 2024, Dr. Luis Junqueria, University of Cambridge for his thesis: The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Healthcare and the Revival of the Occult in a Modernising China, 1900–1949.
He is currently a D. Kim Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), University of Cambridge, where he is revising his PhD thesis for publication as a monograph, The Science of the Spirit: Psychical Research, Medicine and the Occult in Chinese Modernity. The manuscript is under review with the Cambridge University Press book series ‘Science in History’. Last month, his first edited volume, Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries, was published by Amsterdam University Press.
In the coming months, he will continue at HPS under a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, alongside a new appointment as Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His next book project, Healing through the Mind: The Rise of Mind-Cure Movements in Modern East Asia, explores how laypeople in China and Japan reinvented their own traditions of self-cultivation by engaging with ‘mind-cure’: various popular, early 20th-century global movements championing self-care and mental healing.
Second Prize was awarded to Dr.Xiaoqing Wang, University of Edinburgh for her thesis: Bodyscapes of Modernity: A Post-Critical Sociology of Art and the body in republican China (1912-1937).
Xiaoqing Wang obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2024. She currently delivers courses on modern Chinese history and visual culture at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. A primary research project that she is currently undertaking builds on the findings of her doctoral research and continues to explore the paradoxical nature of Chinese modernity and subsequent developments in the contemporary period. A paper in progress examines the marginalisation of art in Chinese knowledge and its relationship to the process of rationalisation during the socialist era. Additionally, she is engaged in research exploring the contemporary transformation of aesthetics and visuality. Her recent papers examine the aestheticisation of cheerful faces of marginalised groups in contemporary Chinese visual culture, and the particularities of aesthetic experience in immersive exhibitions.
Third Prize was awarded to Dr Junda Lu, School of Oriental and African Studies, for his thesis: The State as the Celestial: Roots of Statism in Modern China, 1820-1893.
Dr. Lu is currently building upon his PhD thesis by currently preparing for a new research project that further develops one aspect of his opening chapters by delving into the underlying logic of intellectual transformations within Confucian scholarship from the 1780s to the 1820s. This project can be integrated with the former part of his thesis for the publication of a more well-rounded book, which historicizes the intellectual foundations of the modern Chinese state and re-examines ideas underlying Chinese statism apart from both the nationalist narrative of China as a unified nation and the essentialist understanding of the authoritarian character in Confucian political thinking. In this way, he wishes to situate the increasingly aggressive behavior of China’s current regime within a larger historical context to debunk the teleology in modern Chinese history wielded by political authority, which would help reveal a wider range of possibilities for multi-disciplinary research on China.
By James Liu and Edward Weech, 16 April 2025