East Asian Studies: Archives & Collections

SOAS Library has collected material relating to Southeast Asia in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Its collections on Southeast Asia include manuscripts, fieldwork notes, photographs, official correspondences and rare books. The collections contain several sub-collections on specific topics and regional areas.

The Echols Collection covers pre-modern Southeast Asia from the 1550s to the 1920s. Primary documents consist of travelogues, letters, official accounts, journals, autobiographies, guidebooks, and photo albums. They document the colonial period, whether the Dutch in Indonesia, the British in Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore, the French in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, or the Spanish and Americans in the Philippines.

The Southeast Asian collection comprises books, newspapers & periodicals, rare books & manuscripts, digital collections, electronic resources and web archives from and/or about the eleven countries of the region. The collection contains works on ethnology, literature, religion, society, language, gender, the environment and more.