Wat Saladaeng Neua Collection

This is one of six collections of Thai-Mon palm leaf manuscripts digitised by the EAP1123 project team.

The temple has a formal collection of religious texts housed in a separate library, raised on stilts to protect from flooding, to the back of the compound. Custodians had no key, but we could see by the guilded edging of the palm leaf manuscripts that they were religious. Of interest for this iteration were the texts which community elders brought out to show us from various nooks and crannies, apparently kept in a room under renovation. These included four palm-leaf manuscripts of folktales, a text on the training of novice and young men, and a rare find, an incomplete historical text on King Dhammacetī. They other text they showed us was a medical parabaik written with white chalk. Community elders were open and it is worth revisiting the temple if for no other reason that to get a closer look at the religious texts and to see whether they have any more texts in the room in a state of disorder.