Alan Darmawan writes:
While Europe was in the throes of the Napoleonic wars, British military commanders took manuscripts from the Royal Collections of Palembang as loot, while a Dutch commissary ransacked houses of noble families for the treasures of Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II (r. 1804–1812).
This commissary, J.J. van Sevenhoven, brought his spoils to the famous linguist and bible translator Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk for inspection, who described 22 manuscripts in notes now held in his personal archives in the Leiden Special Collections.
Seven of these manuscripts described by Neubronner van der Tuuk now reside in the National Library of Indonesia, but the remaining 15 were lost. His notes do, however, provide insight into the contents of these manuscripts and how they were lost.
Van der Tuuk’s notes and summaries help to reconstruct part of the collection of the royal library of Palembang. They serve a basis for researching manuscript provenance, genres and languages of texts copied and read—in other words, they allow us a rare glance into the literary and intellectual culture of Palembang in the past.
