RAS Collections Evening 2026
The Society’s annual Collections Evening for 2026 will feature three talks exploring its manuscript and art collections from Malaysia, India, and Japan, complemented with a post-talk object viewing session. The event programme is as follows:
Talk 1: Dr Farouk Yahya – The Maxwell Collection and Local Private Libraries in the Malay Peninsula during the 19th Century
The collection of Malay manuscripts and printed books of Sir William Maxwell (1846-1897), now held at the Society, is remarkable in terms of the quantity and variety of the material, many of which were acquired from local sources. This brief talk will explore some of the private libraries in the Malay peninsula that formed the basis of Maxwell’s collection, providing a valuable insight into the acquisition and circulation of books in the region during the nineteenth century.
Talk 2: Niyu Lin – Listening to the Creek Beneath: The Palimpsest of the Faulds Album
This presentation will explore the Society’s Faulds Album (RAS 079), an Edo-period concertina album that appears to contain fragments of Buddhist imagery. It focuses on the often-overlooked underlying layers of painting and calligraphy beneath the Buddhist drawings attributed to the Kanda Sōtei atelier, revealing the album as a palimpsest that records a shift from individual, literati practice to collective, institutional workshop production.
Talk 3: Professor Almut Hintze, Professor Peter Cornwell, and Dr Myriadne Wang – Title TBC
This presentation will address different aspects of a major project which saw the digitisation and online display of 55 notebooks from the Society’s Edward William West archive. These largely comprise copies of Zoroastrian texts made in north-west India in the later nineteenth century. They were photographed by postdoctoral students working as part of the Multimedia Yasna project (MUYA) and later made available online via an online collections platform.
Free and open to all. In person and online via Zoom.
To attend online, email emd@royalasiaticsociety.org for a link.