Jacques Leider
EFEO
One of the major and now well acknowledged aspects of European expansion was the constant and intense effort of documenting and mapping newly explored regions. In the case of Myanmar, Western knowledge of the kingdom was considerably expanded during the mission of Michael Symes to Amarapura in 1795. One man in particular, Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, a medical doctor, took an eager interest in collecting geographical and ethnographical information. While his original journal has disappeared, Hamilton published a wide selection of data after his retirement in his critical “accounts” of fourteen native maps that portray the kingdom and its border areas around 1795. While appreciating Hamilton’s remarkable geographical work, the paper will highlight the interest of this little known source for the historical, anthropological and cultural study of late eighteenth century Myanmar and the northern Tai area.
(Presented in the 2012 Chulalongkorn-EFEO International Conference on Buddhist Studies : Imagination, Narrative, and Localization, 6-7 January 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, organized by Faculty of Arts and Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University In conjunction with The Buddhist Studies Group, EFEO)