Book Description

Excerpt from The Talaings In attempting the description of the Talaing people in the following pages, it has been my fortune to be going in and out amongst the remnant of the exiles in Siam. That this has been an advantage I hope will appear in the result. It has been possible, by comparing the people in the alien land with their compatriots in the homeland, to come at a better understanding of things which claim the Talaings as a separate people. It is not always possible in Burma to say what has been inherited by the Talaings from their ancestors and what has been introduced from the Burmese. It may at the same time have been a disadvantage not to be able occasionally to verify things from actual contact with the people in Burma. I have not, however, been without help of the kind, as I have had a Burma Talaing with me all the time, to whom I have constantly referred when any particular question arose. For the use of native books I have possibly been in a better position than I could have been in Burma. The monks in a number of Talaing monasteries have been very obliging. It has been an advantage to me to have ready access to the National Library in Bangkok. H. R. H. Prince Damrong bade me make free use of whatever I could find helpful there. Dr. Frankfurter, the learned curator, has been very obliging in affording me help in getting at information; and his Mon assistant, Phra Tepalok, has been ready to aid in any way he could. For all this I am very thankful. The system followed in representing Talaing words is one that commends itself to some scholars. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.